ajaypal.com

NOTE: This is an edited and modified version of an old article after more and better analysis. The old article no longer exists here, maybe you can check the google cache for the old version.

A few days back I bought a cheap MP3 player/ MMC/ SD card reader in one device from ebay. It has no built in memory and depends on an external MMC/ SD card and connects to the PC via USB. Can store MP3/ WMA/ WAV files for music and reproduce them poorly through a pair of nice looking but not so good sounding ear buds.

See the complete listing/ details on ebay here.

My review of the product

• It is very compact and I like the concept of external battery and external memory in the form of SD/ MMC cards.
• Works in Windows and GNU/ Linux out of box.
• Some card do not work as expected and may result in data loss and frustation. Please make sure your full size MMC/ SD card is compatible before investing.
• Works as a card reader as well (for full length MMC/ SD or with adapter).
• But contrary to claims does not play all MP3 and WMA. Single channel Mono MP3 sound horrible, 2 channel (Stereo) MP3 work fine. Seems some issue with firmware of player not supporting monaural mp3 files.
  My workaround is to re-encode my Mono MP3 as stereo. This is what I do in my GNU/ Linux box (NOTE: you will need sox and lame MP3 encoder installed on your system):
  • Convert the MP3 to wav using sox

    lame --decode music.mp3 mono.wav

  • Using sox convert the mono wav to stereo

    sox mono.wav -c 2 stereo.wav

  • Again encode the wav file as MP3 using lame, and upload it in your SD/ MMC MP3 player

    lame stereo.wav music.mp3

  This is what I do to convert a mono mp3 to stereo:

  lame --decode music.mp3 mono.wav; \
  sox mono.wav -c2 stereo.wav; \
  rm mono.wav ; \
  lame stereo.wav music.mp3; \
  rm stereo.wav
  

  Not very pretty but works.

• Don't know about WMA, havn't tested much.

Anyway, an average music player with support for very limited formats. But what else should I expect for less than 1K.

Rating: :-|