My new gadget

Frank wanted to get something for me, just because, and he did today. A Rave MP Arc 2.5, it’s a stylish little MP3 player, 2.5 Gig hard drive type … he got it at Costco. The package included a headset, not just the “earbuds” as it’s packaged online and found elsewhere.

It’s made with an Li-ion battery little thing. So that means it’s re-chargeable, like a newer cellphone, for example. It needs to charge for 5 hours at first, then it can be uplugged and play for 10+hours or so straight. Nice thing is, as it’s initial charging is happening, you can connect it to your computer and load it up. That’s great.

It uses mp3’s and wma’s, WindowsMediaPlayer files, in other words, and that’s primarily a good thing IMO, since that’s what I use, WMP10. I like it best of all the “regular” players out there. So I loaded everything I’ve listened to in the last month on my computer, onto the mp3 player, from one of the WMP10 auto-playlists.

I’m not sure how it’ll work, but we’ll see. I am listening to music from it right now. It has great EQ settings and there are many ways to listen to the music, via artist, album, track, genre, etc.

I am very excited to have this mp3 player. I’ve wanted one for quite awhile now, and it’s cool that the time is now. So I can bring my songs to bed, in the van, in the yard, etc.

I use Audioscrobbler too, which is a free online service that aggregates the music you listen to. You have to have a plugin in your media player, and many are available for the various different players out there. So if you install a plugin and sign up on the site, you have a page that the data aggregates on, and weekly parts of it update to show top tracks and top artists for the previous week, and then there are accumulated top artists and top track lists, and total tracks, which are supposed to update more often, depending on many things right now. The service is going through some bumps right now, but I like it the near-month I’ve been using it. The thing I’m not sure about with my new mp3 player is, when I Sync it with my computer, will that send played track info to WPM and will the audioscrobbler plugin read that info and update online …? I’ve read others talking about a process that sounds like that, I’m not sure if it was WMP or another media player. In any case, it seems that it should be so that it’ll work out.

So this kind of mp3 player is different than a regular iPod, for example. It’s tiny and holds only 2.5 Gigs of data. Only. Ha. That’s a lot of music. About 83 hours, or so. iPod’s hold different, depending on which, but a 20 Gig is one iPod model, for example [they make much smaller ones too, but their main lines are large]. There are other types of players, iRiver, and Creative Labs make them as well, plus others yet. Rave is made by GoVideo. They’ve been around, and their player was just the one at Costco that we liked when we looked at them. We also had looked at Fry’s. Frank went alone to get this today, and did go to Fry’s again as well. The deal at Costco was good. This is the one I have, on the manufacturers website. It was $129 at Costco, and came with full-size mini-jack headphones as well as the rest of the usual package.

There are other players that have less hard drive space, some of them have expansion slots, SD cards, etc can hold music. I was looking at that type at Fry’s before. I wasn’t sure about it. So Frank made the decision. I am glad he did. 2.5 Gigs is big enough for now. The internal re-chargeable battery is a big deal nice thing too. So it’s a really cool present to get, something you wanted, but something that you weren’t sure of what brand or model exactly.

Thank you dearie! 🙂