MP3 Player Integration

[BrotherNov]

I've always been kind of curious about MP3 players, I've bought a bunch of them for my kids. Now with the advent of 40+ meg hard drive players, I'm getting excited about them for myself.

Maybe ...

Here's the deal - I'm not the kind of guy who will run around with headphones on, so I'm not looking at it for that purpose. What I want to do is completely replace my 10 pound album stuffed with CDs (that get lost, scratched, etc.)

I saw on I-river's website a cassette tape based peripheral that appears to connect the MP3 player to my car's stereo. If I could also connect this thing to my home theatre system, or anyobne else's stereo for that matter, then we're really talking. If I can bring this over to anyone else's house, plug it into their stereo and have a digital interface to 300 cds, then I'm buying it tomorrow. I can junk the mountain of cds and replace it with this cool menue driven black box ? Too cool. Is this really feasible? practical?

[dang]

Yes, it's feasible. Our review (http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review593.html) of iRivers SlimX iMP-550 cd based mp3 player comes with a car kit (tape adapter, cigarette power adapter) which works great. The same accessories should work with their HD based players. (I'm still waiting for them to send me one of them for review.)

They should have a line out which you can connect to a line in, or connect to an rca adapter and plug-in to rca-in on your home theater. down side for home theater use: no remote. You'd have to get up and seek/fastfoward/rewind on the device manually. Not a big deal at parties though.

[Cloud]

You know what would be a good idea is to just buy a huge external hard drive and rip all of your albums to MP3 at like 196kbps (high quality). The name and tag them so you can copy them to your MP3 player when you want to use them. If you copy everything to your MP3 player and store them that way, it would be fine, but might be less reliable than a hard drive.