FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS FOR MP3 NEWS

Our future depends on your brain! Grinning Planet's picks for weekly audio clips are intended to help you to learn, stay informed, and expand your mind, all by simply listening to your MP3 player while you drive, putter around the house, or veg out in a chair. You can also listen directly on your computer, either by just clicking the "listen" links or by right-clicking to download the MP3 file to your desktop and then playing it from there.

Our goal is to provide a mix of MP3 news from various sources that gets to the TRUTH about what's going on, ensuring true RELEVANCE to where this planetary circus wagon is headed.

In addition to "Truth and Relevance," our MP3 news suggestions balance two selection principles:

• This Week's MP3s -- These are stories that aired in the week that ended as of our listed "week ending" date. These make up the bulk of each week's offerings—i.e. the "Feature Story" and the "Hot & What Not" section. In many cases, we have listened to and vetted the stories, but not in all cases. We want your MP3 player to get the week's hot-off-the-wire downloads right along with ours, so we often include recent stories (from usually trustworthy sources) even if we have not yet verified that every piece is a winner.
• Cool and Classic -- These are news and interview pieces that we have listened to, vetted, and recommend. They may have fairly recent dates, or they may be older---but still relevant---programs. Such MP3s appear in the green sidebars prefixed with "Cool and Classic" (or sometimes "Catching Up On").

Our top goal in picking MP3s to include in our weekly lists is to make sure they are honest and relevant. News organizations that score well on these factors do the following:

• They strive to engage in the traditional role of the press as watchdog over the activities of governments, corporations, and others in power.
• They don't avoid subjects and facts that would be embarrassing to corporations and governments.
• They don't parrot the propaganda dished out by The Powers That Be without investigative treatment and critical analysis, and they don't pass off press releases and "video news releases" as actual news.
• They report on meaningful stories, and report on them in depth, following up as necessary.
• They don't distract the audience with gossip pieces, infotainment, and other "non-stories."
• They don't substitute he-said/she-said "balance" for fact checking; and, when necessary, they point out misstatements and blatant lies, even when the truth shows one party or person to be "more wrong" than another.
• They seek guests and interview subjects beyond those who are part of the standard "Beltway Insiders" pool of politicians, analysts, and pundits; they especially seek those who represent points of view beyond those offered by the Democratic and Republican parties and leadership.

Rather than recommending a specific brand, we can offer a few thoughts about the characteristics you should look for in an MP3 player to make sure it has maximum functionality for listening to batches of news and interviews as MP3s:

• Resume Feature -- When you turn off the MP3 player and then turn it on later, things should restart exactly where you left off, even if that was in the middle of an MP3. Many feature listings for MP3 players do not say one way or another if this is included, so you'll probably have to do some digging or find out by contacting the company whose MP3 player you're interesting in. (If they don't email you back, that's not a good sign for future customer service!) That may sound like a lot of effort, but this is an important feature to make sure you get.
• Pause -- If you get momentarily interrupted, you obviously want to be able to stop the MP3 player for a minute without having to actually turn it off.
• Fast Forward, Rewind -- You'll want to be able to move forward or backward within an MP3. It's even nicer when the speed of the fast forward and reverse are user-settable.
• Skip -- You'll want to be able to skip to the next track or go back to previous tracks.
• Transfer Software -- Some players include manufacturer-specific MP3 management and transfer software to help you get the MP3s from your hard drive to your player. Other players let you use a Windows-like foldering system to manage and transfer MP3s in a more drag-and-drop fashion. Make sure the player your considering has a system that sounds user-friendly to you.
• Order-of-Play Control -- Some MP3 players just play all MP3s you've transferred in some sequential but mysterious order. It's better if the player lets you control the order based on parameters like file name. It's also helpful if the player allow you to group MP3s into folders and prioritize the order of the folders (even if only alphabetically) so you can further control the order of playback, ensuring you hear the MP3s you consider most important first.
• Hard Drive or Flash Drive -- Players with hard drives have a much higher storage capacity, which is important if you want to also listen to music MP3s. (They are usually much larger per minute of content than audio MP3s.) But hard drives are not as durable as the lower-capacity, chip-based, flash-storage players, so if your primary reason for getting an MP3 player is to stay informed, go with a flash-based player. We've found that 1 GB of storage is usually more than enough for a week's worth of newsy MP3s.

It's very helpful to read user reviews when researching MP3 players. Amazon.com has done a nice job of integrating user comments, manufactuer feature listings, and other info into their pages.

If you must know, Grinning Planet typically uses MP3 players made by Cowon/iAudio. You can get cheaper players, but we've now owned several Cowon players over the years, and each time we've gone through the research process, Cowon has always has always come out on top with respect to have the features we need. However, companies are always changing things, so when the time comes for you to buy, do your own research! Caveat emptor!