The Linux Blog

Well, the other night, I went out to buy some more headphones and came back with an MP3-CD player (it plays CDs with MP3s burned on it. I also added $5 to buy one that used ID3 tags too ) . Anyways, my old headphones broke (sort of, one of the pads fell off in the dark one night), so I just decided to get a new CD player — with MP3 support (hey, I said that twice. It must be important.) (the old one was about $50 4 years ago and I got much, much more value out of it than $50). (all prices USD)

It’s quite a nice one. I paid the same price I did for my CD player — $50. I have now combined all my CDs into MP3 CDs by artist. I’m quite pleased with not changing CDs unless you want to change artists. One disadvantage is that I still have to change CDs. I would have bought an iPod, but I didn’t feel like spening all that money.

So, off to the weird part. I turn on the CD player with ESP off (skip protection. In the manual, it says this:

200 seconds skip protection for WMA files (64kbps)
100 seconds for MP3 (128kbps)
45 seconds for a regular music CD)

So, anyways, back to where I was, I turn it on with ESP off. After about 10 seconds of playback on the inital song, the CD slows to a stop and after about 20 seconds, it completely stops until 35 seconds, where it reads for 10 mmore seconds and repeats the cycle. What’s this? It has ESP even when ESP is off (also note I use 192kbps MP3 files).

As for ESP on, the process is almost the same, except the CD stays stationary for about 5 seconds instead of 10 and it spins faster. I also tried turning ESP off after it did the 5 second stop while previously on ESP and it didn’t spin for quite a long time (over 30 seconds, I didn’t time it).

For the headphone quality, WOW! It’s much better than the old ones in that it can handle the double Dynamic Bass Boost (the others sounded horrible with the second one on) and can handle much more decibels. They are much tighter fitting so they don’t slide off like the others would, but are not too tight. The player plays MUCH louder than the other at maximum.

I highly recommend this player. It’s made by Philips and says Expanium on the front. (psst, it can take either 2 AA’s or 2 AAA’s ) Advertised battery life is “Alkaline AA Audio CD: 10 hrs MP3/WMA: 20hrs. Alkaline AAA Audio CD: 5hrs MP3/WMA: 10hrs”. Note that this is ‘powersave mode’, not ESP mode. (weird how they both are shock resistent, as I have repeatedly tried to make it skip when in powersave but was unable to, though I didn’t continuously drop it for 3 minutes or anything)

The manual is telling me that longer file names == less songs able to burn. What? It shouldn’t change anything, can someone explain this?

By the way, if you have iTunes protected files, search Google for hymn m4p or something like that. It’s quite legal, as it leaves your account information in there, but allows you to convert them to MP3.

Edit: I noticed this ESP when ESP is off only works on MP3 (makes sense) and I assume WMA. I never plan to burn a WMA CD. The CD on a normal one will spin all the time and no ESP is on when in powersave mode.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 12th, 2004 at 12:31 pm and is filed under General Tech, Old Archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.