my mp3 player

amid all the hysteria surrounding file sharing and mp3 licensing, i have gone out and bought me an mp3 player. i went to my favourite local bigbox warehouse store, costco, to buy some other things when this one caught my eye. i had wanted to buy one for awhile now and had my eye on an ipod shuffle. i knew what kind of features i wanted but never really put that much effort into looking for one and then going to the store to check it out thinking that one that i like might magically appear before me. it did, kinda. i bought the sanyo dmc300. it has 512mb of built-in flash memory (of which, 16mb is taken up by the system leaving you with 496mb), fm tuner, voice and fm recorder and an sd/mm expansion slot for more memory. this last feature was something that i was looking for as i already own sd memory cards for my digital & mini-dv cameras and have an sd reader built-in to my notebook. i have already filled the entire memory with 96 mp3 songs at 192kb sampling. i probably could get 30 or 40 more songs if i had used 128kb sampling but regular mp3 is not a great compression method for sound quality. hopefully sanyo will release a firmware update for an ogg vorbis [wikipedia:home page] decoder! that way, i won't ever have to worry about mp3 licensing because it's open source.

***UPDATE***

i have been asked by 2 people so far about the sanyo dmc300. so i will oblige and share some more useful information about this particular mp3 player.

all-in-all, this unit is pretty easy to use, as are most mp3 players. the design is simple and esthetically pleasing and the blue back-lit lcd screen is large enough to display all the necessary information that you could want to know about the songs that's currently playing. you can adjust contrast and battery saver settings for the screen. as mentioned above, the expandability of the memory is one of the selling features that i truly wanted and a built-in fm tuner with lots of station presets was a real bonus. the voice recording feature is pretty convenient if you want to record some notes, comments or even interviews. the recording is in mono but can be adjusted for the quality of sound and type of compression (better quality=bigger file size=less recording time). there is no voice activated recording but can be paused and then continued on the same file. if you press 'stop', the next time you will start a new file. the documentation seems to indicate that the unit can record fm transmissions but have yet to figure out how to do so. there are also other features such as the ability to scroll lyrics across the screen, change preset equalizer settings, random/repeat and others. the player comes with a quick start guide, ear phones, usb adapter and cd-rom (win98 drivers and additional documentation).

the unit is not without its problems though. for one thing, the buttons are finnicky. you must press & hold the stop button for a few seconds to turn it off but sometimes it fails even though it feels like you are pressing the button. coupled with this problem is that it sometimes fails to remember the last track that was playing (returns to track 1) and compounding the problem, the shuffle algorithm is not really random meaning that it seems the "shuffled" track order is always the same. i also thought the battery indicator wasn't as accurate as it could be. the battery life is good however at about 8-10 hours of use but the indicator still showed power when it cuts out. on my particular unit, it seemed that the fm tuner was not functioning. i reflashed the firmware and that seemed to clear up the problem for me. but all these negatives for an mp3 player that costs $120 shouldn't stop you from getting this unit because it truly is a great deal!