Music while Riding

[Master_eT]

I was just interested in the possibility of listening to music while mountain-biking. The CD-player that I use at the moment would be fairly useless for mountain biking with, as it would skip too much.

So I'm probably after some sort of solid-state device, or an iPod-like thingy.

Do you ride with music, and if so what do you use?


Master_eT.

[junior]

yeah im starting to ride wit music again, im using a MD never skiped on me

[peachy]

this topic has been done before i'm pretty sure, use search button

/me awaits naz

[wombat]

You can hear Naz's music when you ride next to him, it's great, saves carrying your own player.

[tu plang]

i'll get in first.
iPods are the best mp3 player around but not the best for use during sports etc. they arent solid state (they use a HDD) so lots of bumbs over a long period will likely fark them up. for riding etc ur best bet is a flash memory based mp3 player (ona the players that are about 128/256mb).

edit: oh and an MD would do the job i spose :roll:

[naz]

music and riding wot 2 words could go better hand in hand, ive been ridin 3 years and a total of 1 year with music and now a days ill ride shit without music, i generally have all my music of bike videos, i think the relation between the music/video and u ridin causes a epidemic breakout of adrenline,
now to ur hardware, Solid State mp3 players would be ur best bet, HDD will eventually fail due to there sensativity to vibration and stuff, Minidisc will skip if ur riding down a bouncy enough trail.
bakc to solid state limited space (upyo 1g as far as i know) but 100000% shockproof u could put it on a paint shaker and it wouldnt miss a beat, long battery life generally 20-50 hours dependant on the player) volume loudness out put is measured in Mw higher the louder,
sound quality on most players is top notch, but its also dependant on the quality of the song and from where it was ripped.
button placement, i have a iriver ifp-390 and its awesome 256mb, 24hour battery life 12mW output u could wake the dead, but tthe fucking button it comes a good centimetre out of the player and after 6months it broke so now i cant change volume or song, so when choosing a mp3 player check the buttons are vulnrable to being ripped off and sit quite flush to the body of the player.
physical size shouldnt realy matter as most solid states are puny and can run ages on a single battery.

www.mstation.com.au
www.mp3direct.com.au

hope it help, oh and ben i have 256mb player and can squeeze on 120 songs
thats being ripped at 64kbps wma
check out the iriver ifp-5xx series small, loud, plenty of space(256,512,1024mb)

[Master_eT]

Awww, c'mon, gimme a break, im new to this place... 4th post now :)


Yeh, the problem with getting a flash memory player for me would be that I have way too much music, and 128mb just aint enough (try 65GB :D) That's the reasoning behind the iPod. I read about the iPod's that the HDD is hardly ever actually spinning. But I would say that constant abuse would fuck it up a little, but I suppose warranty covers that (until it runs out anyway :D)

I'd love an iPod now, but I dont really think I have the money, they are damn expensive.


Master_eT.

[naz]

HDD there platters of metal covered in magnetic material on a spindle, with a read write head that can move across the platter upto 50times a second or somthing. The gap between the platter and the read write head is .0001 of a mm or something insanely small, and constant banging will ofcouse defect the head and it will hit the platter scraping the magnetic material, corrupting ur HDD have funn replacing that

oh and there are better HDD players other than ipods, 8 hour battery life pffft wouldnt even last a day riding....
irivers hdd player 16hour battery life runnin off li-poly batteries(lighter and smaller but producing same output as li-ion)
www.iriver.com

[notobe]

Who says you need to have all your songs on the player at once? just select a few make a few playlists and change them to how you feel.

[Rik]

Minidisc will skip if ur riding down a bouncy enough trail.

Will it? How have your experiences been? I've shaken my MD hard and it doesn't skip, AFAIK they use a very solid interface with the disc.

DO NOT buy a HDD-based player, no matter how tough they claim them to be. I know the laptop HDD's in them are seriously shockproof, but the less moving parts the better. 256mb and 512mb memory cards are cheap enough to justify a card-based player. Plus if you have a camera or phone or something that uses the card, it's an added bonus.

[naz]

rik, i had a mzn-909 it skipped like no tomorow but then again i got it in korea for like 20$ but rik did u shake it once or twice or constantly for like 20seconds
and its not the interface with the disc its the read write laser and how much it gets misaligned by a bump and the time to correct itself and the size of the buffer they use

[Rik]

Valid point, of course, the laser is going to bounce around too... sorta slipped my mind.
That said, anything with moving parts is bad for riding.

[tu plang]

Awww, c'mon, gimme a break, im new to this place... 4th post now :)


Yeh, the problem with getting a flash memory player for me would be that I have way too much music, and 128mb just aint enough (try 65GB :D) That's the reasoning behind the iPod. [b[I read about the iPod's that the HDD is hardly ever actually spinning[/b]. But I would say that constant abuse would fuck it up a little, but I suppose warranty covers that (until it runs out anyway :D)

I'd love an iPod now, but I dont really think I have the money, they are damn expensive.


Master_eT.

yeah it has a ridiculously big buffer which will stop u hearing any skipping but the long term effects of constant bumps as naz has described will root it good and proper. are u ever goin on a ride where u need 65gb of music neway? by my count (and if ur music is encoded on average the same as mine) that is a month and a half of music....

edit: formatting

[Master_eT]

Yeh, I'm definatly not going to need the whole 65GB of music (38 days to be exact) but I do frequently listen to a hell of a lot more than 128mb/256mb of it.

Buying seperate flash memory cards etc really doesnt seem very economical either (from the prices ive seen)

Mainly what I'm looking for is use while snowboarding as well (being away from the computer for about a week, so i cant swap the music around)

128mb would be fine for just short rides of course, but im looking for something big for the expeditions.


Master_eT.

[Rik]

It's not hard to transfer MP3's reguarly (say, every night or 2), that way you keep a variety of music in your player. But then I just read you're away for a while... so...

256mb of Compact Flash for $131 is very economical, check out www.mp3.com.au for more supercheap stuff. 2-3 of those cards should be good for ALOT of music. If you're keen, you can always do a batch convert and drop the bitrate of your mp3's down as well, get alot more music per megabyte. Don't tell me about music quality, because if you worried about quality, you a: wouldn't be using a portable player b: you wouldn't touch mp3's and c: you can't tell through most headphones anyway, especially once you get a bit of background noise into the equation.

[Master_eT]

Hmm, I suppose I probably could downgrade some of my music, (some is in .APE format (450mb for a whole album)) Most is usually 192kbps+

But I use sennheiser headphones, but yeh, I suppose if I'm doing other stuff i'm not really gonna notice the quality too much.

heres a list of all my music for those that are interested...
A lot of it is shit music tho :p
http://members.iinet.net.au/~master_et/playlist.html


Master_eT.

[naz]

have u heard of .ogg format its ment to be 10x better quality of mp3 and half the size very interesting ill try to find the site www.vorbis.com and i think iriver support the codec, but i say that it doesnt matter having a limited amount of music on ur mp3 player its not like u wanna listen to every song and will get pissed off with it repeating tracks

[notobe]

yeah exactly.. i know i couldnt listen to all mine.. unless they didnt repeat and lasted the whole time i was riding.