I've read quite a bit about using them for passive listening. I guess any cheap MP3 player would work for that, though it would help to have a screen for selecting tracks, and some way to make a track loop.

What about active listening? Do any of you do that with an MP3 player? I noticed mPlayer (on the PC) lets you seek forward/backward 10 seconds or 1 minute using the arrow keys, which seems rather useful. Do any portable MP3 players have that, and does it turn out to be helpful if they do?

bladethecoder Wrote:I've read quite a bit about using them for passive listening. I guess any cheap MP3 player would work for that, though it would help to have a screen for selecting tracks, and some way to make a track loop.

What about active listening? Do any of you do that with an MP3 player? I noticed mPlayer (on the PC) lets you seek forward/backward 10 seconds or 1 minute using the arrow keys, which seems rather useful. Do any portable MP3 players have that, and does it turn out to be helpful if they do?

err...ur from the stone age aren't you?

If you were being serious then yes, all mp3 players do that. I recommend getting a Cowon D2 which has a touchscreen with a small stylus you can use for drawing kanji, it also has a memory card slot which is useful, and Cowon has the best sounding players too.

Shirow66 Wrote:If you were being serious then yes, all mp3 players do that. I recommend getting a Cowon D2 which has a touchscreen with a small stylus you can use for drawing kanji, it also has a memory card slot which is useful, and Cowon has the best sounding players too.

Why do you need to draw kanji on an MP3 player?

I have a D2, but I don't use it to draw kanji because it is reeeeally not fun drawing on touchscreens... It does handle flash though, so one can download/steal/borrow japanese quiz flash apps from the internets.

The touchscreen is useful when skipping around in mp3s though (since I've put the audio from various movies/drama/anime in my d2). You just press anywhere on the time-line of the audio file, just like a mediaplayer on the computer, to skip to that part. Of course reverse and fast-forward can be used too.

Any mp3-player should do, but I had certain criteria which an mp3player needed to fulfill for me to buy it.

* Space: so I never get bored, able to put a huge variety of stuff in it (SD-card is a big plus!)
* Touchscreen: so I could skip around big 90min+ mp3s (typical movie-length..)
* Not too big size-wise: size matters!
* Text viewer + Picture viewer: In hindsight this was useless, I never read any books nor looked at pictures on my D2... (though it handles kanji like a champ)
* Built-in mic: So I could listen to myself doing my sentence reviews (since I read aloud) and listen to my pronunciation.
* Good price: I don't know if the D2 is cheap now.(nor the D2+ which is the same thing but in a different color or something). I do know it was not that cheap when I bought it :/

Some of the really basic mp3 players don't have the seek forward/back function. I also think Cowon are good.

I think the best device is something cheap and small, so you can have it always with you without being afraid of loosing or breaking it. I use a Creative ZEN Stone just for the purpose of listening to Japanese and another (better) player for music and the rest.

I'm not saying drawing kanji on the D2 is awesome or something, I'm just saying it's possible. I do it sometimes when I'm bored and I don't have a pen and paper around.
The D2+ has the upgraded BBE+ sound enhancer filters, and a slightly different look, other than that, I don't think there's a difference.

Quote:err...ur from the stone age aren't you?

Not in most respects, but I admit I've never used an MP3 player.

Quote:If you were being serious then yes, all mp3 players do that.

Not quite. As far as I can see, the cheapest MP3 players have no screen, and have 4 control buttons (pause, volume up, volume down, next track, prev track).

I downloaded the manual for a random slightly-more-expensive MP3 player with a screen, and seeking was possible, but used an awkward combination of buttons, and it looked very easy to do next/prev track by mistake instead, thus losing one's place.

Quote:I think the best device is something cheap and small, so you can have it always with you without being afraid of loosing or breaking it.

I agree. I suppose I'm trying to figure out the minimum feature set for effective language learning, and the cheapest MP3 players that support it.

Quote:The touchscreen is useful when skipping around in mp3s though (since I've put the audio from various movies/drama/anime in my d2). You just press anywhere on the time-line of the audio file, just like a mediaplayer on the computer, to skip to that part. Of course reverse and fast-forward can be used too.

On the computer, I've found clicking on a timeline quite useful for finding the right area in a long file; but for re-listening to short sections I much prefer mPlayer's keyboard commands that skip 10 seconds or 1 minute. I could live without the former - I tend to chop up long files into chapters even for use on the PC.

My fave is the ipod, very customizeable, I went with something cheaper once and was quite disappointed, ipod has a lot of good controls, full customization over playlists, etc. I think the creative zen's are similar in price and functionality as well.

The smallest sizes with a screen have come down in price but still are not super cheap

bladethecoder Wrote:

Quote:err...ur from the stone age aren't you?

Not in most respects, but I admit I've never used an MP3 player.

Quote:If you were being serious then yes, all mp3 players do that.

Not quite. As far as I can see, the cheapest MP3 players have no screen, and have 4 control buttons (pause, volume up, volume down, next track, prev track).

I downloaded the manual for a random slightly-more-expensive MP3 player with a screen, and seeking was possible, but used an awkward combination of buttons, and it looked very easy to do next/prev track by mistake instead, thus losing one's place.

Quote:I think the best device is something cheap and small, so you can have it always with you without being afraid of loosing or breaking it.

I agree. I suppose I'm trying to figure out the minimum feature set for effective language learning, and the cheapest MP3 players that support it.

Quote:The touchscreen is useful when skipping around in mp3s though (since I've put the audio from various movies/drama/anime in my d2). You just press anywhere on the time-line of the audio file, just like a mediaplayer on the computer, to skip to that part. Of course reverse and fast-forward can be used too.

On the computer, I've found clicking on a timeline quite useful for finding the right area in a long file; but for re-listening to short sections I much prefer mPlayer's keyboard commands that skip 10 seconds or 1 minute. I could live without the former - I tend to chop up long files into chapters even for use on the PC.

What kind of cheap MP3 players are you looking at!? Are they made in Haiti, the Congo, or some place like that? I mean a $40 Taiwanese made MP3 includes a screen and all the basic amenities, but then again you can probably buy some second rate piece of crap if you're that cheap.

Also, If you came from the stone age, why in the hell didn't you bring some exotic animals from those times, you could have sold them and had enough money for a decent MP3 player.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:My fave is the ipod, very customizeable, I went with something cheaper once and was quite disappointed, ipod has a lot of good controls, full customization over playlists, etc. I think the creative zen's are similar in price and functionality as well.

The smallest sizes with a screen have come down in price but still are not super cheap

It's terrible at handling audiobooks though x_x Unless I'm missing something...

Squintox Wrote:

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:My fave is the ipod, very customizeable, I went with something cheaper once and was quite disappointed, ipod has a lot of good controls, full customization over playlists, etc. I think the creative zen's are similar in price and functionality as well.

The smallest sizes with a screen have come down in price but still are not super cheap

It's terrible at handling audiobooks though x_x Unless I'm missing something...

Not if the audiobooks were bought from iTunes Store... I think normal audiobooks may be converted to that format, but I haven't looked into it.

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:My fave is the ipod, very customizeable, I went with something cheaper once and was quite disappointed, ipod has a lot of good controls, full customization over playlists, etc. I think the creative zen's are similar in price and functionality as well.

The smallest sizes with a screen have come down in price but still are not super cheap

Yes, but there are quite a few iPods, all different ;)

Yonosa Wrote:What kind of cheap MP3 players are you looking at!? Are they made in Haiti, the Congo, or some place like that?

Usually Hong Kong. And the ones I mentioned first seem to be based on the iPod Shuffle, which is apparently quite good enough for some people and purposes, and is made in the same places as any other iPod.

iPod Shuffle Wrote:Skip to the next song - Press the Next/Fast-forward (>>|) button.
Start a song over or play the previous song - Press the Previous/Rewind (|<<) button once to start a song over. Press it twice to play the previous song.
Fast-forward or rewind a song - Press and hold the Next/Fast-forward (>>|) or Previous/Rewind (|<<) button.

Now, I don't yet know how user-friendly the fast-forward and rewind are, how easy it would be to accidentally "press" instead of "press and hold", or whether the other models do it any differently.

Yonosa Wrote:I mean a $40 Taiwanese made MP3 includes a screen and all the basic amenities, but then again you can probably buy some second rate piece of crap if you're that cheap.

Also, If you came from the stone age, why in the hell didn't you bring some exotic animals from those times, you could have sold them and had enough money for a decent MP3 player.

There's no need to be rude. And it's not "cheap" to only want to pay for the features I need, even if I'm not yet sure what those are.

fast-forward works the same on all iPods (but on "real" iPods, you can press the middle button to go into "scanning mode" and manually forward through the song using the wheel) and you're not going to accidentally use it wrong. You have to press it really quickly to skip forward or backward, holding it for like a second or less is enough to start scanning.

If you've already got a PSP, they can make pretty good mp3 players. You can go back and forth using the d-pad quite easily. Make sure to lock the buttons (push the power switch so that the space next to hold is yellow) if you put it in your pocket so you don't accidentally press buttons. Only problem is that it's a bit big and the battery life is pretty short =(

Or better yet you could use your mobile phone?

I guess the reason to not use a PSP is that it's quite heavy and big. The reason not to use your cellphone is that the battery won't last (though I've never used my cellphone as an mp3 player, so I don't know how much it actually matters).

Tobberoth Wrote:

Squintox Wrote:

Dustin_Calgary Wrote:

It's terrible at handling audiobooks though x_x Unless I'm missing something...

Not if the audiobooks were bought from iTunes Store... I think normal audiobooks may be converted to that format, but I haven't looked into it.

Any mp3, WAV etc. file can be converted into the m4b format which is Apple's audiobook format. It's basically like the regular m4a format but allows bookmarking i.e. automatically keeping your place when you stop listening partway through. Very useful for long spoken word files that you don't listen to in one go.

Thanks for the info Tobberoth. I think I'll need to try out a real iPod to understand properly.

I hadn't thought of my phone ;). It can play MP3s, but sadly it only has 32MB of flash. And the instructions say I should be able to rewind by holding down the button used for "previous track" (as with the iPod) but I can't seem to make it work; it always just jumps to the previous track however long I hold it down... the same with fast-forward and next-track.

OK, my thoughts have crystallised now that I've had a chance to reflect on this discussion overnight.

We've established that most MP3 players support fast-forward and rewind (though perhaps with varying degrees of user-friendliness). And iPods (other than the Shuffle) have the magic "wheel" that I really ought to try out ;)

The question in my original post may have sounded stupid at the time, and in a way it probably was; but even if I was a little confused, it has a much more serious meaning.

For years, I've been clicking around on imprecise timelines in most PC media players, and using fast-forward and rewind in other media players, or when watching TV with the PVR, watching DVDs, listening to CDs away from the PC...

So, for some reason I was studying an MP3 in MPlayer a couple of days ago. I looked up the controls, and noticed the 10/60 second instant skipping. And as soon as I tried it, I felt that it was better. (Usually a drastic interface change takes some time to get used to, but not this one.) For the first time, a media player interface was responding to what I wanted, precisely and immediately. Of course, there are still occasions when a timeline, fast-forward or rewind are more appropriate, but for me that's not very often.

"Fast-forward" and "rewind" date from the days of tapes. IIRC, on the VCR you even got the speeded-up/reversed picture like today. These days we have clickable timelines, speeded-up/reversed audio, and skipping to the next/previous track/scene. But finer-grained skipping seems to be quite a rarity. If we go back to my original question, "I noticed MPlayer (on the PC) lets you seek forward/backward 10 seconds or 1 minute using the arrow keys, which seems rather useful. Do any portable MP3 players have that?" - perhaps the answer might even be "no" =P

If any of you have never tried studying audio with MPlayer-style skipping, please do. Maybe I just have eccentric tastes, but even so, some of you might like it too. Alternatively, maybe this way really is better, and just hasn't caught on yet ;)

I'm still thinking about an MP3 player to get. I love everything about iPod's except for the stupid piece of shit program called itunes. I just want to be able to copy paste my data onto memory like any other portable drive.

And I'd also want one with a touch screen or something, again, an iPod, so I can srs on it and stuff but yeah, same problem, gayTunes.

Wait a little while and get this.

liosama Wrote:I'm still thinking about an MP3 player to get. I love everything about iPod's except for the stupid piece of shit program called itunes. I just want to be able to copy paste my data onto memory like any other portable drive.

And I'd also want one with a touch screen or something, again, an iPod, so I can srs on it and stuff but yeah, same problem, gayTunes.

えっ！iTunes is the best player because it's so handy. Don't tell me you prefer crappy players like Winamp or MediaPlayer over iTunes.

Musashi Wrote:

liosama Wrote:I'm still thinking about an MP3 player to get. I love everything about iPod's except for the stupid piece of shit program called itunes. I just want to be able to copy paste my data onto memory like any other portable drive.

And I'd also want one with a touch screen or something, again, an iPod, so I can srs on it and stuff but yeah, same problem, gayTunes.

えっ！iTunes is the best player because it's so handy. Don't tell me you prefer crappy players like Winamp or MediaPlayer over iTunes.

Bwuh!? VLC, Music Cube, Mplayer?

Itunes might be ok for just playing music, but there are times when you just want to drag and drop music onto your ipod just like a regular usb flash drive. And since ipods have a weird folder setup you can't drag and drop...

No I use a proper media player called Foobar.