That's our home stereo now!
It was a double funeral: our home stereo and our car radio/cd player.
We knew this was coming. The home stereo was the cheapest thing we could find, and it was some years old. For months it had been laboring with certain CDs, unwilling to admit it just couldn't do it. So it'd spin a while, and spin some more, and then stop. And it wasn't really made to do that anyhow. We used it as a CD player but it was primarily intended to play DVDs.
When our car radio/cd player started giving us trouble, we tried coaxing it along too. That worked for a few months till we discovered that it was heating the CDs it was playing. Then we thought we'd best stop before we melted our precious music into harmonic slag.
What to do?
iPods are apparently all the rage, but they are also very pricey. Even the tiny ones are more than most other MP3 players, though the gap seems to be narrowing. We ended up with this Sony Walkman, the NWZ-S545. 16GB of memory, which can hold probably thousands of cuts. We also got a very simple speaker set - the kind you'd hang off of a computer that needed, well, speakers.
It's been great! It even has a voice recording option, and can play FM radio. We got a skin/cover for it, to protect it, and made sure that the new car stereo we got could handle AUX in, so we could play it there too. The new stereo also has a USB port, which looked good, but was not really helpful. More on that another day.
I should mention that the first Walkman never worked, so we swapped it the next day. The second one has given us no troubles.
You can either connect it to your Mac or PC and treat it sort of like a thumb/flash drive - just copy files onto it as you would any other flash drive. Or you can use Windows Media Player to synch music and pictures and play lists onto it. This has been an appealing option since it also sends along the album art. The art displays on the screen of the walkman which makes picking music more pleasant.
Now we have music at home and in the car and no need to cart around CDs. It's good!
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