MP3 Newbie stupid questions...

[MikeP]

I took a punt and bought an Acer MP-330 20 gig HD thingummy!

It turned-up on my doorstep today.

Having carefully opened the packaging, laid out all the contents and checked everything listed was there, the first thing that struck me was that despite the contents listing a DC Charger and the MP3 player actually having a socket marked DC, there is an AC charger included! (I suppose it could be a translation issue?)

There is a tiny, 14 page book of instructions.

A tiny CD that is only used for loading the Driver for Win98.

How on earth do I record from a CD to the MP3 player? (I stupidly assumed that there would be something about Realplayer or the Microsoft equivalent).

As soon as I connect it to my PC via the USB, it goes into sulk mode and won't even let any of the buttons work so how can anything be transferred?

Is it broken already?

I knew I should have stuck with a CD Player!

 

[cookie]

when you plug it in via usb, is it seen as an additional drive in My Computer?

if so, drag and drop i guess.

 

[Redboots]

when you plug it in via usb, is it seen as an additional drive in My Computer?
if so, drag and drop i guess.

Thats the way but create directorys for sets/types/albums... you can only have 999 files per dir and the more you have in the root, the slower it will work - old dos limitation and the player is probably a fat format

You will have to convert you CD's to MP3 though... I use Goldwave - http://www.goldwave.com/

 

[MikeP]

Well I knew with a little help from the knowledgeable here that I'd get there eventually (despite my manifest frustration earlier).

Should it take so long to convert to MP3 format though?

Thanks for the advice so far.

 

[Wizard]

Length of time to create an MP3 depends on the sample rate. But even at a high rate, it shouldn't take long. Plus you can do a disk at a time and get on with other stuff while it's happening

 

[Fanum]

As Wizard says Mike, you can convert them on the fly......make sure you've got WMP 9 or above, check the options in the Media player to rip the cd as it plays then just insert a cd into the PC CD drive tray (that's the coffee cup holder to you ) and it'll do it all for you........

You can do it quicker without listening to it at the same time if you'd rather

TIP.......label all the tracks up properly as you do them....I didn't, I just ploughed through all my CD's an now I have literally hundreds and hundreds of 'unknown' tracks on my Zen...a PITA when you're trying to get some good sounds lined up

There is a thing in later versions of WMP that find all the track and album details from onlin as you insert them

 

[Deleted account 220427002]

a high bite rate takes less time i think... but for most 192 kbs is fine

AC is your mains power into the power adaptor.... which converts it to DC

i use musicmatch jukebox for converting cds and playing music on my pc... it has a free version

http://www.musicmatch.com/

 

[cookie]

TIP.......label all the tracks up properly as you do them....I didn't, I just ploughed through all my CD's an now I have literally hundreds and hundreds of 'unknown' tracks on my Zen...a PITA when you're trying to get some good sounds lined up

this is a very useful tool for sorting ID3 tags on your pc.

 

[Fanum]

this is a very useful tool for sorting ID3 tags on your pc.

OO interesting.....but can it relabel a totally untagged file???

It'd need to compare each fle with some massive library or something...that would be impressive...or does it just guess at them using the info it does have ???

If it does the whole thing, i'll give it a go......but in these days of DRM I'm a bit cautious what I use

 

[MikeP]

Right!

I've downloaded/bought all the recommended additional software, so the next couple of days will hopefully see me spammed-up on this MP3 malarky (fingers-crossed ).

Bill,

Thanks for the heads-up on the cup-holder. I always wondered why this machine had two when I only drink one cup at a time!

Tuned,

One of the attractions for me about this thing was that it was listed as having a DC input. Can I assume that with a suitable lead I can re-charge it from the bike?

 

[cookie]

OO interesting.....but can it relabel a totally untagged file???

It'd need to compare each fle with some massive library or something...that would be impressive...or does it just guess at them using the info it does have ???

If it does the whole thing, i'll give it a go......but in these days of DRM I'm a bit cautious what I use

firstly it tries to identify the tracks by their length/placement against an internet database like itunes does. if that fails, it can try a match with amazon. of course that only works with whole albums, it can't identify a single track.

at worst, you can use it as an editor to manually batch label tracks.

it's also handy for checking what tags are actually present on a folder full of tracks. easier than checking each one in properties

i'm sure it can do more, but i've not dug that deep.

bit complicated to use TBH, but handy.

 

[Island Ranger]

Listen to the happy geeks.............just get a turntable and strap the b*st**d on the back. Hope this helps all the best

 

[Iain Hogg]

firstly it tries to identify the tracks by their length/placement against an internet database like itunes does. if that fails, it can try a match with amazon. of course that only works with whole albums, it can't identify a single track.

at worst, you can use it as an editor to manually batch label tracks.

it's also handy for checking what tags are actually present on a folder full of tracks. easier than checking each one in properties

i'm sure it can do more, but i've not dug that deep.

bit complicated to use TBH, but handy.

I was recently ripping old cd's using iTunes and it happily found album and track titles for cd's I had recorded from vynil and manually edited out the crackles between tracks!

 

[Yoda]

If you use FreeRip, it wanders off to a database site and picks up all the track labels for you, then rips 'em all to MP3 (or Ogg or WMA etc) and stores them neatly labelled along with the artist's and the album's name.

Another nice bit of free software that does what it says on the tin.