My First MP3 Player

2005-05-11

My latest impulse buy was to get an MP3 player.  My excuse was thinking how when I try to work out with no music I get bored and tired in minutes but when I go dancing to techno music I can dance for 3−4 hours non−stop (well, not quite but maybe 3 to 4 times for 40 minutes each with a 20 minute break).

On top of that with the iShuffle listed at $99 it almost seemed like an impulse buy. So, I went looking. I had pretty much ruled out an iShuffle because Rhapsody now supports unlimited downloading of music to any WMA supporting player and of course Apple's systems don't support WMA. Still, at only $99 I did think maybe I could live with that limit if nothing else was any good.

Going to the store though with so many options it took nearly 3hrs of looking and going to a couple different stores to decide what to do.  First off, there are cheaper players now.  Bic Camera is selling the Creative MuVo 512meg no display for 8600 yen, about $20 less than the iShuffle and it supports WMA.  Then they are also selling the Creative MuVo Micro N200 with display AND FM Tuner AND Voice recording for 12800yen, only about $20 more than a 512meg iShuffle (10600yen)

But, of course, once in the store my eyes started wandering.  A 1gig iShuffle is only 16000 yen and there was a part of me thinking if I'm going to get one I might as well get the biggest.  A 1gig MuVo is only about 17000yen. And once I considered that price, a 5gig Olympus m:robe is only about $50 more at 22000 yen. 5times storage for only 25% more cost.  It's actually got a pretty sexy design and is currently outselling Apple's iPod Minis which go for 21000 yen (4gig) and 27000 yen (6gig) respectively.  But once I was considering the 27000yen range I noticed it's only another $50 to the 20gig iPod and it's competitors.  Decisions, Decisions...

I mulled it over for a while but finally came to my senses and decided the original point was to get something for working out which meant I wanted something with no moving parts and part of the impetus was the about $100 cost so I finally decided to get that 512k MuVo with display.

So far I'm pretty happy with it.  It's arguably far more useful then an iShuffle as it has radio and voice recording, both function I will use to study my Japanese.  It also has another feature I like which is it uses standard batteries.  Nothing sucks worse than to want to listen to music only to notice your batteries are dead and there is nothing you can do about it so for me standard batteries are a plus.  Plus I already own AAA size rechargables.  No special software is required, plug it in and it just shows up as another drive.  You can drag and drop songs (or files) or use the various features in WMP, Rhapsody, etc to get music in there.  One other thing I was surprised at was it appears to fully support Japanese.  Of course I guess I should have expected that since they are selling it in Japan but I was surprised to see kanji appear for songs with kanji in the titles.

Now I just have to get to that second part......working out 😛

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