Audio players that aren't the iPod: January 2010 Archives

The $20 Centon Craze 4 GB "MP3 player" I picked up a month or so ago is billed as only playing MP3 and WMA files. Well, I neither have any WMAs nor want to have them, but I decided to test which other audio formats, freedom-loving and otherwise, this cheap little device can handle.

Here are my results:

Ogg: The Centon Craze plays Oggs with no problem. The Centon company would probably sell quite a few more of these if they let the freedom-loving world know.

FLAC: I got some "sample" FLAC files, both 16- and 24-bit, from the excellent Pristine Classical Web site. I dropped them into the Centon, but they didn't show up in the player. Hence the Centon does not support FLAC.

WAV: The Centon Craze does play WAV files. WAV is the format that audio comes in on standard CDs. Curiously, you can't "see" the WAV files on your Centon Craze in the "usual" view, by which I mean the "MSC" or Music view.

But you can see them through the "RPL" or Replay view. Just press and hold down the "M" button on the player until you get the main menu, then arrow over to the "RPL" icon and press the "M" button again. Then you'll be in your file tree, and WAVs will both show up in that tree and play if you "M" on them.

I did say this player's user interface is awful. It's no iPod. But it does allow for direct drag/drop onto the player's flash memory, and it requires no specialized application to do so. And you can drag/drop files from any computer you wish. You can also go the other way, drag/dropping files from the player onto any number of PCs — anything that'll mount a USB flash drive, in fact.

Use any computer with any OS, play MP3, Ogg and WAV, cost only $20? Beautiful.

I'm in.

Now I'm not saying I won't seek out a better player, possibly a SanDisk Sansa Clip or Fuze that will play FLAC files.

But for now getting Ogg and WAV in addition to MP3 is a huge bonus I didn't expect for my $20.

Update: I'm getting better at navigating through the arcane interface on the Centon Craze. Here are a few tips:

• There is a difference between when you are playing an audio file and not. To go from the folder you're in to another folder on your player, press the Play/Pause button to stop the audio, then click the "M" button and use that and the Rewind and Forward buttons to navigate among the folders and files. This is important: When you want to play a new audio file, DON'T CLICK PLAY. If you do that, the player will play the last audio file you were listening to. Instead use the Rewiind and Forward keys to select the file you want, then use the "M" key to play it. Unituitive? You bet.
• At any time, press and hold down the M key to get to the main menu in the player.
• Remember when I said that MP3s show up in the MSC area, as accessed from the main menu, and WAVs show up in the RPL area? Well, folders with Ogg files also show up in the RPL area, but their files do not. However, both folders and their Ogg files show up and play in the MSC area of the player. However, for some reason the Oggs both display and play out of order. I can't figure this out. From what I can gather, MP3s do not have this problem. Not a deal-breaker, but an oddity nonetheless.

Some people think the iPod and iTunes are podcasting and portable, digital music.

Others chafe at the restrictions placed upon the user by Apple.

Count me among the latter.

I do have an iPod. It cost some $300 about seven years go. I don't know if I ever wrote my post about how I used to use it as a backup drive, barely as a music/podcast player, until I removed its protective rubber cover, let it get suitably scratched and then used the hell out of it for a subsequent year.

But ... I couldn't load it with files from any of my computers. No, it was and still can only be updated from the iBook G4 on which we run iTunes. I can't drop a music file or podcast onto it from my iTunes installation on my Windows PC, from which I manage the iTunes portion of the Daily News' growing number of podcasts.

I can't manage the iPod in Linux. Aside from the iTunes way of attempting to force users to use one computer and one computer only to manage any given iPod (and my situation is even more complicated due to my iPod being initialized on a Mac and having the HFS+ filesystem, as opposed to the more-easily dealt-with FAT filesystem on Windows-initialized iPods), I just want to use my device the way I want, on the OSes I want, and with the files delivered the way I want.

So I bought a $20 player — the 4 GB Centron Craze MP3 Player — that, to be frank, sounds great but has a shit user interface.

But it only cost $20, has a small but useful LCD screen and allows me to drag/drop files of any sort onto it from any PC and OS that reads FAT filesystems (and that's EVERY OS out there, pretty much).

Right now I'm pretty much only using it for podcasts, and I've followed the lead of Fab and Dan of Linux Outlaws in using gPodder.

GPodder is fast, cross-platform (Linux, FreeBSD, even Windows), supports both iPods and "regular" MP3 players, and provides a most excellent way to "catch," listen to and load up podcasts on your favorite audio device.

The way I have it set up in Debian Lenny, with the now-ancient version 0.12.1 (Debian Sid has version 2.1), it can download a dozen podcasts simultaneously and automatically drops them on my cheap MP3 player.

While I bought the Centon player (navigation is horrible; did I mention that?) on impulse, there are better MP3 players that aren't the iPod, don't sell for iPod prices, and unlike the iPod and my Centon play the Ogg and FLAC open/free file formats.

Among these are the Sansa Clip, which I've heard of but never heard. I'll be on the lookout for one of these, and I'm more than a little eager to start ripping CDs to the lossless FLAC format. I even have the Ogg codec installed on my Windows PC, and I use the Windows Media Player to listen to Ogg-encoded music.

I guess that means my geek credentials are pretty much being revoked, using WMP to listen to Ogg ... but I don't put a lot of stock into said credentials, and I'm OK with them being pulled by the rest of the geek theocracy.

Before that happens, I encourage all of you to give gPodder a try.