Waterproof MP3 Player

Although I am not a member of the Steve Jobs is God club I am more impressed with the waterproofed iPod Shuffle: www.swimman.com/main.html No personal experience with it, but it is an impressive product.

I just saw a review in our local paper of the Freestyle Audio MP3 player. It's supposed to be much more rugged than the other waterproof players. www.freestyleaudio.com/products.php -

I have a finis SwimP3. Quality is great, but it is not user friendly getting your music on the player.

Wow- that waterproof shuffle looks like a great idea! I may want to get one of those just for walking in the rain or for fishing (although my first generation shuffle survived a complete submersion in a river and is still doing fine). But- I have tried swimming with the shuffle in a waterproof case and found that it didn't work well for me. The sound from the waterproof earbuds varies greatly depending on the presence or absence of water in the ears (and I've tried 3 different styles). I also found that I tended to dislodge the earbuds when my arm passed along the side of my face (especially when doing backstroke). I also was unable to come up with a very good solution for dealing with the cords. I recently purchased a SwiMP3 v2 player. The device is much more swimmer-friendly. The bone conduction sound transmission works great and the whole unit is very compact and doesn't interfere with swimming. Unfortunately, after just 2 swims, my SwiMP3 player stopped working so I'm going to have to send it in for replacement. I'll provide a more complete review once I have a chance to thoroughly test the replacement unit. Two things (one good, one bad) already came up that were not obvious from the advertising. The good thing is that you are now able to manually transfer songs from your iTunes library to the SwiMP3 player as long as they are in MP3 format. Any of your music that you have burned from CDs can be converted to this format by iTunes and used on the SwiMP3. Unfortunately, tunes purchased from the iTunes store cannot be converted to MP3 except for the fairly limited collection that is now available at a slightly higher price without the digital rights restrictions. Hopefully the availability of DRM-free music will increase. The second issue (also related to DRM) is that although the SwimP3 is advertised as being able to play songs that are in WMA format, I learned that the SwimP3 player cannot play "protected WMA". This was a huge disappointment because I had hoped to be able to listen to the audible books available for downloading from my library. These won't work with my shuffle, so I had hoped that I could use them on the SwiMP3 player, but that does not appear to be the case.

Lucky me - my hubby got me the Swimman waterproof ipod shuffle and headphones for my birthday! Which is great, since I am an open water girl, and have a love/hate relationship with the pool during the winter off-season (or hate/hate, depending on the week). In a word - it's awesome. The headphones are pretty comfortable, and the shuffle is so easy to just clip on your suit or goggles (I like it on the shoulder strap of my suit - I can't feel it at all and I can easily get to the buttons if I need to). If you do try it, be aware that the waterproofing process makes the buttons REALLY REALLY STIFF. Like so stiff you think you might break it the first time you try to turn it on! They loosen up pretty quickly. But I thought mine was broken when I got it because I couldn't turn it on. Luckily, their customer service department is great, and I got it figured out pretty quickly. Enjoy!