The tone zone sets out some of the choices you have for carrying music with you on your travels. It also contains help for converting commercial CDs to the mp3 format at the highest quality.

Why take recorded music at all when you travel?
You might be surprised that I'm beginning this survey of "music on the road" with an examination of why it's a good idea to have portable music with you at all. On the other hand, you might be the type who prefers to seek your relaxation in other ways less solitary than clamping headphones over ears and drifting off into your own world. You might get all that you need from local music, going to recitals or concerts, talking to folk you meet along the way. If you're this type, there's nothing here for you. 

This page comes from my belief that using music on trips (and I'm talking of something longer than a week here) can help concretise the experience in ways that sightseeing and meeting locals can't. It's long gone in any other part of memory, but playing King Crimson's "The Sheltering Sky" takes me right back to Northern Sumatra in the wet season. I also miss my music when I'm away from it for any appreciable time - it's not a crutch to lean on when the going gets tough - it helps me to see the music from the perspective of the new surroundings, like I often see my own thinking.

The options - what I looked at and what I didn't.
Many options exist for carrying music with you as you travel. I've left off  DAT (Digital Audio Tape) players and recorders from this overview. I can't see that they offer any real advantage for casual users over a Minidisc or Flash memory mp3 player in either quality or storage capacity. I'll try to keep this listing up to date, but this is an area of rapid change, and next month another device may appear at a lower price and greater capacity than what I studied, so check the manufacturers' Web sites for the latest information (some links on the next page).

What you decide to take depends on how much money you want to spend and how little quality and variety you're prepared to put up with. On trips in many places, the risk of theft or physical damage might be a real concern, so a tape cassette walkman would give you less to worry about. I was able to repair my cassette Walkman in a tent using my Swiss Army knife some time ago. A long trip in somewhere with little other stimulation (through the outback in wet-season Australia, for example) might suggest an extensive music library so you don't get over-exposed to the same pieces. Also, where you are able to reload the music on your player counts. Some machines need you to use an Internet-connected computer with either a USB or Firewire port to move files on to them - consider where you're bound and if such facilities are likely to exist before choosing.

My choice might be right for you...
My own choice (for the moment) is a compact and cheap Flash player (not Apple), with a pair of  head phones (Koss Porta Pro folding) to go with it. My particular player uses SD cards for storage, and I carry a few of them - each 2GB card has songs encoded at between 192kb/s and 320kb/s. The player and cards travel in the headphones case. When I'm bored with the music on it, the SD card can double for use in my camera after it's been formatted, and the player itself was so inexpensive I won't shed many tears if it gets stolen or damaged.

CD/CD mp3 players:
CD players are reasonably priced and fairly rugged, if a little bulky. Many will play not only regular, audio CDs but data CDs recorded with mp3 tracks. The players usually have lengthy electronic shock-protection, so that jolting and jarring on buses and trains doesn't upset them. You'll spend a lot on batteries, though, if you don't/can't take the mains power adaptor with you for use in your hotel (or if you're somewhere without electricity). Consider a solar charger and rechargeable batteries in any case if you are going somewhere reasonably sunny.

Don't use the standard jewel cases to carry your CDs. Put them into thin, lined plastic sleeves (such as the double-sided sleeves made by Case Logic). You can buy these sleeves as replacement liners for the zipped CD carrying cases you see everywhere (you could go the whole way and buy the case with its liners included, but they're quite a bit bulkier to carry and often fiddly to get CDs in and out of). Even twenty CDs packed one atop the other in plastic sleeves use little space, and if you enclose the stack in a stout freezer bag wrapped in spare clothes your music is well protected. Even so, don't take original discs with you - burn copies of them... it costs only a little extra, but avoids heartbreaking potential loss later.

MiniDiscs:
Many travellers like the MiniDisc, and it's easy to see why. A MiniDisc system has plenty of advantages: the players are small and rugged, and if you have a recording model you can record discs as you go along from (for example) a friend's CD player. If you want to make recordings of sounds around you, a pair of lightweight earpieces make reasonable microphones for authentic binaural recording (and nobody will guess you're doing anything other than listening to a Walkman). MiniDiscs are really tiny and you can obtain 80 minute capacity discs. There's fierce debate about the quality of the playback, but I believe the ATRAC Compression that is used is certainly inferior to CDs, and probably inferior to quality mp3. They sound pretty good, though.

Hard-drive players.
Players which have a miniature hard-drive inside them have both advantages and disadvantages when you're travelling. The ruggedness of such players is less than, say, a cassette walkman, so you must be careful not to drop them. Additionally, you are limited to use below 3000m altitude due to the way hard-drives operate (I have heard sorrow stories where users who were unaware of this limitation took their iPod trekking and found it was ruined after drive seizure). Advantages are clear: the capacity is vast and you can record as well as play on the machines. Many players also let you access the hard-drive directly for storing files in other formats - so you can transfer your digital camera files when the memory card is stuffed to overflowing, for example. Newer players have passable colour screens that can playback digital movie files, though I find it curious that anyone would watch a film on a piddly little screen. Some players have a built-in FM tuner.

The original Apple iPod - re-branded in black or silver as the "Classic" - can be used on Windows computers as well as Apple, but there's a downside to it - you are tied to updating its 120GB internal drive on a computer (and that through the iTunes software), so a year in the Amazonian rainforest won't give you much opportunity to change your loaded song list. All iPods now have video playback ability. The iPod Classic's capacity is enormous - 120GB translates into around 30,000 songs (stored in standard mp3 format at 128 kb/s). There is a neat scroll wheel system to find the song title you want, with a backlit display showing what's selected. However, beware of low battery life (the Apple machine has a proprietary, rechargeable battery which will only fit in Apple's charger) and high prices. Other manufacturers are offering devices that are based on the original iPod concept - namely, a hard-drive and decoder with indexing software - and seem to be a little ahead of Apple in the battery life area. Many, however, prefer the iPod for its slimness and finger-friendly design. Confusingly, the iPod Nano player uses Flash memory, so is smaller and has better battery life than the hard-drive iPod player. Read the following section on this page to find out more about Flash memory-based players.


      
Left to right: Apple iPod Classic, iPod Touch, Microsoft Zune


Not the only Apple in the barrel...
The very latest competition to Apple's iPod to emerge is from Microsoft itself. The Zune player has many supporters and features an attractive interface. Prices were recently (2008) shaved by $50. It has WiFi wireless access which allows you to swap tunes with other Zune users, although digital rights management limits you to three plays of the copied tune before you must purchase it. Like the Apple products, the Zune has a hard-drive version and one with Flash memory (see below). Other alternatives to the Apple empire would be the Zen Vision:M from Creative Technology or the iAudio X5 from Cowon Systems.

Flash memory players.
Until a few years ago, Flash memory-based players were either too expensive or offered too little storage space (only 500MB) to be reasonable for taking on a trip longer than a weekend. Players such the iPod Nano changed that. What is attractive about Flash players is that they have no sensitive hard-drive to bottle out on you, so can take a lot more bumps and knocks. The players are also generally slimmer and lighter than the equivalent HD player and their batteries last longer (Apple claims 24-36 hours without video). The newest versions of the iPod Nano will store up to 16GB of music - that's 4000 songs, quite enough for even a long trip. Another flavour of the Nano (in 2008) is known as the "iPod Touch," with the old shuttle dial being replaced by a touch screen (I hate touch screens) and a design which mimics the popular iPhone. Capacities go up to 32GB, but byte-for-byte, you pay more for that touch screen than with the standard Nano.

I dismiss the much smaller iPod Shuffle, though it's cheap at around $70/ Euro55, as too limited at 2GB (500 songs) for anything other than a weekend trip. It's more useful for jogging or making the daily commute to work.

The most expensive component in any of these players is of course the flash memory. Prices of flash memory have come down fast in the last five years, but as demand exceeds supply at the moment (2008) it wouldn't be good to wait some years in the expectation that they will continue to fall - get the player you want now.

The Sandisk Sansa e280 is an iPod Nano-lookalike which also features an FM tuner (you can even record from it, as well as listen to it directly), something that the iPod Nano lacks. It has 8GB of Flash memory for around $150, and you can plug in a microSD card to expand its capacity. This tiny memory card is presently available in up to 2GB capacities, and I see no reason why you couldn't take a library of music on microSD cards, each smaller than a 1 Euro coin. Also, unlike the iPod, its battery is removable, which I think is worthy of consideration when taking it on a longer trip. As well as being able to replace a faulty battery away from the player's service centre, you can double your playback time by carrying a spare battery in areas where access to charging juice may spotty (the Karakoram, for example).



L: Sansa e260, R: Sansa c200
Moving down the Sansa product line, you might find the Sansa c200 attractive. The prices are great ($100/Euro90 for the 2GB version) and it can also be expanded with microSD cards:





Some words about formats and DRM
Few will want load a raw .wav file (straight off a CD) on their portable player: it takes too long to transfer, and the size of each file is enormous. The development of compression formats allowed music to be swapped via the Internet in the early 90's, then later made into a cash cow for big music companies through online music stores. The formats you'll encounter most often are mp3, AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC and Monkey's Audio (APE). There are two essentials to remember when talking formats: lossy/lossless and locked/unlocked content (otherwise known as DRM). Some formats drop part of the audio content during the compression process - that is how an mp3 file is able to be up to ten times smaller than the original file taken off a CD. This is lossy compression. Mp3 and AAC are always lossy formats; WMA can be either lossy or lossless, as can OGG. FLAC and APE are two lossless formats which are becoming increasingly popular. Can anyone hear the difference? With the usual tiny earbuds and a 192kb/s mp3 file, original and lossy may sound nearly the same, but at a lower bit rate and on good speakers you'll hear the difference at once, especially on music where complex quiet pieces are interleaved with louder parts. As always, there must be a trade-off - in this case between quality (file size) and number of songs able to be fitted on the storage media.

Some more on the formats: MP3 is an abbreviation for MPEG Audio Layer 3. MP3 was the first generation digital audio compression format, invented by a team of German engineers who worked on a digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. A bit rate of 128kb/s is common, but for better quality you'll need at least 192kb/s.
AAC is an abbreviation for Advanced Audio Codec. AAC is the second generation audio compression format developed by the MPEG association. AAC delivers the same audio quality as the MP3 format but at the bit rate of 96 Kbps meaning it requires 25 % less storage capacity for the same quality.
WMA: Windows Media Audio, Microsoft’s audio compression format. WMA delivers the same audio quality as MP3 and AAC but requires, respectively, 50 % and 33 % less storage capacity. The WMA’s regular encoding bit rate is 64 Kbps.
FLAC and APE: Free Lossless Audio Codec and Monkey's Audio. Both FLAC and APE achieve compression rates of 30–50%, but this means that the resulting files are larger than a typical mp3 or AAC file (up to five times larger). Because they are lossless formats, no audio date is thrown out during encoding, and the sound is more like the original CD or live performance.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is incorporated into some compression formats such as AAC and WMA, locking the content until you have paid a fee for the track. Simply swapping songs between players will fail. DRM enforcement has gone hand-in-hand with a crackdown on file-sharing sites (see the tone zone page here), with the more popular ones such as Grokster and eMule going over to the pay-per-download model. The protection methods used can either bar any copying to another player, or restrict the copies (or CD burns) to one generation. Some download sites such as Rhapsody levy a monthly charge, with unlimited downloads, but with tracks which will lock and be unplayable if you leave the scheme. All I can say is, when you buy any music on the Internet, read the agreement carefully before you hand over your money. If you'd rather not play the DRM game with WMA files (and the new Windows Vista operating system takes this to absurd lengths) just make a Google search for FairUse4WM.
Read more on DRM and the opposition to it here (or click the picture)





Ditch the earpieces!
My biggest tip for all of these devices is buy your own headphones. If you are at all interested in quality and comfort you won't want to use the earpieces supplied with most of them. Manufacturers save money on the overall cost by including very inferior earpieces most of the time. Quality headphones (with a band over your head, you can find folding models) - from Koss, Sony, Sennheisser and others - can lift the performance of your unit by so much that you will never understand why you didn't change earlier.

Splash out on speakers...
Once you've sampled the sweet sounds and freedom of proper headphones in place of earbuds, you might be thinking of extending your portable player outfit (and shoulders, if you're going to be travelling far with it all) a little more by taking miniature speakers along. As you might have guessed, you won't be getting anywhere near the pounding bass you'll be used to from your living room boxes by plugging a walkman into a plastic case featuring two 5cm cones, but many of them do sound surprisingly good for the size. You will actually hear more bass with good headphones (the Koss Porta Pro are remarkable in this respect, better bass than my Mission monitors), so the freedom element and use at parties are the selling points of miniature speakers. If the bass makes the tiny speakers distort, you'll just have to turn the levels down a bit. The most often recommended is the Altec Lansing InMotion, which is a docking station that will complement the Apple iPod perfectly. It's rather expensive at around $200/Euro180, though. Almost as good, and a third of the price, is the Sony SRS-T77, though it appears to have a higher level of background hiss than the InMotion.



     
L: Altec Lansing InMotion, R: Sony SRS-T77

You're on my mind (like a song on the radio).
Consider taking a radio if you think you'll get bored with the same music you have at home. Radios are generally very tough travel companions and they need no discs or tapes to feed them. With a multi-band radio you can listen to local stations and even learn some of the local language if you have time. In most countries with a Western presence there will be a station or stations playing "popular" music, and the cost of the media is precisely zero! A radio is very useful in today's changeable world - you might learn of weather or political problems from short wave broadcasts before you read of them in the local newspapers.

Happy listening!

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