(Why I'm writing this at this moment I'll come back to...)

One of my goals for the Zaurus was to provide music on plane trips. However, the built-in player is really lame, my biggest memory card was 128MB, and the cheap Sony earbuds I had really stunk. Plus, I would get these really loud squeaks between tracks that were painful (I searched to see if this was a known MP3 problem of some kind).

So, before Christmas vacation, I bought myself two presents: a Lexar 512MB CF card and some Etymotics earbuds/plugs (not the unbelievably expensive ones, just the nastily expensive ER6 @ $130). I also decided to try the player app for the Zaurus from The Kompany.

In addition, since I had started reripping/encoding CDs to OGG, I made sure to re-rip some airplane favorites (sort of divvied up into Enya-ish things for sleepy time and louder favorites for awake time).

The results:

1) The Etymotics didn't blow me away, but they are much better than my previous Sennheiser/Sony earbuds and the earplug aspect is a great advantage -- essentially noise-cancelling without all the bulk and I could sleep on them.

2) Zaurus. Surprisingly, I had DC power in my seat in both directions on my long trip, so battery life was never really tested.

3) tKPlayer? Much better than built-in player, but not amazing. I still got those squeaks between MP3s, so assume the original player wasn't to blame....

4) OGG? Fine. I didn't have any duplicate MP3/OGG tracks for comparison, but no squeaks from the OGGs. I need to do some A/B listening before I encode much more to decide what bitrates/quality to use. The 512MB card is a big improvement, but right now the OGG file sizes I have generated are big due to my blase use of high bitrate/quality specs.

So, an iPod it ain't, but it is doing what I want, and I don't need to haul another player around.

Why am I motivated to write this now? Well, about 5 hours ago I got off a Seattle-->DC redeye. There was no power in the seat, but I can report that, to my surprise, the Z played at lowish volumes for about 3 hours (with screen blanked) and battery still shows > 80%.

Beyond that, asleep in 2A on this Airbus with Enya softly warbling through the new earplugs, I managed to remain completely unaware that - midway through the flight - the poor woman in 4B did a reportedly amazing projectile vomiting number on the folks in 4C, 4D, 3D and 3E -- or so the nice woman in 2B informed me as we landed. I like those headphones.

That's my report.

LOL. Thanks for the report... i've been looking at that set of Etymotics to replace my Sony's. Anything that can keep you from experiencing a rojectile vomit at 30,000 is good enough for me...lol.

(dig the sig Jim. =)

Eww. I'm surprised it didn't reek!

- Trevor

regarding the sqeaks between tracks, try encoding some mp3's with a different encoder. I've had that problem with some encoders on various electronics (including the empeg.)

actually, the squeaks are from a bad first frame. if you know the mp3 structure (frames starts with FF FB iirc), you can hex out the first frame and prevent it from happening.

ah...I speak as a fool then.

I can't speak for the Zaurus, but Ipaq's (at least the 3600 series) have distinct hardware probems with hardware 'pops' at the beginning of songs. FWIW.

-Zeke

Eww. I'm surprised it didn't reek!

The nice Ms. 2B told me that it did reek quite a bit. She was particularly uplifted by this being herself a few months pregnant. The plane was about 3/4 full, so apparently they shifted folks around and then took about half the blankets on the plane and just piled 'em over the 2" deep pool of vomitus. So, yes, all the folks from 4th row back got to climb this blanket mountain to exit the plane, but it really didn't reek that noticably by the time I woke up.

Actually, in past lives, I have had so many people puke on me (200-300?) that I may have built up a bit of an immunity.

I can't speak for the Zaurus, but Ipaq's (at least the 3600 series) have distinct hardware probems with hardware 'pops' at the beginning of songs. FWIW.

Ezekiel, Meatballman, iMaGe,

Interesting. All of the MP3s were encode with a recent LAME. The noises aren't audible on the Empeg or playing from a PC/laptop (or on my old Nomad II). So I took it to be Zaurus software/hardware specific. The noise is like the typical noice of scratching a tonearm over an LP, but shorter in duration and slightly higher pitched and can be very loud/painful (like if you just finished listening to "Love Rears Its Ugly Head" at 11 through the earbuds!). Seems to occur on 50-75 of MP3 transitions on the Zaurus regardless of player software.

The fact that something like this occurs on similar iPaq is interesting. No idea of how the respective units implement decoders and such, but anyway it shouldn't be an issue after a bit if the OGGs continure to be squeak-free.

Ipaq's (at least the 3600 series) have distinct hardware probems with hardware 'pops' at the beginning of songs

Most of this problem came from the amplifier being cut on and off to save battery power. ROM upgrades have tended to help, the best one being one of the last Pocket PC 2000 based ones that they released. The Pocket PC 2002 ROM updates brought some of it back though.

The noise is like the typical noice of scratching a tonearm over an LP, but shorter in duration and slightly higher pitched and can be very loud/painful

Exactly the sound I get from my empeg (and other empegs) with some musicmatch encoded mp3s. Weird. I'm just re-encoding them with LAME and it fixes them right up.

Pre-Empeg days and using Lame (3.87 at the time) I had the same problem; fine on PC but sudden bursts of squeak noises seemingly random on my CD recorder with MP3 play-back capability. Only thing was, noise wasn't random, I could go back to the same location of the track and it would be there in the same way. Note there weren't problems at either beginning or ending of tracks.

Digging a bit, I found out that adding "strictly enforce ISO" to the Lame command line solved the problem, I haven't had any problems since with any MP3 hardware-decoder equipped stuff, nor with my Empeg, for that matter, but I haven't tried without so it may well not be an issue in that particular instance.

http://www.r3mix.net is a very informative site.

Actually I'd guess it happens if the audio device is closed and reopened in the player. Some players will hold it open to avoid such a problem.

But that's just a guess.