Technology today, particularly mp3 players give us a wonderful opportunity to learn when we are on our way, wherever we are. I’ve been listening to Torah Tapes via walkman for a long time but the mp3 player is quite superior due to it’s small size, higher capacity and better fidelity.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Cross-Currents fame, wrote an excellent article in a recent edition of the OU’s Jewish Action which covers many of the basics of mp3 usage. Here are some of the key points from the article with some of my comments.
Rabbi Adlerstein purchased a small capacity IRiver for around one hundred dollars which holds about twenty hours of material, and runs on a single AA battery. Although it doesn’t have the coolness factor of the IPod, I also highly recommend the IRiver line for those who favor price and function over form. And as Rabbi Adlerstein points out you can easily record live shiurim if you purchase a model with the voice recording option.
The next part of the article maps out the four steps—download, reformat, splice, move—needed to take material from the Internet and transfer it to a personal player.
To download material from the Internet, you must right click on the link, select Save Target As… and download the file to your PC which takes less than a minute on a fast link.
To reformat the file to mp3 format, if necessary, Rabbi Adlerstein recommends a freeware program called Switch, available here.
Rabbi Adlerstein wisely recommends splitting shiurim into more manageable segments of five or six minutes each to easily find your place if you don’t listen to whole shiur at once. He recommends Mega MP3 Splitter which can be downloaded here.
For the last step you need to transfer your files to your player. You can link the player to your computer with a USB cable, and open the program that came with the device which looks like Microsoft Internet Explorer, only with two parallel sets of panes—one for the computer, the other for the device.
For more detailed instructions, please read Rabbi Adlerstein’s entire article here. And for free audio downloads, visit 613.org, simpletoremember.com, Classic Sinai, OU Radio or some of the other places mentioned in the article.
An amazing new audio side with hundreds of great classes on a variety of Torah/jewish related topics has recently been launched, is http://www.lidrosh.com
S has a good point, that 20 hours could force frequent updates, but a 1 gig will hold 100 hours if you are compressed at about 10 meg per hour, which is reasonable for shiurim.
I agree with the decision about solid state, especially if you run with your mp3. Amazon has the iRiver T30 1 GB MP3 Player for $104.99.
I’ve used some of my friends players, and I find that iRiver to have the best controls. In fact I loaded up a mini Ipod recently (the mini is also solid state) and I am still recommending the iRiver. But if you have teenagers, good luck on convincing them about anything but the Ipod, sometimes coolness trumps everything.
Unforunately I don’t, since I have an ipod and haven’t really researched what is out there. But I would say that get a player with as much space as you can reasonably afford. It will be more costly if you end up deciding to buy another mp3 player with more space once you realize that 1 gb just isn’t as much as it seems like.
S., do you have a recommendation? (unit and/or size?) I’ve been thinking about getting the Sansa m240, which is 1 Gig, but you mention that may not be enough.
I had mostly been thinking of a player that uses steady state memory rather than a micro drive since it seems the batteries last longer, and since I might use it while riding as well, I’ve been told the vibrations are not good for the drive and cause early failure.
>Rabbi Adlerstein purchased a small capacity IRiver for around one hundred dollars which holds about twenty hours of material, and runs on a single AA battery. Although it doesn’t have the coolness factor of the IPod, I also highly recommend the IRiver line for those who favor price and function over form. A
Although affordability is of course an issue, I want to point out that 20 hour storage is not a lot. In fact, its a lot less than you’d think. Unless you want to find yourself constantly deleting content you’d do better with an mp3 player, even if not an iPod, with considerably more storage space. It’s worth spending a little more for it.
Thanks for posting an excellent article. MP3 shirum are a bracha while working during Sefirah and the Three Weeks. It’s great when we can use techology towards Avodas Hashem.
I’m passing this info along to my son who’s in Beis Medrash. Perhaps there are some Torah/media sites here he doesn’t already know about (even though I doubt it).
Virtual Beit Midrash (Yeshivat Har Etzion) offers podcasts of KMTT (Ki Mitzion Teitzei Torah). You can download them using a free podcast receiver program such as Juice. All the instructions are on the VBM web site. There’s a podcast per day, designed to be just about right for an average commute.
Rabbi Lazer Brody’s mini lessons can be downloaded, ‘Switched’, and played on mp3 players.
If you already use a Palm device or Pocket PC, you probably even have an audio player in there. Palm devices (I use a Zire72) have RealOne, which is very easy to use. The only downside, at least on the Zire 72, is it eats up the battery. Still, I listen to one or two shiurim a day, often in the car with an adapter plugged into the headphone jack and running to the car radio.
Now’s a good oppurtunity to plug Torah.org/Project Genesis’s own mp3 site:
http://www.torahmedia.com
To date we’re just short of 2000 FREE MP3 DOWNLOADS!
With membership you’ll have access to close to 5000 RECORDINGS.
Featured speakers include Rabbi Yochanan Zweig, Rabbi Moshe Eisemann, Rabbi Paysach Krohn, Rabbi Shlomo Brevda.. see the full list here – http://www.torahmedia.com/quicklinks.php?sid=&cid=&type=speaker
In the near future we’ll be offering recordings from Rabbi Yissochar Frand, and BYBT’s own Rabbi Label Lam.
If you or someone you know would like to submit recordings to our ever-growing library please contact us at support@torahmedia.com.
All the Best,
Mordechai
Mark introduced me to the value of an mp3 player and my wife, father-in-law and I can’t thank him enough.
BTW, those of you who dint have the time to listen to the audio posts here on the blog can download them and take them to go. And don’t forget the Shmuz!