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I have been wanting a small MP3 player for a while now and not wanting to jump on the iPod/iTunes etc bandwagon, I had a variety of MP3 players to choose from.

When it comes to music and device build quality, I have my preferences of manufacturer and managed to bring my choices down to either Sony or Creative.

The final decision was size of unit and size of storage.
As I didn’t really require a large full colour display, a small featured MP3 player was what I ended up looking for.
My required storage for on the move music listening is around 512MB but I chose to go for 1GB models so I can happily put all my MP3’s on random play.

The following 2 MP3 models described below are at current time of writing similar in specifications and at a price of around the £50 mark.

SONY NW-E003F 1GB

The Sony NW-E003F looks a very nice player and includes a FM radio, Direct USB plug and approximately 30 hours playtime on a rechargeable battery.

• Width (mm) : 24.6
• Height (mm) : 79.0
• Depth (mm) : 13.6

For extra cost, the Sony NW-S703F is a fraction larger but features high quality Noise cancelling earphones and a 3 lines colour OLED screen to view CD album jackets.

Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB

I have only ever owned PC soundcards made by Creative and trust them for their high reliability, compatibility and build quality.

The Creative Zen Nano Plus is small and yet packed with features with up to 18 hours playtime from a standard AAA battery.

The ZEN Nano Plus comes complete with an FM tuner, Voice recording and line-in encoding for direct connection and recording from any audio source. Directly record your music from a CD player - no computers needed!

• Width (mm) : 33.5
• Height (mm) : 65.5
• Depth (mm) : 13.0

Conclusion

The Nano Plus was at a lower price than the equivilant Sony model, just that little bit smaller and with more features. Even though the playtime is less (I use high quality rechargable batteries anyway) this was the MP3 player I chose.

Line-in recording is achieved via a cable (supplied) just plug in the jack to an audio source and record, you can even change the bitrate to 96/128/160 kbps and also set it to detect silences to directly record an album and split into tracks.

As with practically every MP3 player on the market, it comes with Windows software and drivers (tested by my friend, Steve P) which work with no problems.

Linux also has software to use with MP3 players, most notably Gnomad 2, a GTK+ music manager and swiss army knife for the Creative Labs NOMAD and Zen range - which I haven’t yet got working on my computer.

The alternative method for managing MP3’s on the Zen Nano Plus, is just to use it as a USB storage device.
As long as your Linux kernel, Linux modules and your Linux distribution supports hotplugging, then simply mount it to an available directory.

mkdir -p /mnt/mp3player
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/mp3player
Please note that the best way to allow certain user access to the device is with the use of other mount options not discussed here.

You can then copy whatever you like to and from the device (even use it as storage for any other files/directories you choose - dont worry, the MP3 player will not attempt to play a tarball etc).

One final note, the MP3 player firmware can be updated with a Windows exe - my Nano Plus has its original firmware and allows me to (if I wanted to) record directly from the built in FM tuner straight to MP3 - updating the firmware removes this option.