You know, if you take this ring tone thing to its logical conclusion, it is entirely possible that an artist will emerge who carries all their songs on their mobile and at gigs just walks on stage with the phone and just plays the rings tones to the audience through the microphone or...in a duet situation...just has another guy/girl come on stage and ring him/her on his/her mobile.

Well considering theres nutters out there on the fringes of the Irish electronic scene doing live performances featuring tunes played on Nintendo Gameboys (seriously!), the mobile phone live scene is a possibility all right. The thing that will put the brakes on it is all these lazy people downloading ringtones. Back in my day, if you wanted a unique ringtone, you spent about three hours messing round with the composer function. Pah! Kids today! Too lazy by half!

Hows that MP3 player working out Eoghan. Im tempted to pick one up myself Did you order from Ireland/Europe or the US ?

Klootfan, My iRiver iHP-140 40GB beast of a digital music player is working one hell of a treat. I now have it loaded up with 4400 songs and its still only half full. So where did I get it? I considered getting one by mail-order from the USA but it was too much hassle. And that's even before considering that I'd probably get stung for Customs & Excise duties which would drive the price through the roof. I ended up getting it from http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk in the UK who shipped me a copy for a very reasonable price (well, compared to what I've seen it offered on the Eurozone high street). Having said that, at the time of writing they're out of stock of the 40GB iRiver. I got to fiddle with an Apple iPod recently for the first time and I must say it is the most gorgeous piece of technology, design-wise. Even so I have to say I extremely pleased with my much uglier iRiver. It beats the iPod on all fronts – except aesthetics. Take battery life alone - a full charge of the iPod gives you a maximum of 8 hours playback, while the iRiver can give 16 hours playback. Right. Enough, of the salesman pitch. 'tis over to you now I suppose to decide. eoghan

Have you been able to sleep properly what with all the worrying that after all that money and work, some prat might swipe it from your jacket or what ever. I suppose you just have to keep an eye on it. The amount of times i reach down for my mini disc player on my waist thinking ive lost it cause i cant feel it even though the headphones are in my ears and the music is playing away. Funny really.

Eoghan does the WMA format not have inbuilt copy protection??????? in otherwords it will play fine on one machine but if you copy it, your copy should not work At leaast that's what Micro$oft were trying to do a while back

You can turn off WMA DRM (copy protection) in windows media player quite easily for ripping CDs. Obviously if you download a file that is already copy protected, you can't turn that off. Don't dismiss WMA on the basis that its a commercial standard owned by Microsoft, MP3 isn't the open standard most people think it is either. The MP3 patent is still owned by Thomson who make their money by collecting liscences on every MP3 player, encoder and stream out there. See http://www.mp3licensing.com/index.html If open standards were really important to people, we would all be using the Ogg Vorbis format, but the truth is people prefer convenience and functionality which is why we all use mp3. WMA has good features too, which is why more people are using it these days.

Just to confirm that - yes - I did turn off the WMA DRM (copy protection) before I started ripping songs from my CD collection. The WMA Variable Bit Rate (VBR) which I am using is - I have to say - great. No compromise of playback quality yet keeps file size to an optimised (i.e. smaller than MP3 at a fixed bit rate) size. Yip, for what it's worth WMA VRM is my format of choice for my iRiver player. eoghan

Eoghan, Quick question for you. Was more Irish VAT added to the price of your MP3 player when you ordered it from http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk. Just wondering because I read somewhere that if you buy from amazon.co.uk, they slap an extra cost to the price because of irish tax or something like that. Ive spotted the iRiver iHp-140 for £250 in https://www.3dsolutions.co.uk Seems to be the cheapest around. But im not sure if they are goign to slap more onto it because it is being delivered to Ireland Cheers www.3dsolutions.co.uk

Ive an iRiver from mp3players.co.uk for £264 Cheapest i could find. I suppose id better start ripping soon. Should be fun

Bloody heck klootfan. UK£264 for a 40GB iRiver? That's a deal and a half. A good 50 Euros cheaper than I got mine. Although we'll all be kicking ourselves that we didn't wait another § months or so when they release the next generation of players that will have colour LCDs and can play movies (they are launching them in Japan later this month, more info here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/28/iriver_h300/ Anyway, good luck with the CD ripping. It goes on and on and on and on. But worth it. If you go for the WMA VBR audio format I would recommend to not use the highest bit rate option it offers. Choose instead the one that offers the bit range of 90-145 kbs (or some range close to that, can't remember exactly what the range was). This for me offers the best file size:sound quality ratio. Also don't forget to turn off the copy protection feature. eoghan

Just to confirm Eoghans theory on bitrate. CD Quality is regarded as about 128Kbps so there isn't much point point at ripping higher than that, 90-145 sounds about right. Apparently CDs have a bitrate of around 172Kbps, but I doubt you'd notice much difference.

Cheers for the advice folks. I saw the next generation iRiver players alright, and the price of the one ive ordered is probably going to drop by about 50-100 pound, but it was just too damn tempting. I reckon my minidisc player must of got wind of the new mp3 player because the remote broke on it yesterday. It also coincided with my discman breaking in work ( it was on its last leg anyway)

I have always found myself that a wind up gramaphone mounted on a shopping trolley has always been sufficient for my mobile, musical needs. Don't forget, Satan is real !!!