I have to agree with J. C. R. Davis when he (or she) says that MP3's are
so computer intensive, but I don't hate them. I bought a Diamond Rio
PMP300 ONLY because after $100.00 in rebates it cost me $50.00. I
thought it was the best way to see what all the fuss was about. Yeah,
it's cool and light weight, but with 32MB of RAM, it's also useless. I
won't be rushing out to buy 32MB SmartMedia cards at $90.00 each any
time soon. Not to mention that ripping MP3's and then downloading to
the Rio is a real pain. I can't seem to rip MP3's from CD's digitally,
so I have to use the analog setting. Yeah, I know it's my hardware
that's causing the problem, but I'm not going to go out and buy new PC
equipment just to rip MP3's. My CD collection tops 500, so to rip it
all to MP3 would take nearly 40GB worth of hard disk and a LOT of time.
What happens when my hard disk crashes? Restore from backup right? Now
I have to go spend $400.00 or more for a backup solution large enough to
protect my whole MP3 collection. Let's add it up. $50 for the player,
$180 for the memory upgrades, $300.00 for the hard drives, $400.00 for
the tape backup drive (that isn't 100% reliable in itself), and $40.00
for a new CD ROM that will digitally rip MP3's. That's nearly $1000.00
for a fool proof MP3 setup! OR, I can go get a new MZ-R37 for $180.00,
plug it in and just record or go portable.
The one thing that MP3 does have over MD is the web based CDDB. It's
just fantastic. Put the CD in the drive, press a button and all the
track titles are there - done. It's also true that not EVERYONE cares
about sound quality. For me, the MP3 128kbps rate is good enough for
portable listening or crappy computer speakers (but not hard core,
serious listening). We need to see a marriage of the two with MD units
that are capable of decoding the 140MB worth MP3's that an MD can hold
but are still also true ATRAC MD machines. This is the obvious solution
for survival AND wide-spread acceptance of the MD format. Sony, are you
listening?
Craig Bernard
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