How To Buy An MP3 Player

"What MP3 player should I buy?"

Every week I see someone on a forum posting a variation on the "what MP3 player should I buy?" question. Which in itself is a variation on the "what TV/car/pet-monkey" question we all get asked from time to time. And in many cases, the person asking the question fails to elaborate on their requirements.

"So really, what MP3 player should I buy?"

Buy an iPod touch. They play music (very well as it happens). They sound good (if you use decent headphones and avoid low bitrates). You can use them to surf and tweet and play Angry Birds. They're easy to use. They look cool. And if you need massive capacity or music only, look at the classic/nano iPods. Are we done?

"But I don't want to be a clone / hate iTunes / need a removable battery / have to play some obscure format / want to be able to drag-and-drop directly onto the player"

Ok, now you're getting somewhere. Questions you should be asking:

• What are you going to use it for? Music? Videos? Internet? Apps?
• Do you need a dedicated music-playing gadget, or do you want music to be one of the things your smartphone does?
• What capacity? How big is your collection? How big will it be in two years' time? How much space do you want to leave for stuff that isn't music?
• Do you need gapless playback? If you listen to albums or remember ancient technologies like CD, then yes, this is something you want to consider. Very few players support gapless, so this might be something you'll have to compromise on. If all you'll ever do is shuffle or use your own playlists, you can probably live with the player inserting extra gaps between songs.
• What formats will you be playing? Do you have music/videos in obscure formats? Can you convert your files to something your player can handle (if your music is in lossless then yes, conversion is easy, otherwise this is an issue)? Can you be bothered converting to the best format for your player?
• Do you need to be able to manage it with direct folder access or otherwise have an irrational phobia of iTunes (or a perfectly rational fear of Sonic Stage)? Do you need to be able to manage it from multiple PCs? If your library is bigger than your player's capacity, managing what's on the player by direct file-copying only could be a challenge.
• What's your definition of "sound quality"? And will you be bringing the bitrate and headphones to get the best out of it?
• What about battery life? Will the normal battery-saving tricks of dimming the screen and turning off wi-fi be enough, or do you need to be able to swap-out the battery?
• How much do you want to spend?

Ok, now you can ask questions, determine the necessities and nice-to-haves, draw up a shortlist, and figure out what player works for you. Incidentally, for me, gapless playback was the dealbreaker that saw me buy players from Rio, Sony and Apple. And remember to budget for some decent headphones and a case, because these days you probably won't get much in the box (actually, I once got decent Sennheiser headphones and a dock bundled as standard with a player, but it was a Rio. And 2004).

"Not buying an iPod. The end."

OK, many people don't want an iPod, for understandable and not-so-understandable reasons. I've seen people claim that they won't entertain the prospect of an iPod touch because it's "an iPhone without the phone" rather than "a music player with touch screen, video, wi-fi, etc". Whatever, if "must not be player X regardless of how suitable it may be" is your number one requirement, at least you're narrowing your shortlist.

I'm not actually answering the question here. I'm not the one buying a new toy. But do think of your requirements before asking a very general question. Or just play safe and buy an iPod.

Converting Lossless Music To Other Formats

Some quick notes on ways to convert your lossless (eg. FLAC) files into other audio formats.

Using Foobar - FLAC To MP3

Note that Foobar doesn't ship with encoders, so you'll have to go download extras to handle the formats you want to use.

1. Get Foobar
2. Launch Foobar
3. Open/drag FLAC files in
4. Select all, right-click and do a "convert", for output format pick MP3 - might want to set up an entry with chosen bitrate, constant/variable preference
5. Pick a folder to dump the converted files into
6. The first time you do this, you might have to tell Foobar where your lame.exe encoder is (see below)
7. Watch the progress bar, go collect your files when done

Options

Foobar lets you set up a number of converter options, so if the defaults aren't enough, do an edit/add new.

My settings for MP3 are
Encoder type: "custom"
Encoder: lame.exe
Extension: mp3
Parameters: -S --noreplaygain -b 192 - %d
Format: lossy
Highest BPS: 24
Encoder name: "MP3 (LAME), 192kbps CBR"
Bitrate: 192
Settings: CBR

Apple Lossless

Foobar doesn't ship with the apple lossless decoding, I had to grab an extra plugin (try the Foobar website for download).

Getting LAME

LAME is the encoder engine that actually converts to MP3. If you don't have the LAME encoder (lame.exe), get latest from Rarewares. Download the zip (it should contain an exe, a DLL, and a bunch of HTML and CSS) and unpack all the files into somewhere like "C:\Program Files\Lame" (just create a new folder).

Ripping CDs For Home Servers And Portable Players

CDs are awesome. They sound great. They have artwork and booklets and occasionally fancy packaging. They can hold up to 100 tracks or 78 minutes. They take up shelf space. They need to be loaded into a machine if you want to play a song off them... er, OK, CDs were awesome, a digital music library of thousands of tracks that can be played as whole albums, single tracks, playlists etc. is more awesome.

Many people have made the switch from CD to a flexible digital library and traded quality for the convenience of inferior formats like MP3. You don't have to. You can have that nice fat bitrate lossless CD quality with all the convenience of a 10000-track CD jukebox. But first you have to rip those CDs...

So you want get that music off CD into digital format. The plan is to only do this once. Ever. So the key question is:

"Do you want it fast or do you want it good?"

If you just want any old quality of rip, use iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. If you have an expensive CD/DVD ROM drive, a shiny new CD and a bit of luck, it'll rip fine. The problem is, something like iTunes will just sprint through a CD regardless, and if it picks up any errors, well you might just hear them when you play it back. CDs aren't perfect and don't have the best built-in error checking, and it takes care or fancy hardware to reproduce them exactly.

If you want this to be the only time you ever rip this CD, ever, consider a slower error-checking rip. CDex is good, DBPowerAmp or acknowleged leader EAC are better. You're looking at 20 minutes a CD, but a good chance of perfect rips. EAC will do a couple of things to get good rips - read and re-read (extremely slowly if necessary) every bit of data on your CD, and then compare that to a crowd-sourced database to determine whether there are any errors on your copy of the CD.

So you have a CD/DVD-ROM drive and a stack of CDs just waiting to be ripped. If you have a laptop (or when you realise some CDs just won't work well on your current drive) you might also want to look at getting an external CD drive or getting that old tower out of storage instead of just relying on that one drive. For major bulk ripping sessions, start with a pile of CDs, set several drives going and burn through your collection.

So basically, you fire up your ripping software, feed it a CD, get it to pick up the tagging information, then start ripping and come back when its done. The best format for filenaming is a "Music\Artist\Album" folder structure, tracks named and numbered "01 - Track Name" for sorting.

If your library software needs a playlist for each album (most don't), make sure you spit out a ".m3u" file at this point.

Some rippers, such as EAC (think DBPowerAmp too) can grab the artwork as part of the tagging process, saving you some work later.

Digital Music: Building A Library From CDs

OK, these days, most people don't buy CDs. Hell, most people can't even spell "CDs" (there's no apostrophe, kids). But CDs are still almost always the only way to get high-quality lossless music.

So this guide assumes you want to build a flexible digital music library from existing and continued CD purchases. Of course, you'll want all that music to be correctly "tagged" so you can find things later.

These notes deal with ripping high-quality lossless - I'm also going to assume that you'll want not only the lossless version to listen to in the house, but the option of a compressed copy on your MP3 player. Any library is going to contain stuff from a few different sources, so improvise for any non-CD formats - if you're starting with MP3 (eg. iTunes store purchases), skip right to the last section. Likewise, skip the CD ripping part for anything you can get in a lossless format. And if you want to go straight from CD to MP3, remember that choice is final and can only be reversed by re-ripping the CD.

I've noted the tools I use, but the process is the important thing here (and some of these stages are optional). Other posts may expand on setting up the various bits of software listed (look for the links), failing that you're going to have to do a bit of searching. Sorry.

If this all seems a bit much, don't panic. Once the tools are installed and setup, it's a fairly simple process to stuff a CD in, press a couple of buttons, then leave the computer to do all the work. It's worth noting that even the most basic "use iTunes to rip CDs to MP3" solution does the ripping (to lossless), tagging, and "creating MP3 version" stages. But those intermediate lossless files are destroyed.

A Day In The Life Of A CD

1. The Ripping
   
   First thing to do is get that music off CD into a digital format. I cover this process in this post. Depending on what you use, you may end up fixing tags and adding artwork at this point.
   
   My Solution: EAC for ripping (I have a couple of drives I can use in case of problem CDs), freedb tagging info, and on those rare occasions where I can't get track info, I fire up iTunes and copy-and-paste the track names (but still rip with EAC). Oh, and EAC can grab artwork too.
   
   
   
2. The Tagging (Optional)
   
   If your disc wasn't found in the database, or whoever put it there spelt a track title wrong and you've only noticed now, or you want to merge two-disc sets into one long album (CDex does this with its wonderful track offset option, EAC has a similar "first track number" option), you'll need to edit the tags with something like Foobar.
   
   My Solution: Foobar2000 (but I don't like the way it won't mirror tagging info changes in filenames, need to find something better).
   
   
   
3. The Cover Art (Optional)
   
   If you didn't get artwork while you were ripping, grab some artwork using something like Album Art Downloader. I'd recommend getting your artwork at at least 500x500 if you can. Safe bet is to save the artwork as "Folder.jpg" in the same folder as the album tracks. Check with your library software for exact size limits and filename requirements. Getting the artwork is something you can do later or grab several covers at once. Watch for auto-tagging programs, they don't always get the best (or even correct) artwork.
   
   My Solution: Album Art Downloader, just search for artist/title, pick the best match and drag from search results into album folder to save. Files saved as "Folder.jpg", up to 600x600.
   
   
   
4. Feeding The Library
   
   OK, now you have a digital version of the CD and the front cover.
   
   Move/copy the ripped music plus artwork to its new home on your music server (you could probably even automate this bit), press whatever buttons you need to re-scan and add it to your library, assuming your music server doesn't do this automatically (Sonos allows you to schedule this). If you're ripping lossless, you'll fill up a hard drive quickly, so do any housekeeping you need to and clean up those temp files.
   
   My Solution: copy to a "Shared Music/FlacTunes" folder on my NAS, use "Update Music Index" option to get Sonos to recognise new stuff, keep the last few weeks of rips backed up on my laptop until properly backed up.
   
   
   
5. The MP3/Portable Version (Optional)
   
   If you're going the lossless route, you probably also want a portable copy, so convert those FLACs to MP3 etc. This is a big topic. I use iTunesEncoder and my own custom scripts to get to 160kpbs AAC, but there's so many options. And if you screw it up or want to change format or bitrate in a couple of years, well you do have those master lossless files, and your PC will be happy to repeat the conversion. And for the artwork, well iTunes will find artwork sometimes, otherwise, just use the JPEG you grabbed earlier.
   
   My Solution: 160kpbs AAC managed by iTunes. I use FLAC and iTunesEncoder on the command line to do the conversion (uses iTunes' internal AAC encoder) and my own custom scripts/software to find, convert and import anything I copy into a temp "flacDrop" folder (FLAC to WAV to AAC).
   
   My Alternative Solution: 192kpbs MP3 converted by Foobar. Open Foobar, drag in the FLAC folders/files to be converted, select all and hit "convert", saving in an "itunes import" folder. Then open iTunes and use the "file->add folder to library" to import. More on Foobar here.
   
   
   
6. The Shelf
   
   Now your CDs can gather dust on the shelf, to be visited only when you want to laugh at the band's 80s haircuts in the photos in the booklet. Unless you forget to do...
   
   
   
7. The Backup
   
   Remember to take backups. Seriously, remember the backups! Or just live in the belief that your hard drive will never fail (millions of people do, some of them are even lucky). A USB hard drive is cheap. Re-ripping CDs is tedious, re-buying downloads is expensive. You choose.