My car was broken into recently and I mourned for my CD player which was (apart from the audio CDs ) the only thing taken. Apart from the cost to me of getting the window replaced and the subsequent wrench of losing some of my favourite music, my enjoyment in the car has been rather confined due to the lack of the player.

With this in mind  the other day, I decided to get a CD player  to get better sound quality back into the car. I decided to get a portable and simply plug into the radio/cassette via an adaptor.

There are literally hundreds of CD Walkman type players on the market, so I set off to get one. I wanted to simply walk into an Electrical Retailer, buy the unit and escape. Shows how wrong I can be!

I had already bought my son a Cd Walkman last year with mp3 capability and had already decided that this was the way I wanted to go as well. My son's unit performs flawlessly and has never let him down. It was bought via an Internet site, but I wanted one right away. Simple,eh?

I started my journey in Dixons. The assistant was only too keen to sell me an MP3 player. He proudly started to show me the collection ..and was none too chuffed when I pointed out that I did not want either a Mini disk player/recorder or a solid state mp3 player. I explained that I wanted a CD player with MP3 capability.

He looked blank at this ..you know it plays MP3s as well as normal audio disks, I started helpfully. He mumbled that he didn't have any and didn't sound all that apologetic. Starting back into how good solid state MP3 players were, I cut him off and left.

Ah well, what about Comet?

In the Comet showroom they had a stack of players of every conceivable colour and shape. Looks hopeful!!

The assistant nodded sagely while I explained my wants. We had one of those , he stated. He searched and eventually went to his storeroom to retrieve a Phillips unit.

It looked a fairly good unit. £150 for it, he proclaimed, it's the last one we have.

It didn't display tracknames via id tags or anything. I pointed out that I had bought a better one the year previous for less than the one he was holding.

I left feeling more than slightly disappointed.

Only one place left where I was searching .Currys!!

Well, that lasted as long as it took a clone salesman  to explain how I was better to buy a solid state unit. Yeah, a blank Cd costs me 13p apprx. to store 700mb of mp3s.

How much would it take to do the same for his solid state player??? I didn't get to find out since his mouth promptly grimaced and he sort of lost interest.

I moped my way back up the High Street, so much for high technology in shops in Britain, it seemed I was going to have to order off the Internet.

As much in hope , I wandered into Index. Yup, a catalogue shop where everything would be vastly overpriced and have as limited a range as the other retailers. I perused their catalogue and was absolutely gob smacked to find more than one CD player with Mp3 capability. Not only that but the one I decided on was less than £90 !!!!

I bought it , of course, which is why I'm writing this.

So, after that short intro, here's some of the facts ..not even reasonably presented

I bought a Goodmans unit.

A CDMP 370 to be precise.

As you can see from the picture, the unit doesn't look particularly different from any other CD player. 

The packaging it comes in isn't very inspiring, a clear vinyl cover with a piece of flimsy cardboard with very few details on it. The packaging also holds the AC adaptor, audio patch cord, and headphones. I should add that there is a small booklet bundled with it as well , which explains all the functions. Their reason for this is to be as environmentally friendly as possible.looked rather shoddy to me, but if it helps reduce the cost to the environment, I suppose its worth it.

Getting it working is simply a matter of putting in batteries (not included).

The unit plays well, as you'd expect from a unit that has 45second electronic shock protection (120 seconds in mp3 mode)

Lemme see, what else does it have?

Well, there's a button for dynamic bass boost!! And there's also a line out socket as well as an input for the charger supplied with it. One of the first things I did was fit it with rechargeable batteries . although the chances of me wandering around with it are slim ,to say the least. The batteries are reputed to last 6 hours, but as in everything in advertising, I suspect that this is with the volume set to low , no anti shock enabled (you can disable it in audio CD playing) and the latest in high energy alkaline batteries. I have played this unit at my work by linking it to a ghetto blaster and it did last for the two hours I tried it out, not exactly bad when you consider how much a rechargeable holds compared with a normal battery.

Onto the unit itself. As you saw from the picture of the unit, it has various buttons laid out on the lid . With these buttons you can search for a particular track/directory on the mp3 Cd, enable/disable the esp. or simply forward, stop, play the CD etc. The unit is programmable (24 tracks), but I normally just switch to random mode and let it go.

The display shows the album title , track name and artist in a scrolling format if you have the id tag embedded in the mp3 (and why wouldn't you) . It's a rather nice touch which does seriously help when you have over one hundred tracks on the CD.

The makers claim that you can use normal audio CDs, mp3 encoded CDs on either CD/R or CD/RW  formats. The one sticking point is that you can’t use an open disk. In other words , it doesn't take CDs written in the likes of Direct CD. In fact, it stresses this. It does, however, say that disks written with Musicmatch, Nero, and Disk Creator are acceptable. I use disk Creator and haven’t had any problems with them playing. It also won't take multi session disks! Correction, it will only read the first session on the disk, and it doesn't like mixed disks, where you have normal audio  and mp3  for example. Any file it doesn't recognise is skipped and it does state that renaming non mp3 files to an mp3 extension will cause damage to the unit if it tries to play them.

Anything else?

Well, the maximum albums (directories) it will read is 22, or 200 files. In other words, don't put more than this on one CD, cos it won't read past the 200th track!!!

This isn't actually a problem as I usually encode my mp3's at 160kbps or above. So, how many mp3's will it recognise? The answer is practically all. It can read any mp3 (whether variable rate or fixed) from 32 – 320 kbps and will also read in the sampling frequency 16khz – 48khz. It can handle mpeg 1 or 2  layer 2 or 3.

I haven't had any major problems with the unit although I have found it can take anything up to 15 seconds to initially read the disk . Taking the unit from a nice warm house first thing in the morning it doesn't like and it takes a few minutes until the car heats up before it will play correctly. I assume that this is down to the rapid temperature difference. Apart from these little niggles, it is an excellent unit and means I only have one CD in the car most times. As I said, I use it in random mode , so a nice load of songs on the CD keep me happy again while I toddle off to work or return. Long journeys may require more than one Cd , but as I said, nearly everyone has a CD writer nowadays and it is a cheap and inexpensive way to store your music. The unit will only read mp3 and not the likes of Vog Orbis or Windows Media files, but I don't generally encode or download any songs in these formats , so its no skin off my nose. If you're looking at a cheap way of playing your mp3's without the expense of an mp3 player……. I can recommend this one!!

And conversely can't recommend any of the major High Street retailers!!!