Mac Daniel's Advice

MP3 and the Mac, Part 2

Korin Hasegawa-John - 2002.05.16

This is the second part of a two-part series on MP3 and the Mac. If you haven't read the first part, you should.

MP3 players come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like Samsung's Mini Yepp and Digital Global Network's MPIO-DMK aim to be as small and portable as possible. Others, such as the Creative Nomad IIc and the Sonicblue Rio 800 are designed to be expandable with a small size. There are also large beefy MP3 players that have large, beefy hard drives at their hearts. The range is amazing.

Some quick advice about MP3 players: If you want to carry a lot of music and you have a fast Mac with FireWire, the iPod is tough to beat. The auto-sync feature with iTunes works really well, and the FireWire interface is lightening fast. It's also a lot smaller than most other hard drive-based MP3 players - and you can play Breakout on it.

Of course, there are other choices, and lots of them are cheaper, albeit with less memory and not with that special made-by-Apple cool factor. For a small MP3 player, Samsung's Mini Yepp is hard to beat. It's a little bigger than a watch and weighs about an ounce. It also is cheap, but the downside is that it only has 32, 64, or 128 MB of memory. (64 MB is enough for about 16-20 songs at my encoding settings: VBR, min 64 kbps, max 256 kbps.)

A slightly bulkier choice (palm-sized, as in your hand, not 3Com) is the Nomad IIc from Creative. It's about the same price as the Mini Yepp ($130 for a 64 MB version) and there's a 128 MB version for $40 more. It can be expanded by SmartMedia cards up to 128 MB in size, giving you 256 MB or about 64-80 songs at my settings.

Most MP3 players on the market work well with Macs. Of course, the MP3 player that works the best with Macs is the iPod, but that goes without saying.

Many of these MP3 players use iTunes to control them, including the Nomad, which works really well. When you connect the player (all the above except the iPod use USB) it will show up as a device in the left-hand column of the iTunes window. Nice. If you select the MP3 player and then go to the "Advanced" menu, there should be an option to "View Device Playlists." Select this. Now you can create playlists from iTunes on your MP3 player. (Not all MP3 players support playlists, but most of them do.) Then drag music from the library to the playlist you want on your MP3 player, and it will copy the music over.

Samsung's Mini Yepp uses a special piece of software, Yepp Explorer, to load MP3s onto your Yepp. This supposedly works like a piece of cake, but I'd still prefer the familiar face of iTunes, which won't work with the Yepp as far as I know.

There are also many older MP3 players in the hand of consumers, such as the venerable Rio 500 (a classic, great MP3 player). They should work with iTunes or any third-party software that they shipped with, although this third-party software may not work under OS X or Classic.

Another standard type of player is the MP3/CD player. This allows you to play MP3 CDs (not the sort of CDs mentioned before). They are custom CDs with songs in the MP3 format. You can fit up to 140 songs on a CD, which is significantly better than a standard CDs 20. If you use one of these players, such as the RioVolt, download iTunes 2 immediately (if you don't already have it). This allows you to burn CDs in the MP3 CD format from playlists, making your life much easier. Burning from playlists in iTunes was discussed in the last article.

Hopefully these articles give you an idea what to do with iTunes and showed how MP3s can be useful. Now go out, ditch the Discman, buy an MP3 player and a 50 pack of blank CDs, and rip your whole CD collection to MP3. Then rock the house, the car, the basement, and the neighbor's dog with your custom CDs. Throw some tunes on your MP3 player and go on a jog (or just sit around the house - whatever floats your boat).

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