MP3 Players: A Family Affair
I never thought I would use this column to write about a portable MP3 player or any other music player that's designed primarily to be used with headphones. Although I have nothing against such devices, I don't think of them as family technology. They're really the ultimate form of personal technology, designed to be used by one person at a time.
My wife considers headphones a form of social isolationism and refuses to let our kids wear them in the car. If they want to listen to music, they have to share it with the rest of us.
As an avid cyclist who sometimes rides on shared bike/pedestrian/skater paths, I get annoyed when I have to shout at someone to tell them I want to pass because their music is drowning out the world around them, including my approaching bicycle or my proclamation of "Passing on your left!"
My lack of enthusiasm for such devices is one of the reasons that it took me so long to check out any of the portable MP3 players like the Apple iPod, Archos Jukebox or Nomad Jukebox. But, after using an iPod for a couple of weeks, I'm now convinced the category has legs. Like my colleague Mike Langberg who reviewed the iPod last week, I too am "impressed," but for different reasons.
Mike focused on the iPod as a personal entertainment system but, after connecting it to the cassette deck of our family minivan as well as to our home stereo system, I'm convinced that this general category of devices -- players that store music on hard disks -- is also the ultimate family listening device. In fact, it has the potential of bringing tranquility to our family car trips and a lot less clutter around the stereo system in our family living room.
On car trips, we have a policy of rotating music. Each of us has different tastes. My son Will loves jazz, our daughter Katherine likes techno and oldies and my wife Patti tends to favor folk music. When I'm in the car, I like listening to jazz, oldies or talk radio. We all like listening to audio books on long trips. To satisfy all those tastes and provide some variety, we take along a pretty big stack of CDs whenever we go for a long car trip. Now it's possible to store everyone's favorite music on a single device about the size of pack of cards.
With all this music on one device, it's easy to please every member of the family. In addition to letting each person select their favorite album, we've also used the playlist function on our PC media software to create our own mixes such as "Will's Favorite Tunes" or "music that no one in the family despises." You can even use some of these devices to listen to audio books, newspapers and magazines that you can purchase and download from Audible.com (www.audible.com).
In the best of all worlds, our car stereo would have an audio-in jack or a wireless Bluetooth connection that would make it easy to connect an external sound source. Better yet, it would be nice to have a car audio system with its own internal hard drive and MP3 player but, despite some promising new auto entertainment products, most us don't yet live in that world.
Just about all car stereos, however, do have a cassette player and Sony, Jensen and several other companies make devices that allow you to play portable MP3 players, CD players and other devices through the tape deck. I picked up a Jensen cassette adapter at a local electronics store for about $15. The device has a little cord that sticks out, which looks a bit unsightly, but it's a small price to pay for domestic bliss.
The iPod is also very much at home in our family room thanks to a simple RCA mini-plug patch cord that allows us to connect it to our home stereo. The fidelity of the compressed MP3 files isn't quite as good as playing a CD, but it's very close. Now that we're using it, Patti no longer complains about CDs being left all over the living room, or worse, put back in the wrong cases. I don't worry about our CDs being scratched or damaged by spilled soft drinks, our over-active pets or any other household hazards.
Mostly, however, it makes it much easier for each person in the family to find the music he or she likes.
We don't have little kids, but if we did I could imagine using such a device to create playlists for them. I'd probably include repetition of the songs they loved the most. A lot of little kids actually like hearing the same music over and over again.
Another alternative -- which is actually a lot cheaper -- is to use your PC or Mac to burn audio MP3 discs. Many DVD players can now play MP3 CDs, as can inexpensive portable CD players that you can purchase for under $50. You can store up to 10 hours of music on a single CD, making it easy to create music collections for individual family members or the entire family. Some newer car stereos play MP3 CDs or you can use a cassette adapter to hook a portable MP3/CD player to your car stereo.
There are also a couple of home systems that, though a bit pricey, may be a glimpse of what the rest of us have to look forward to. SonicBlue's $1,499 RioCentral automatically ``rips'' music from its built-in CD player to an internal 40-gigabyte hard disc for later playback. It also lets you burn your own music CDs and share music with SonicBlue's Rio line of portable devices. Sony's $999 CMT-L7HD Micro System is a sleek-looking stand-alone audio player that comes with a 10-gigabyte hard drive that Sony markets as a "Virtual 300 CD Jukebox."
The only thing that worries me about this technology is the possibility that record companies might start putting copy protection on CDs. In their effort to thwart piracy, the record companies are experimenting with various types of copy protection and ``digital rights management.''