Well, I've had my first ever MD player/recorder for a few days now. I was in a pretty big hurry to get it my hands for a looong motorcycle trip I took this past weekend and I wanted the tunes to keep me company. That didn't work out so well, unfortunately. Not enough volume, and the speakers I bought for my helmet pressed against my ears causing pretty intense pain. Next up is a pair of those Koss in-ear types.
Anyway, I'm fairly impressed with the technology and the device itself. I'm not much of an audiophile, and I don't find the compression of LP4 to be offensive, but it is noticable with the headphones that came with the unit and another cheap ($30) pair of Sony headphones I have at work (which also crush my head; do I just have sensitive ears?). I'm primarily recording MP3s I've previously encoded using grip and bladeenc under Linux. I'm encoding the MP3s at 160kbps, which I think is a pretty good compromise between space and quality. I'm using the Xitel DG2 under RedHat Linux 7.1 with very good results. I was pleaseantly surprised to find that the mixer functions do nothing at all, so I don't have to worry about having them set any one way and can record at work and at home without that inconvenience. XMMS does an excellent job decoding the MP3s, and even without the two second gap, the recorder inserts trackmarks. That seems kind of strange, from what I've read here, but I'm not really complaining. What I've discovered, in editing the mix I made earlier today, is that the trackmarks aren't exact; I'll likely go back to a 1 or 2 second pause, although that seems to introduce double trackmarks pretty reliably... (Anyone found a cure for that particular pain?) As far as the player goes, I've actually got kind of mixed feelings in some respects. It is very small and light and I think I only got it to skip while squashing it between my GPS and some other hard bits in my tankbag yesterday. I'm not even sure it *was* skipping; I think I may have reached the end of the disc. :-) Some of the things that bug me, however, are the length of time it takes to jump between tracks (the seek time seems rather long). The button interface is less than thorougly intuitive; labelling tracks is a sufficient pain in the butt that I doubt I'll bother, unless I can pick up one of those parallel port titlers cheap. The other thing that bothers me is that I have yet to find a way to return to the first track on a disc without repeatedly hitting the << button. Is there a way to do that? Can someone explain the difference between recording with "sync" on vs. off? The recorder automatically locks into sync mode when I plug the optical lead into the Xitel box. I can't really figure what that gives me, but I *do* realize it takes away the option for setting the recording level myself... Thanks in advance for any advice you can send my way; this is an awsome group! B _____________________________________________________________________________ B r i a n L a l o r [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/~blalor Spam me not. To get my pgp key, put "get pgp key" in the subject of your message My homework was not stolen by a one-armed man ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
