MP3 player repair day

[johnridley]

My cheapo MP3 player (512M Sandisk, $18 woot.com special) got wet yesterday while riding in the rain. In the past that hasn't bothered it, but it quit on the way home. Dead battery, I assumed. Charged the battery last night, but this morning it went 10 minutes before croaking.
Fresh battery at work, it wouldn't power up.

Cracked it open, discovered that some nasty crud had crystallized around some IC leads. It sounds kind of gross, but I suspect it's salt from sweat, since it's been around my neck for several thousand miles. Some water followed by WD40 chased it away and now it's OK again.


While I was thinking I'd lost the player, I started reviewing my options for replacing it. I have a Zen Vision:M which is great but too big to use on the bike (plus it's hard drive based so probably not good).

I do have a Zen Micro that L dropped and destroyed a few months back. She got a new Samsung player which is probably the nicest small player I've ever seen (the iPod nano only wishes it was this cute or had a screen this nice) so the Micro has just been sitting on my dresser for a while. I knew the Micro had a microdrive in it, so I cracked it open tonight, put the microdrive in the computer's CF slot, and sure enough it's recognized but is pretty much one big bad sector.

I stole a 1GB CF card from my SLR and put it in there. Formatted it up, charged the battery, threw a bunch of songs on it, and it's doing fine. It can't have the CF card permanently, so I need to decide whether to buy a 4G or an 8G card for it. The pricing is relatively linear, so the decision is a little harder (if it was $40 for 4G and $55 for 8G, I'd go with 8G, but it's $80 for 8G). As a bonus, I'll be losing all the moving parts of the microdrive so it'll be a decent bike ridin' player.

Comments

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

I've had a couple of successes (and a failure!) repairing MP3 players over the last few months. A couple of cracked circuit boards and one leaked battery gunge.

The failed one eats the rechargeable battery in a few minutes - no signs of anything at board level - but the big chip does get finger-licking hot...

A pity, it is in an oversize 'pen-drive' physical format with a swing-out USB at one end, decent LCD display and FM radio, but only 1GB. I've spent more time on it now than it was worth.

I wonder if the power requirements of the CF and microdrive in your recent fix are sufficiently different to have any big impact on battery life?

Because most of my cycling is in relatively short 2-5 mile commutes and also on busy streets, I don't use an MP3 player while cycling, so my Archos audio/video widget gets used primarily while travelling or sometimes when late at work.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The word on replacing the microdrive with a CF is that the player is a lot faster (I can already vouch for that; startup is much faster than it was, and song-to-song skipping is instantaneous instead of 2-3 seconds). As for battery life, it depends on the CF card. People who took out the 5GB microdrive and put in 16GB flash cards say battery life is about the same, but those who put in 4GB cards say it's a little better.

I mainly like the fact that in the 15 minutes I've used it since I dropped in the 1GB card, I'm already not handling it like it has a hard drive in it. Before, even when putting it down on a table when turned off, I'd set it down rather than just tossing it a few inches.

I think I'll keep using the little 512M player on the bike, and use the Micro at work. On the bike I don't listen to music, since I only use one earbud, so it's NPR on FM or audiobooks/NPR podcasts

I think I'm just going to go with a 4G card. I've got a 30G player for long trips and vacations. 1G is a little skinny; L doesn't mind smaller players because she's a teen and like I was back then, doesn't mind listening to the same few dozen songs 50 times in a week. I kind of like hitting random play all and not having dups for several days.

This is the 3rd time I've had the Micro apart. I previously had to repair the infamous bad SMT headphone jack solder connection, twice. It's a tough repair; the bad connection is between two connectors and there's only about 2mm of space to squeak a soldering tip down into. The first time I tried to do it with a bit of 12 gauge wire wrapped around the iron and filed flat to reach down inside, but the connection was flaky and a few months later failed again. The next time I just filed down an actual iron tip to fit in there.

So far this morning, Rush "La Villa Strangiato", Bob Marley "Go Tell It On The Mountain", Blind Willie McTell "Bell Street Blues" and White Stripes "You Don't Know What Love Is".

[jennlk]

Technically, L only finished the 'destruction'. You'd dropped it a couple of times before she even started using it.

She also didn't like the micro because the 1G is too small (and really, giving her a drive based mp3 player for her backpack was sub-optimal anyway. I knew it at the time, but it's what we had, and the T9 wasn't out yet.)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

It was a 5GB player, bigger than the T9. I only put a 1G card in it last night because that's what I had around.

I've never liked microdrives, I always thought they were a crude solution. I was happy to sell the one I bought for my camera years ago. They're pretty much dead, I don't think anyone is still using them though you can buy them for practically nothing online. The iPod mini and the Zen Micro were a few of the last things to use them. Flash is cheap enough now that the risk of the spinning media isn't worth it anymore.

They were pretty binary from what I have read. You might drop one 49 times, and if they still work 100%, there's no damage; they have G-force protection that locks the heads and allows them to take drops of pretty high Gs as long as it's not actively reading/writing at the time. But that 50th drop when it's actually running is going to kill it dead. That's what happened with this one. No blaming L, one of my drops could have just as easily killed it.

Dropping in a flash card will get rid of the drop risk for the most part anyway.

Agree that the T9 is a much nicer player though; hardly even in the same league.