In the next six months, I'll be going overseas to a place with little electrical access and scarce internet connections. I want to bring all of my music with me, which runs over a thousand albums. If you can comment on this dilemma, any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to keep the budget under $500.

Here are the options I've seen so far:

Portable DVD Player: This would allow me to cram 128kbps MP3 versions of the albums onto a small stack of Dual-Layer DVD's - no limit on space. This should be the sure-fire answer, but the technology does not seem to be where I need it. Most players have criminally low battery-lifespans, and I would guess still require me to keep the "screen" open and on, draining the battery even more. I haven't even seen a model that listed how long the charge lasted on music playback. The only one that seems to come even close is this one, and even that looks a bit shady to stand on.

Hard-Drive Based Unit: This would also be a wonderful answer, but I have not seen a product that went much over 80GB or so. I'm estimating that I'll need 150GB+, and that means that I'm shooting for either 200GB or something with 'no-ceiling'. One friend suggested buying two Ipod-Photos (or the Iriver equivalent), and while that sounds nice, the money cost is way above the other two options here. A hard-drive unit that supported some kind of memory sticks would work, too, but I don't see much for memory attachments besides 1GB USB's - and it's not worth carrying a backpack full of them.

MP3 CD Player: This is the weakest option, but also the cheapest and the most feasible. A bunch of AA-batteries, and these things tend to go for over an amazing 50hrs+ per charge. It will require me to carry a giant book of CDR's wherever I go, though. I don't want to do this, but I will if I have to.


I've been furiously googling and scouring this forum for solutions the last few weeks. I'm sure there's some stuff I've missed or mis-read, so any comments you have would be carefully considered. Thanks to all who reply, this forum has been a massive help.

Do you really need that music for six months. You can only carry serveral weeks of music with 150GB+ of music (assuming it's stored lossy), so it's not like your not going to repeat music. If you can get access to a computer on a regular basis (which I guess is unlikley), a portable hard drive is the obvious answer, combined with a portable player. Otherwise, you'll have to bite the bullet and buy the largest portable you can find.

Get a 60GB iPod

Really, how much music do you need?

(And I do have 500+ CDs, but I have a 20GB Rio Karma and I am happy)

Get one of those, and maybe a stack of DVDs with extra music. I think you will be able to find a computer to load them on the iPod if you get bored of 800 albums (which is roughly what you would fit on an iPod, I think you could cram a some more with 128k AAC)

The largest 2.5" laptop drive out there is only 160GB (and has yet to make it to the market), so you can forget ~150GB in such a thing as a DAP for the near future.

I've got no idea if they exist, but a possible solution would be a player that takes input not from it's own drive, but lets you hook any USB mass storage device into it. This would allow you to use any external harddrive.
I do recall an mp3 player / usb key combination from creative iirc where you'd plug the key into a separate playback part, but i've got no idea if it'll accept generic USB mass storage devices. And you'd still need a way to power the external harddrive which will be spinning all the time, it's not going to be efficient.

Maybe you could get the old Creative DAP (jukebox 3 or something) with a 80GB HDD (upgrade). Encode in ~128kbps LAME and you'll fit 1250 CDs (average 60 minutes).

1250 * 60 * 60 * 128 / 8 / 1024 / 1024 = 68.7 GB

On battery life, consider an external battery pack wtih something like NiMH D cells.
When you get access to power mains you can charge the pack with out maybe having to leave your player unattended at the outlet.

edit: WIth the right charger/cell combination, NiMH's can be charged up in as little as 15 minutes. My current player (nice as it is) with built in Lithium bat takes 8 hours.

YOu don't say where you are going, but that may also give you the option swapping in alkalines if the rechargables are flat.

If you will have more access to 12 volts, make sure your carger can run off that as well.


On storage, you could just bite the bullet and code the songs at a lower rate in Vorbis Q=0 or AAC depending on which player you end up with.

Get A Nueros and buy an extra 80gb backpack, or buy the 160gb 2.5" drive when it comes out and throw it in your Nueros. There is a post on their forum about how to do this.

DC

80GB iPod photo's are rumored in a few weeks time. It could easily hold a thousand albums, especially if you use 128kbps.

I've searched their forum and been unable to find this thread. If you have a link to it, it would be much appreciated.

By "extra" backpack, do you mean that a Neuros can add several extra backpack drives (ie, 80gb + 80gb + 80gb = 240gb Neuros)?

There's this kit you can kit you can buy on the internet that allows you to make your own MP3 player and use normal IDE hard drives in it, so maybe look to that? here is the site if you're interested.

Thank you, 'HisInfernalMajesty'. Wow, this would be an incredible answer, being able to just go get a huge 300+Gb drive and make it portable. Excellent link; thank you.

However, the work at these pages is mostly dated around 2001, and there are some related drawbacks that I found:
Which - I think - a 60gb Neuros can beat size-wise when it has a 80gb 'backpack' attached (I'm still looking into that). Either way, 128 gigs is not too far off from the corporate 80gb Ipods/Irivers around the corner.When going for huge portability, that slow startup is a problem. I was initially concerned when I saw that none of them had made a player over 50gb, and this is probably one reason.Browsing the file-structure of a thousand albums, then, would take quite a while. This is probably the other reason none of them had huge hard-drives.


So a size-cap, slow-startup, and difficult file-browsing make this not feasible. Overall, though, thank you for the link. It's a very intriguing idea. It would be golden to come upon a community of people doing this currently, with current technology/hardware. I know nothing about using computers to that degree of hands-on, but for a minute there I was ready to learn.

There's Mp3 "Discmans" that can accept DVD media (single layer only).

Edit: There's one such Sony model reviewed here. Battery life is 10 hours MP3 playback.

I've been looking at that kit for awhile, actually, and even with it's drawbacks, there would be some good uses for it.. Custom case, custom everything really... Maybe one can find a hacked firmware out there that fixes some of these problems?

DigitalMind - DMC Xclef 500

* 100 GB (up to 137 GB, when available)
* 20 of hours of play on a single charge
* voice recorder with built-in mic, and a 1/8" line-in jack
* USB 2.0
* 10 mW/channel of clean RMS power
* both PC and Mac compatible
* Ogg Vorbis support
* MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV and Ogg Vorbis Music
* direct MP3 Encoding
* FM playback & RECORDING
* appears as another hard drive when connected to your PC
* multi-lines (7 lines) graphic LCD with EL back light
* firmware upgrade ability

http://www.digmind.com/store/index_500.html

Where will you be charging this theoretical monster-DAP?

Looking at the solution suggested by HisInfernalMajesty, I got an idea.

If you're feeling frisky, you could buy a hdd-based DAP (iPod, Creative Zen, iRiver, whatever), disassemble it, and try to see if you could connect a 3.5" drive to it using a IDE-cable kit of some sort (I know these are commercially available somewhere).
This way, you could build a custom case for your DAP, which would use the features of a full-featured HDD-DAP, and the power of a huge harddisk.

I'm imagining something like a tree-case with an extra large battery pack, and a special slot for the HDD, so you can switch between several HDD's.

One potential problem with this solution would be any limitations imposed by the DAP's firmware. For example, the Creative players have a track limit, which is somehow based on the verbosity of the MP3 tags. The only way to find the limit would be to load tracks until the player chokes, but I would guess that it would be far short of the 150GB limit.

Well, in that case I'd recommend the iPod for modifying, as it has Open-Source alternatives for the firmware.

Option C has worked well for me in the past. A rechargeable player or a DVD player are not suitable for remote areas without electric supply. AA batteries can be easily carried. A 200 CD folder is actually not that large. It will also serve as a decent back up for possible future HD problems. The thinking necessary in choosing the disc to insert can actually be healthy in places where silence may be best