Post #54951 by aquarj on Mon, Oct 13, 2003 2:44 PM

Here is a gadget I've been eyeballing for a while, that sounds like a cool solution for the task of digitizing LPs.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/archosmultimedia.html

The idea is that it's a portable MP3 player and recorder, about the size of a cassette tape, but with a 20 Gb hard drive. So, it doesn't matter if your computer is anywhere near your turntable, and you don't have to burn cds. The player itself has line outs, so you can play it through any stereo. Ugh, I sound like a sales pitch. Anyway, the problem with the Ipod and lots of the other "jukebox" players is that they don't have any line-in or recording capability.

I think Creative Labs has something similar - most of theirs don't record but a couple models can. And Philips and Samsung and some other brands are coming out with their own ones soon. Dunno anything about the quality of these things, but probably hi-fi mp3 encoding is good enough for most people.

Looks like these things cost about $250 and up, and the next big deal is to include video recording and playback capabilities too. If you don't need the big hard drive, I think there are a few cheaper super-mini flash based players with 128 or 256 Mb that have analog line-ins and USB jacks for moving files to/from a computer. That could be plenty of space if all you wanna do is record an LP and then dump it onto a hard drive on a computer, without necessarily having some device that holds your whole collection of mp3s at once.

I was thinking of getting one of these doohickeys, but decided to wait til next year when more come out.

-Randy