The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Stupid mp3 players

I’ll simply quote myself. If anybody is able to tell me of a device which does this, or for example a custom firmware for a further nice device, please comment either here or there (no registration required here).

I was practically ready to order the Sony NW-A3000. It has all the options I require, such as (most importantly) gapless playback, no extra battery sucking extra expensive making stupid colour screen with the ability to play video and that kind of crap [1], all that seemed to be against it since the recent pricedrop was the kinda sucky software you had to use to get your music on it.

But what seems? It only does fucking gapless with the ugly stupid ATRAC format.

I’ve got so much music which requires gapless, practically everything does. From the Offspring to Clawfinger to Tool to Pink Floyd to The Beatles. Am I going to rerip them from cd into ATRAC? No Sony.

Just for the record, iPod, Creative stuff, iRiver stuff etcetera doesn’t do gapless at all (iRiver seems to do some fake stuff with silence detection which can cut off up to 10 seconds of intended silence).

So basically as it turns out to be the only players meeting my criteria are the Sony ones if I either reencode my mp3’s (which is of course stupid), so I’d have to rerip my cd’s onto the device (which is just as stupid really, especially as the format sucks). Alternatively there’s the old Rio Karma of a dead company which meets my criteria quite nicely, however it’s no longer available and seems to have trouble with the harddisk unlike Sony’s device.

Actually one of the reasons I use foobar2000 over Winamp is that it does gapless (yeah, there’s plugins for Winamp but they all suck except with ogg). Now I wouldn’t go back to Winamp for other reasons, but at the time I switched I viewed them as practically similar, only foobar2000 better blending in with Windows instead of a custom skin and gapless.

My current Aiwa “discman” (portable cd player) which is starting to become a little less happy with living after 6 years of trustworthy service can play gapless cd’s fine.

This crap pisses me off. So much. I actually want to spend € 200-300 on such a device, but is gapless playback so much to ask for such an amount of money? Clearly not, as an “ancient” (2004) device such as the Rio Karma shows how it should be done. Obtaining that one would be too much of a risk because of obvious reasons however.

Perhaps I’ll simply invest in upgrading my non-mobile sound equipment (i.e. the boxes) and buy a cheap-ass new discman which has all the features my old one has with the addition of mp3-cd support if my current one happens to break down after all.

[1] If I want to watch something I’ll take my laptop with me in the train and in the bus I’m not going to watch anything anyway. On my bike I can’t watch anything nor willl I watch anything when I walk although it might be possible.

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