MP3 player

[jayemcee]

Now this may seem like a silly question.......
I am thinking of transferring all of our CDs onto a MP3 player. The cheaper end of the market advertizes ones with downloads via CD or DRM 9.
Am I right in assuming that I need one that has the method of download as CD?
The secondary question is can all MP3 players either be connected to a "dock" ? or be used with small speakers to make it multi-user friendly.
Is downloading easy?

[VHG]

If you already own the CD you can "rip" the files off the CD into MP3 format. Windows Media Player and other products can do this.

Note that MP3 format is inferior quality to CD fomat (the MP3 files is compressed so loses some quality).

If you want to hear a song in best quality then listen to the CD.

[anotheoldgit]

Forget about these expensive ipods, I have a number of very cheap supermarket MP3 players of different storage capacity.

Just treat these as additinal storage devices, and down load your music from your computer after you have ripped your music onto your computer.

You can then listen via the headphones, or separate spakers plugged into the earphone socket. And if you have a tape player in your car you can buy a device that loads into your tape player.

[jayemcee]

Thank you for your responses everyone. I mainly wanted to do this for taking some music on holidays. So to preserve the quality, perhaps I will continue to play actual CDs at home and just copy some of those onto a small, cheap player for mobility and to prove that I can do it.
For UK holidays I can continue to take a wallet of CDs with the CD player, doesn't take up that much room in the boot.
Wanted to see if I could dip my toes into the techy world to impress the grandchildren!!!