NEWS: Microsoft wants to put it in your ears, bud.

Good deal. I am thinking of investing in an mp3 player for my truck, so I can cram gazillions of songs in at a time. My 6 disc CD changer was the best, but now it randomly changes CDs while in the middle of songs. Since I need a new one, I'm thinkin bout getten me one of them there fancy thingermajigs.

I thought that was a fancy feature people paid money for.

You know, kazoos are really, REALLY cheap.

I really only ever leave the house to go to work, school, or gaming, and about the only time I'd actually get to *use* a portable media player would be in transit. So, really, it's mostly just about me wanting to be able to carry my entire multi-day music collection in my pocket.

If I were smart I would have purchased a Zen, and strongly suggest to everyone to do the same, I am on my third i-pod in 2 years, The damn things continually stop working, and there is now way to repair them without giving up another 100 dollars and hope it is fixable. Fuck every corporation who decides that they can charge 3 to 5 times what the manufacture and labor cost of an item is o that they can build the ceo another friggin' house. Assholes, the whole lot of them, Make one yourself out of an altoids tin ans apre parts, there are directions on the internet to do it for less 100.

For less than $100? Easy. You could probably pay Digikey prices and still make out for less than $100. The real trick comes down to the coding. If you don't know how to program, your best bet would be to find some open source and run with that, but that limits your hardware selection to what the code supports. The really easy way is to find someone's online EE project. Those usually are totally complete from start to finish and with testing results.

If I remember correctly, one of the first things the encoder does is to remove certain frequencies at either end of the spectrum which are deemed "less important". Here's an overview: Wikipedia-MP3. I didn't really go through it much, but it probably contains a link to the actual spec.

I have a JVC KD-LH810 in my car. My entire audio collection fits onto about 35CDs. It's sooooo nice. Much more safe, too, because I only change CDs when I want something different. I have one whole CD of 311 another of Foo Fighters & Green Day, etc... They're all in alphabetical order. I left ~100MB free on each CD to make it easier to insert new CDs into the collection without having to rewrite the whole batch.

I refuse to own any of these devices. I tend to drive places rather than walk.

Hence I already have a CD player readily availalbe, and satellite radio as well.

The speakers in my car can go loud if I want them, and when played at a normal volume they don't deafen you like earbuds on an Ipod or Creative MP3 player would.

I can't stand ipods. They are overpriced and too damn trendy. Also, what I gather from the commercials is that if you buy one you turn into a shadow. Who would want that? It would make walking at night a real danger.

Nope,I have a pen with a radio in it, only cost 2.99 and it came with batteries and ear buds.

I've got an extra if you want it cause you know it only cost 2.99!

Oh man, I wish I hadn't checked back into this thread... *shoots self*

Uhm, actually it's not, and actually that doesn't even make any sense.
Bitrate IS file size.
Bitrate is defined by kilobits per second. So it MEANS how much space is taken up by each second of audio. So it's physically impossible for one file to take up more space than another file at the same bitrate, unless they're completely different songs with different lengths.
And at 160 or even 128 kbps I defy you to tell the difference between WMA and MP3. Some experts think one sounds better, some think the other sounds better, and in truth it's a matter of the particular sound source and your personal taste to some degree.
But the point is that WMA is no larger or smaller than any other file at the same bitrate. Microsoft marketed WMA as having the same sound quality at 64 kbps that MP3 has at 128 kbps, which would make WMA files half the size of MP3 files at the same quality. Personally I don't think that's true, and I encode everything at 160 kbps WMA which is pretty much CD-transparent on recreational gear. With MP3 I always encoded at 192 kbps. So my MP3 files were bigger than my WMA files. but it's all dependent on what bitrate you make your files at.
Most places that music is available, you'll find it at 128 kbps.

This is not true either. As stated above, normal WMA is a lossy psychoacoustic codec like MP3, which gives very similar results to MP3 at the same bitrates. WMA Lossless is something completely different. With later versions of Windows Media Audio (I think v8 and above but I'm not sure), Microsoft also included a separate codec for lossless compression, suitable for high-end audio archiving with no loss of those frequencies psychoacoustic formats like MP3, AND normal WMA, deem unnecessary. So if you can't hear them, what difference does it make? Well if you're doing studio work which transforms the audio spectrum, sometimes you can shift those holes in audible ways, so in those kinds of applications, using a psychoacoustic lossy format even at 320 kbps is unadvisable. Anyways, it's not much use to the average consumer.

Man, evidently Microsoft's biggest opponent in breaking into the portable audio player market has nothing to do with how good or bad or useful or useless or cheap or expensive their hardware is. It all comes down to consumers who are CONVINCED they know what they're talking about when they don't actually have a clue.