4 GB MP3 player under £30 delivered

eyelinerprincess

Just be careful buying electrical stuff from ebay, more often than not they're fakes. If in doubt, check out their feedback and especially negative feedback using http://www.toolhaus.org

Pastmaster

timboid wrote: »

Russyfoot / sandy2,

I, too, use my MP3 player more for audiobooks than music. SanDisk have a range of players that have both a fixed memory capacity and an expansion slot that takes either an SD card or, more recently, microSD cards.

I used to use a SanDisk MP3 Companion which worked with their Cruzer Micro USB stick, but I found it was too easy to jog the tracks.

Now I use a Frontier Labs NEX3+ (https://www.frontierlabs.com) which has no in-built memory, but takes SD cards (I use a selection of 1GB SanDisk Ultra II Plus SDs which have a built-in USB connector). It also takes standard or rechargeable AAA batteries (about 7 hours playback time), has an FM radio and FM transmitter (for use in the car) and built-in voice recorder ... how about that!! Admittedly, I found the FM transmitter a bit weak 'cos a modern car's 'shell' is so thick, the aerial can't pick up the signal. It's small and compact and has a rubberised outer coating to protect it from bangs and knocks, comes in various colours but only has a monochrome LCD.

For those audiobooks that are in one great big glob of a file, I use an MP3 Splitter to divide them into 10 or 20MB chunks, then if the battery goes, I can skip forward to relevant chunk and continue. There are loads of free ones you can download off the web.

By the way, both the SanDisk and NEX3+ players mentioned above DO continue from where you left off if you switch the player off, but not if the battery flakes out during play.

Hope this helps!

Which MP3 splitter would you recommend?

buglawton

I use Mega MP3 Splitter at https://www.snapfiles.com/get/megamp3split.htm.
A bit clunky as you have ot insert all the break points manually but it does the job. Any better suggestions?

There are some MP3 players (I think the iRiver T-10 is an example) that have a search in large steps mode used for audio learning as well as better battery life.

The 2 issues of

- Player Loses it's Place when switched off
- Battery Life

make it pointless to buy a cheap MP3 player IMHO.[SIZE=-1]


[/SIZE]

timboid

buglawton wrote: »

I use Mega MP3 Splitter at https://www.snapfiles.com/get/megamp3split.htm.
A bit clunky as you have ot insert all the break points manually but it does the job. Any better suggestions?

There are some MP3 players (I think the iRiver T-10 is an example) that have a search in large steps mode used for audio learning as well as better battery life.

The 2 issues of

- Player Loses it's Place when switched off
- Battery Life

make it pointless to buy a cheap MP3 player IMHO.[SIZE=-1]


[/SIZE]

I used an aptly named utility called "MP3 Splitter" from https://www.brizsoft.com (used to be called https://www.media4pc.com). It allows you to manually select how the audio file is chopped up, or for massive MP3s, you can just select the number of chunks it gets broken into. Unfortunately, it's one of those evaluation versions (unless you fork out $20 for an unlock key) but I just uninstall and re-install when I need to use it.

I recently found an absolutely free one, but I haven't tried it yet. You can get it from here:

http://www.nch.com.au/splitter/

It apparently allows you to split an audio file by the number of chunks, duration or even silence detection!

Good luck!

buglawton

Slice Audio Splitter for free looks brilliant. Looking forward to trying it.

peterpiper70

Just recieved an E Mail that these are back in stock
Ordered one for delivery wednesday 11th.
Regards

Estavez_2

Or if you double up to £59.98 plus P&P you can get one with 20 gig storage.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-MP320G

My flat mate got this and seems to be pretty good. If a little plastic looking!

real1314

zenjamie wrote: »

I've just returned my second one of these. Loading more than about 2Gb of music causes an error message and appears to corrupt the player - totally unable to connect to it from file manager.

Could be that I've just been unlucky but...

This sounds like a hacked player. I bought 2 "4GB" mp3 players from ebay before xmas, for the kids, £60 for 2!

They were both hacked, only had 1GB (I actually opened them up and checked the serial numbers on the memory chips).

Got a full refund + return postage.

The other thing to note is that not many of these cheap players have any sort of file structuring/selection system, so you can't choose waht song you want except by clicking "next". That's fine for a 512MB player with 100 songs, but for a 4GB with 800???
each "next" click takes 2 secs, so on average it'll take you 400 clicks x 2 secs to get the song you want = 13 mins 20 secs

dt9546

john-boi1 wrote: »

Please be aware that many of these bargain mp3 players have a very short battery life sometimes as low as 2 to 3 hours.

So if this is important to you make sure you confirm battery life before purchase

think thats dependant on what battery you use

i used to buy "30" batteries for a £1 from poundland and battery life used to be about 7 hours

now i use rechargeable energizer which lasts me about 14 hours

Derv_2

zenjamie wrote: »

I've just returned my second one of these. Loading more than about 2Gb of music causes an error message and appears to corrupt the player - totally unable to connect to it from file manager.

There is a limit to the number of files that can be stored in the root directory of these USB devices. Most will report "Disk Full" when the limit is reached but some become unusable and will need reformatting.

To use all of the capacity of larger sized USB flash memory devices create one or more sub folders and put the music files into them instead of the root directory.

Or of course, your device may have been faulty . . .