My wife and I play gigs at retirement homes and hospitals. Throughout the year, we play monthly programs. Each Program has 15-17 songs and each pgm is different. All songs are in mp3 format, but may have come from different sources although the main source is biab/rb. About 2/3rds of the songs are sing-a-alongs.

All was going ok until we went to win 7. We need a player that can play a single song and then stop to talk the audience. We play the songs in order and each filename begins with the song order number (i.e. 01 Misty). My initial problem was to find an mp3 player with external buttons to push for play, pause, advance, back, and also to select a specific program folder, which I guess most refer to as "Playlists" now. Hey, I'm an old guy, ok?

We have been using a TASCAM mp3 music and voice trainer, MP-VT-1. My new desktop will not recognize it and Tascam tech support says that it works fine with Win 7 64 bit. Sometimes is will recognize it but shows "no files". This unit doesn't have much memory but it has enough for our stuff. My netbook will not recognize it either. Well, obviously we have to be able to add and delete songs. When we started at had to put eveything on CD's and play from a boombox. I don't want to go back there.

Trying to find a player that will play a single song is really tough. Many people don't even understand why someone would even want one. I just tried a Sansa Fuze 4gb, but it's output volume is not enough for our monitor. I've been considering a used/refurbished ipod, but I'm not sure if it will play just a single song from a list. Matt suggested a zoom h2 once, but it looks like that is a recording device. However, if it would meet our needs, I would gladly buy one. Seems like some of the older equip. would play single songs, but it's not available now and you take a chance getting a used one. I would like to say that price is no object, but I think we'll have to keep our cost to around $200. I guess that we could use our netbook, but we worry about the Alzheimers' patients tapping the keyboard while we are playing. The caregivers aren't always able to stop them and we have had music taken from our stands while we were playing. Can I call that distracting? Oh well, we play for free so not too many complaints from the management.

I guess I could buy another mv-pt1 or something similar but I'm really at a loss as to what to do at this point. We are using the tascam for a gig at church tomorrow, we really need to get our July pgm squared away now. Please help us out with some ideas/suggestions/comments. Thanks so much.

Stan

Cornet Curmudgeon