[zirgated]

Here's the situation: I'm a student, about to move to university. I've never been a fan of portable music -- most the time its too noisy to appreciate the music properly -- but I'm thinking it would be quite nice to listen to music on the commute to uni every day. I'm trying to save money, so I don't want to have to buy any more equipment than I have to. I have all my music ripped to an external hard disk. I'd like a portable music player, with excellent sound quality and the ability to play music directly from a computers hard disk (i.e. I don't want to have to transfer music over from my hard disk, to the music player, to play it when its plugged into my computer -- I should be able to do this directly.) I've somehow managed to avoid ever buying a portable music player, so I'm a complete and utter newbie in this area. I've tried Googling for this, but either this feature doesn't exist, or I'm completely lacking the right search terms. Could someone please point me in the right direction for finding such a device or, better yet, recommend me one?
 
Thanks

 

[bikertrash]

never heard of what your asking. How come you don't want to rip? Since you don't want to spend much, Sansa Clip Zip is cheap and can accept up to a 32 gig SD card, if you need more capacity there's a lot out there. The largest capacity is an Ipod Classic.
It would be neat to choose a hard drive and then put an attachment on it to play back any music, but with SD cards being cheap I doubt it will happen. The Ipod Classic is essentially a 160 gig hard drive and if your music is in MP3 then you'd be able to use that.

 

[qusp]

ermm, so you are talking about playing music through the player from an external hd that is plugged into your laptop? just play the files direct from the laptop, if you are going to have it with you, all you really want is an external portable usb or optical dac/amp, the players features that are not covered by the laptop are pure portability,without needing the computer to play the files, without having that need it serves no purpose and you will get better sound from a dedicated dac amp

 

[kmhaynes]

You must be thinking (dreaming) about an bluetooth/wireless/infrared connection from your computer to your player.  AFAIK, there isn't a player that has one.
 
Just get you a Sansa Clip+ and some closed in-ear phones and you can drown out most of that outside noise.

 

[andrewberge]

If what you meant is you want an mp3 player that can also be used as an external soundcard when plugged into your computer, i've never heard of anything that can do that.
If you get something with a large enough capacity, though, you'll be able to fit a good lot of music on it and won't need to use your computer too often.

 

[ukkisavosta]

Such a device actually exists: a Nokia mobile phone with USB OTG. You can upload your favorite songs into the mobile phone itself for commuting, and when at home, just plug the your external HD into the mobile phone's USB port to have all your music available.
 
Also, I just realized that I can plug my N8 into my FiiO E7 DAC using USB OTG, so it essentially doubles as a very high-quality digital music source. Pity that you can only connect one USB device at a time, so you can't use an external HD and the FiiO E7 at the same time.

 

[qusp]

will the n8 work with small battery powered hub with a hd and dac connected? ive seen the n8 mentioned wrt usb otg, but how much storage have you got? does it have a decent playlist manager? i would consider getting it just for audio transport duties if it ticks all the boxes.

 

[qusp]

Quote:

You must be thinking (dreaming) about an bluetooth/wireless/infrared connection from your computer to your player.  AFAIK, there isn't a player that has one.
 
Just get you a Sansa Clip+ and some closed in-ear phones and you can drown out most of that outside noise.

hmm, jailbroken iphone does

 

[ukkisavosta]

Quote:

will the n8 work with small battery powered hub with a hd and dac connected? ive seen the n8 mentioned wrt usb otg, but how much storage have you got? does it have a decent playlist manager? i would consider getting it just for audio transport duties if it ticks all the boxes.

I remember reading that you cannot use hubs (even powered ones) with USB OTG, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work, unfortunately. Not sure about streaming music through the HDMI port. The N8 has 16 GB of internal memory and a microSD slot for storage.
 
The built-in music player has a pretty decent music library with a playlist manager plus sorting by artist and album, genre and song. It doesn't support FLAC, however, so you'd need to install another app for that.

 

[ukkisavosta]

Just to expand on this subject, you can listen to FLAC files with a Nokia (or any other Symbian) phone using a free app called FolderPlay, for instance.
 
Furthermore, it is possible to map a network drive from the phone using SymNC, so you can access all your music wirelessly.