iRiver SlimX Music Player Review

As elegant as portable music players come, iRiver's SlimX 350 ($150 US) is all that its cracked up to be - and more!

With superb anti-skip protection and a super-slim, light-weight body, this disc player is ready to corner the market. Our favorite feature is the SlimX's ability to play both regular CDs and burned MP3 CDs. The big advantage here is that you can fit about 10 full albums worth of CD quality music into just one MP3 CD. Yes, you heard right. It's easy!

Let me explain the difference between MP3s and the files you find on store bought CDs. On a CD that plays in most CD players you will find roughly 15 songs. These songs are in a file type called AIFF. This is not compressed and just one of these files takes up about 40 MB on a CD. (CDs usually have a 700 MB capacity.)

An MP3 is a compressed file and therefore can only play on certain machines (like the SlimX or your computer.) The sound quality is not noticibly different - but the MP3 file version of the 40MB song would only be about 4 MB! Therefore, you can pack 10 times the amount of songs onto a CD if they are in MP3 format rather than regular audio AIFF. You just have to have the right device to play it on - like iRiver's SlimX.

How do you convert your favourite songs into MP3s? Simple. Just download one of the many computer audio programs (like WinAmp or iTunes) to convert music files from AIFF (regular audio CD format) to MP3 (compressed format.)

Once you've burned your MP3 CD all that's left to do is grab the SlimX and pop it in. The SlimX comes with a handy remote control that plugs in and tells you the name and artist of the track (if that's what you named it on the CD.) When you burn your MP3 CD you can also put songs into different folders for different albums or genres of music and the device will let you browse the folders. This feature makes it much easier to organize (and find) your music on the CD. And if you somehow get tired of listening to your burned music you can just switch the mode and listen to the built-in FM tuner (with presets!)

We took the unit to Paris and back and the battery didn't give out until the way back - at which point we just plugged in the alternative battery that comes with the unit. To top it all off, the unit and the alternate battery pack both fit easily into a fairly small purse and added almost no weight.

Now there's really no excuse not to feel the groove all day long.

For more information on the iRiver SlimX music player, visit www.iRiver.com

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