I love to listen to radio programs from the 1940's, detective and mystery programs particularly.

I've bought them on tape and on audio CD, but just recently I became aware of these shows being available as MP3's.

I just received a bunch of CDs today. In anticipation I bought an Apex 1110 DVD player with MP3 capability yesterday ($38.96 at Wally World) but the MP3 shows don't play worth a damn on the Apex (skips, clicks, whole programs inaccessible).

I've been looking around the net and it seems that MP3 capability is somewhat haphazard - some bit rates play fine, others do not, and it appears to be entirely dependent on the player.

My question is, does anyone know of a player (portable or house bound) that plays MP3s without limitation?

TIA

Charlie

This may or may not be of much help to you, but I've found the same things that you have. Car stereos are the worst as far as that goes. They seem pretty resistant to vibration, but they also seem to be the least likely to play the format you need. It's like Murphy's law - Whatever format you have the most of, that's what the deck doesn't play. Look in the fine print to see what formats it does, some don't even play CDR's.

But as for MP3, lots of low-cost players track them pretty well. Go figure. Run down to the KMart and grab a low-cost RCA player. You might find the DVD/CD/MPG unit for fifty bucks and it tracks 'em pretty well. "Real" CD's sound terrible, but MP3's work well and DVD's are surprisigly good.

And then the last thing I've found is that recordable CD's are sometimes more problem than the recording format. Some CDR's work for me for several plays, but don't last long. Some only last a few plays. I've never found a CDR that lasted as long as a permanently recorded CD. I'm guessing that their lifespan probably has to do with heat and maybe magnetism but whatever the case, they don't last long.

I don't know if that was any help to you or not, but I hope so. Go grab you one of those cheap players and see if that doesn't do the trick for you.

Wayne

Very few MP3 capable CD players like "alternative" bit rates, and fewer like less than 44KHz sampling rates.

iRiver makes MP3 CD players that accept just about anything thrown at them (down to 8 kbps / 8 KHz)

• http://www.iriveramerica.com

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