[KLUG Hardware] Re: Portable MP3 Player

[Adam Williams]

About a month ago I asked on this list about portable MP3 players that
worked with Linux.  This is certainly a confusing and bizarre category
of devices.  I've optimistically assumed that no one answered because
(a) no one own such a device and/or (b) no one listens to music. :)

Well;  I scrounged around on uselessnet for a while finding lots of "I
have this device and it doesn't work can anyone help me" posts, the vast
majority of which had zero responses.  The responses that did exist fell
either into the idiot-why-didnt-you-check-hardware-support-
before-you-bought-it category, or the oh!-that-device-uses-the-xena-
warrior-princess-10glx-chipset-isnt-that-useful-to-know category.

I found a web site that listed several MP3 players with various support
for Linux,  all out of production my the way....

I found **1**, yes that is **1** post that was less than 90 days old
saying "Hey, this MP3 player works great".  And after about two hours of
searching.  Of course no URL, nothing, just called it "diva player".

So I went back to google and found - http://www.mydivaplayer.com/

The specs look promising, so I ordered a MP3128W.  

First off, I paid for for two day shipping so it would make my wifes
birthday,  and it took them three days to ship it.  Wow!  Go technology
and automation.

So it finally shows up.  I toss the stupid CD with a bunch of gunky
Win32 software on it, and plug the USB cable it.  Beep!  Another SCSI
drive appears on the system.  A little twiddling in /etc/fstab and I can
right-click mount and unmount it,  and copy MP3 files (or any file) to
the device via Nautilus.

The sound quality is really good, the top volume is deafening, there is
multiple equalizer settings, etc...  all running off a single AA
battery.

While the device has 128Mb of RAM, it also has flash card slot for
adding more RAM, and can be used as a flash card reader.

On top of that is also has a record mode where it has a voice activated
mic that records into WAV files.

The buttons on the front are pretty intuitive and can be locked so you
can't accidentally bump them.

All in all a nice little device.  I recommend this to anyone looking for
a MP3 player that is happy sitting next to a Linux box.