Dithering about portable MP3s

[ciphergoth]

Anti-war march today, 2pm, Waterloo Place, Edinburgh.

Some time ago, the replacement 6GB hard drive in my Archos Jukebox Recorder MP3 player died. It's now out of warranty. I'm considering spending GBP 91.64 on getting a 40GB laptop-style hard drive from Simply and fitting it as per these instructions (also these). Having taken my old laptop apart and put it back together, I'm pretty confident I could pull this off, and I could use open source firmware. But on the other hand, I could just spend GBP 50 on an MP3 CD player. Help me decide! Update: I have sent off for the hard drive, and taken apart my Archos to remove the old drive which turned out to be really easy.

Incidentally, 40 GB works out by my calculations to be around three weeks of continuous, 24 hour music. Expect a visitation by the music slurping fairies. What's the best free LAME-based tool for ripping CDs under Windows?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

LAME-wise, I use CDex under Windows. It's fast, free (in all the ways) and links to FreeDB.

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

I'm currently using 1.5b10 with very few problems.

[zz]

seconded, altho i rip to ogg :)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Sadly my Archos will never play Ogg files while the DSP specs are secret. See this FAQ question.

CDex does look like the good one. I shall load it onto the Archos so I can rip people's CD collections when I visit them!

[zz]

mm, my mum was complaining that i had oggs, because her cd writing software doesn't understand them for the purposes of making *shudder* audio cds..

i would use my nice new laptop for file/music raping purposes, if i ever visited people :>

i was going to try the linux laptop experience, but i can't seem to resize/delete partitions using either partition magic or dos fdisk (either booting from a bootcd or the hdd), claiming not to be able to write to boot sectors & whatnot, and yet there's no antivirus stuff in the bios.. compaq tech support are stumped too :>

[zz]

typical, after changing nothing and leaving it for a week, it works now..

[hughe.livejournal.com]

yes, thirded. cdex is very good