Mp3 player - head hurting now...

[Workingman]

Glad you have the mp3 working your way Di, I knew you would get there.

So, Sound card.... Device Manager>>>Sound, it should give you details.

CD make. I have always liked Verbatim or Memorex, but I have found the cheapo ones from ASDA do the job nearly as well for a fraction of the price.

I have stopped burning CDs except for copies of the originals I used to use in the car. Nowadays I simply rip to my hard drive using my patented and highly efficient filing system. I have thousands of tracks all neatly filed.

I use:
EAC for ripping http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ it is the best, but takes a bit of geting used to. FreeRip might be easier to start with.
XMPlay for playback, tagging, playlists http://www.un4seen.com/ very light on resources with excellent sound quality.
Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ for, welll, messing about, chopping tracks, normalising sound, that sort of thing
Normalising volume http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/download.php this evens out the playback volume of tracks so that you are not upping or downing the volume manually all the time. It's dedicated to the job and easier than the Audacity version.

You will need the LAME enc.dll for Audacity and EAC to work on mp3. It is part of this download http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Lame_Encoder.htm

That should do for now.

[Workingman]

Now look what you have done!

You did not get back so I hope that you have not bothered doing anything about my last post.

I had a little play updating all my bits and bobs to the latest versions and started ripping some newish CDs that I had not got round to when I got the feeling that for someone starting out there might be a better way.

So, to cut a long story short, I have been downloading and trying out a whole load of media players that would hopefully do the whole job in one go. Some of them were big bloaters like Windows MP, and some were just bad. Some had three out of the four steps needed, quite a few in fact. They couldn't burn to mp3, or the burn quality was too low, or they couldn't do playlists and so on. Eventually, though, I found this: http://www.aimp.ru/index.php?do=download&cat=old scroll down and get version 2.51.330 from from AIMP.RU it is free and safe. Unzip ir somewhere then install.

This little gem, and it is a tiny download, will do the lot. Put a CD in and it's a player with an 18 band graphic equaliser, go to the utilities button and it becomes a CD ripper with a tag creator or a tag editor on its own. It is a media library and a playlist maker and editor in four different formats.

It might be worth a try before you go too deep.

http://www.fanhow.com/knowhow:Rip_CD_with_AIMP_47667973 Shows how to rip.

[Diflower]

Oooh, that does look promising

Sorry to have wasted your time Wm - errr, no, set you off on a new path of discovery

Well, tbh, I had a good look at what you said, and got a little bit lost...see, wmp does rip to mp3 format if you ask it to, and does the auto-levelling of volume and all. Then you can make a playlist, name it, and then burn that to a cd, again in mp3 format.
Where I got into trouble initially was trying to sync the mp3-player, that's when it exports the playlist as an m3u format, but if you skip the syncing then it's peasy

So I wasn't quite sure what else I might need...but am happy to be told

Btw, you talked about not bothering to burn to cds, but presumably that's because you listen via the pc?? I/we wouldn't really do that you see, apart from anything else, if you have the sound on the pc then it's on for everything isn't it, games etc?
And actually, I find it off-putting, having the sound coming out of here while I'm sitting at it, iyswim, I do prefer it being from another part of the room

[Suff]

I got a spindle of 25 for only £4.25 from Tesco since I was pretty sure some would get wasted, so I really don't mind how many I use having a go
Another question would be is there a make that's particularly good?

I used to pay £8 for 100 in Edinburgh at a computer shop. Checking ebay elicits £8.49 and £8.69 for 100 as the cheapest offers....

Oh, and have discovered something else clever - the stereo has shuffle mode when you're playing mp3 cds
See, without the mp3-player I wouldn't have discovered all this, it's a whole new world

The world of what you can do with computing is not quite infinite but is certainly very, very large. All you need to do is take the time to explore it.

I have a small box which plays all our DVD's and music through the TV (Cost £65) and the 5.1 stereo system connected to it. BTW I got the speakers for about £200... It is connected by a network cable to my "server" in my computer room. Cost of my "server"? About £180, plus the drives of course which cost more but then that is always so.

However when I brought my own TV back home and put it in the bedroom, I also had two mains networking boxes (the fastest you can buy). I connected them up and connected the second media box (same as the living room one), to the TV. We now have two complete media systems which do our DVD/s and Music, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. The TV is still Freesat and in the living room only, but when we do our new attic bedroom next door, the whole room will be wired and cabled for media. Ditto the new Living Room.

Also, as WM has shown, it does not have to be expensive with the free programs about.

For those who have very little experience with computing, the world of music and media is still a very profitable world, you just need to learn some techniques and terminology. After all, a MP3 player is just a computer which plays music, in the end...

Enjoy, I hope it all works out for you.

BTW, sound cards are possibly not the best way to go for hi def audio on a PC nowadays. Have a look here . Cheap as chips. Well, cheaper.... Obviously you get what you pay for, but some of these things are very good value indeed. I pay about £5 for hard drive caddies for my old laptop hard drives, in the shops they are £17 to £25. The £5 ones work very well indeed but some do come duff. Still it's a major saving.

Just some thoughts for you....

[Workingman]

It wasn't time wasted Di, not at all, but it did wake me up to how geeky I had become about mp3 ..... I wanted best quality : file size ratio and no one single thing could do that. Still can't tbh.

Win MP is too big, too much of a resource hog, to much "do it our way" for me to like it, and it is not flexible enough. So are a lot of the other all-in-one solutions, so I'm not picking on MSoft.

BTW does your car CD play mp3? Mine didn't, it would only play .cda - the original CD music format. Also, with Win7 you can turn individual sounds off/up/down. I have speakers loud, system sounds v. low, browser off.... click on the speaker icon and then on Mixer.

Anyway, enough. You probably have enough to be getting on with.

[Diflower]

Eventually, though, I found this: http://www.aimp.ru/index.php?do=download&cat=old scroll down and get version 2.51.330 from from AIMP.RU it is free and safe. Unzip ir somewhere then install.

WM that link takes me to a foreign version, arabic or something

Oh and our car cd doesn't play anything except cds

[Diflower]

Suff I'm sure your system is lovely, but I/we really don't want or need any more boxes or bits and pieces
We're quite happy with our stereo, and the TV, and we have a dvd hd which is fab

All I'm after is putting a good selection of music on the mp3 player, and also make some compilation cds for the stereo.
I don't want to play any of them through the pc, or through the TV, or upstairs except for taking with me the little speaker for the mp3

[Workingman]

Oops! Sorry.

It's a Russian site. Top right of screen choose En for the English version.

In the left hand Navigation panel look for Old Versions then look for the 2.51.330 about half way down the page.

[Suff]

Di you were saying that you were just beginning to understand what the digital world can do for you. I was just giving you an example.

One point I didn't mention about my system (and incidentally why I have two 5.1 systems for listening to DVD's), is that I gain control of the channels for DVD audio playback. You might think this is ultra geeky but actually it isn't. Have you watched Minority Report and wondered why the background music makes the actors almost impossible to hear? With a decent 5.1 system you can wind down the subwoofer bass and the surround musical score, then wind up the central sound which has the vast majority of the speaking on it. It makes a very different viewing experience.

However that's just my interest in the whole thing. If you're happy with what you have, then stick with it. Personally I'd been very unhappy with the audio experience on DVD's for years and finally managed to sort it out in the last three years. Despite spending £1,500 worth of Sony kit 10 years back....

Enjoy what you have.

BTW it may be that the playlist on the player is in a system database and therefore not easily read.... Always difficult and, as they say, "these things are free (or cheap), if your time is worth nothing"....

For the car you could investigate getting an Aux kit which allows you to play the MP3 player in the car. I researched one for Mrs S car as it has a CD slot only and it was around £20. Although fitting could be less than simple and is a cost to factor in.

[Diflower]

Suff please don't be offended but do you realise, sometimes you can come across as sounding a bit...rude?

We're neither of us eejits. We're also not ultra-geekish about music or films. We listen/watch and enjoy...actually, we are reasonably fussy, me more about music, him more about films.
But the systems we have are actually pretty damn good, no didn't cost an awful lot, but not once have either of us said 'that's not good enough'. Which we both have, with previous stereos and TVs.

And we absolutely do not want any more boxes or bits of kit that need to be put somewhere they won't be noticed and that I have to try and keep clear of dust. And funnily enough, when you have a very much-loved but quite large, hairy dog who's attracted to muddy puddles, dust is what you get.

As for the car, you're used to driving very long distances. Bb spends most days in the car, but within a 50-mile radius of home. The local radio station is particularly good at instant traffic reports, which matter a lot to him, so that's what he has on. He's not actually driving for long enough usually to worry about the rest of the content.
I only drive around 10-20 miles at a time and am happy with the radio too. When we go further, we take a few cds. There's no need for anything else.

Sorry if I sound cross, I'm honestly not, just trying to stop you going on so
As I said before, all I'm doing is putting some decent music on the mp3 player (which is happening, and working nicely), and making some compilation cds - also going nicely.
The two projects could definitely be a bit better. The sound reproduction from the mp3 Cds is not as good as I'd like, and at the moment I'm having to reproduce lists in windows/music and in windows media player for the two different outputs, but really that's all I'm trying to solve
And I'm really, really grateful to both you and WM for the help and advice you're giving me, but please understand some of it is more help than I ever wanted and I'm in danger of feeling guilty if I don't take you up on all of it