Hi everyone

As the topic title says, I'm new to the MP3 world, however I'm willing to learn. (Up till now I've used a Sony Walkman (person?) for listening to radio and recorded music - cassettes)

Now I'm considering changing to a new medium, but my question is - Can I record existing CDs direct to an MP3, or must I load them to my computer first? And once I do get them onto the MP3, can I decide the order in which tracks are strored and played or is this decided for me?

Answers on (an electronic) postcard please.

Thanks

That depends on the software for the player, as far as I know anyway, have never done it that way.
The way pretty much everyone does it is to rip the CD to the PC first, if you can let us know what player your getting, and what software you may have in mind and we can help further.

Hi Guy

Thanks for the reply - no decision yet over the model, but am looking to get something which will store music, and which will have a radio receiver. Research I've done so far would indicate that FM is the most readily available radio option, so maybe a 4Gb MP3 with FM is going to be the eventual choice.

I see from internet searching that there are quite a few on the market. I don't need a video screen - just music playback and radio reception. I'm just looking at a Transcend model TS4GMP320 - any ideas? The tech spec seems okay, with USB Flash drive connectivity for swift transfer of data. The price is fairly modest - £26.77 plus freight from a major on'line supplier.

Here is a list of most of its attributes:

MP3 Player – supports MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM10 (subscription music) and WAV music formats
Recordable FM Radio with 20 station presets
Advanced Digital Voice Recorder
Dual-color OLED screen displays clear text at any angle and in any light
VAD (Voice Activity Detection) for high quality gapless audio recordings
A-B repeat function allows you to continuously replay a designated section of a track
Variable track playback speeds
Supports 13 languages including menus, song/album title, artist name and lyrics(English, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Simple Chinese, Traditional Chinese)
USB flash drive capabilities for data transfer and storage
Included software can be used to lock your computer and password-protect your files
7 Equalizer effects, including a customizable USER EQ setting
Internal rechargeable Li-ion battery provides over 15 hours of continuous music playback*
Built-in USB 2.0 connector for easy computer connectivity and fast file transfers
Real Time Clock displays local and world times

It seems to fit the bill for what I would like.

I'd welcome your comments

Thanks again for contacting the forum

Moving Thread over to Consumer Electronics.
Doug

Well here is a general guide that may help your choice, no name\bargain brands will usually have no support, nor software, the usual way to transfer music with these is simply drag and drop within windows, for this I believe you would have to have the music on the PC, but you could always try dragging and dropping straight from the CD, but ripping first is possibly more reliable.
More expensive players often come with they're own software, these may well offer such a transfer method, but again I have never done it so can't say how well it works if you can do it this way, my concern would be stuttering as the system starts to choke with the transfer, more so in lower powered systems.

There is always the option to use 3rd party software, I use MediaMonkey, it lets me rip disks, it will tag them so the info is correct, or if info is missing you can search it from the web and update the tracks with it, but it uploads music to media players just fine, even iPod's, and it doesn't restrict your use of the 1 system like iTunes does with iPod's, so you can use the music on any system\player, so with this in mind your probably fine with whatever you get, so apart from if things go wrong point of view, a cheap unit should work fine with this, but do balance that with the adage that you get what you pay for, hope you get what you want.

Thanks again for the advice

I'll give it some thought

Kind regards