Re: mp3 use - laptop purchase
> Remember on a laptop quality is often sacrificed for space
> (except for IBM thinkpads, however they are usually quite big)
> and so the sound although claiming to be 16bit may in real use
> be quite cruddy.
That's right. I have yet to see a laptop that didn't transmit some
hard disk chatter through the sound system, even with the mic
turned all the way down.
Of course, fidelity is never as important as the coolness factor
where mp3's are concerned... :-)
The older OSS soundblaster driver works really well... my
HP-800 gets used *a lot* for an mp3 player. It has perfect
power management, too, unlike many laptops... with the HP,
you can close the lid without putting the machine to sleep.
So you can ride around on your bike listening to mp3s
through the headphones if you like. Also the HP800 is one of
the smallest laptops ever made, yet it has a full-sized key-
board. Well, everyone knows what a great Linux machine it is
because the Laptop HOWTO maintainer uses one. The only
big downside is they cost $700 on e-bay. That, and the
HP buffers half as many Ks of music as most sound
cards... so it hits the disk a lot and if your laptop is going
through its daily cron tasks (as is likely if you run anachron
and have just awoken it after some days of inactivity) you
are going to get skippage even if you nice the mp3 player to
negative 19. Which you should do if you are DJ'ing, btw.
The other thing is that the 2.2 kernels don't let you pass the
buffer size so you have to do this in conf.modules or somewhere.
I haven't tried ripping on the HP-800's external CD-ROM, but
I'll bet it works well as it's a SCSI drive. No, wait, it's SCSI
emulation that works well. And any CD-ROM drive that is
really a DVD drive will be much, much faster, maybe due to
larger buffers or something? But you probably have a desktop
with DVD for ripping, right? Hopefully you use CDParanoia as
those Xing-based speed rippers make really terrible mp3s.
Newer IBM Thinkpads (I have a 570, but the 600 is the same)
have crappy sound support that simply goes away after a
sleep or hibernate event... the ALSA drivers are far from
finished, alas.
My 2¢
Henry.mp3
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