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5 Reasons Not to Buy an iPod
TommyH1000 writes "CNet has posted an article with five reasons not to buy an iPod. " The article really just shows the major shortcomings with the iPod (Battery, Cost, Moving Parts etc) and gives several alternatives. A great summary of the major things going on in the portable MP3 player market.
Rip all my CDs and then burn them back onto CDRs. You can fit like 12 CDs on one CDR in MP3 format. I have a wallet case when I travel and I manage to pack the music of 144 CDs with me that way. Best Buy has portable CD players that they sell for 30.00 that read MP3s and there you go, the cheap solution. When I get my cut of this money that the Nigerians are transferring to me though an iPod is the first thing on my list!
You can replace them. You don't even have to send them to Apple.
Go here: http://www.ipodbattery.com/
Well, FWIW, if you're not constantly fast forwarding or skipping songs, the hard drive buffers 20 minutes of music and then spins down.
There are third-party battery replacements available, and they're under $100.
I personally get about 8 hours from my iPod. And when I need more juice I use this:
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http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proces
If you need to listen to music for more than 10 hours having an optional battery pack is a must, and it uses AA's so I just swap those for more power.
I don't see one offered for the Dell or Samsung player.
And your music collection is only ever on your "digital jukebox"? You don't understand bitrate peeling. It lets you encode things at a super high quality to stay on your hard drive (say with 5.1 sound), but then strip it down on the fly as you transfer it to your "digital jukebox" or email it to a friend or stream it on the internet to a lower bitrate and fewer channels. And, not everyone plugs their "digital jukebox" into headphones. You could plug it into a real speaker set, or a sound system.
it seems odd that for each point, they suggest different mp3 players
I don't really find that odd. It's more of a "If you want to go jogging with it, don't get an iPod, get one of these instead." - "If you need over 15 hours of battery life, don't get an iPod, get one of these instead."
They're not claiming that any one thing is better than the iPod, just that some are more suitable for certain niches.
It looks like they really had to stretch to find 5 reasons. "choice in music stores", look, it doesn't matter, the fact is that they still cost $.99.
;-). Still, it's nice to see someone being objective about it.
The skipping while playing is pretty iffy, because they are suggesting that the flash buffer is completely empty before the HD spins up to refill it, which is completely untrue. It spins up long before it's empty to fill up the buffer. A lot like the way burning a cd works (only different
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
bitrate peeling = multiple streams at different quality from one source file. You could implement a power-saving mode in a portable with that.
Or fit a lower-bitrate playlist (longer play) onto space-constrained solid state players from a high quality archive without re-encoding.
Heh.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It isn't an issue for me, and only 1 out of 5 iPod owners I know wanted radio. For that 1 person, it was simple to buy a tiny inline receiver that works with the iPod.
6. You don't want to use 3rd party software to manage files.
Although it has major other faults, the Archos jukebox has one selling point - No third-party software is necessary to upload and download files. It's just a hard drive that plays mp3s (and other stuff in later models). You can load and unload mp3s from it using Explorer, or mount it in Linux. Copy your mp3s just like any other files and play them. There is no necessary uploading software and no download controls. It's fully linux-compatible.
When I was researching MP3 players last May, this was a big selling point of the Archos.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I have a 20gig Archos Jukebox. It's a souped up mp3 player. In additition to storing and playing mp3s, the thing has a little LCD screen, and it plays MOVIES! Or it can output the signal to a TV.
Additionally, it has compact flash and SD adaptors, so you can download the pictures from your camera to the device. This is handy when travelling: you can empty your CF cards and browse photos on the Archos whenever you feel like.
Best of all, it's easy hackable so you can stick a 60gig drive in there.
Revolutionary? Hardly. I've had mine more than 1 year. Currently, there's bigger and better Archos players out there, and doing more for less. Compared to Ipod hype and price, Archos stuff is a steal.
Witold
www.witold.org
witold.org
Er, considering that you're most likely going to be listening to it through a car stereo or headphones, I don't think there's really a need for monstrous, extremely high-quality files.
1/ I know a few people with iPods that do plug them into their stereo, where you can hear that those things are not hi-fi.
2/ It's nice to not have to convert your music to lo-fi to put it on your portable music player.
That said, I wrote a script that converts my hi-fi MP3s (that I'm too lazy to re-encode) and OGGs to lo-fi MP3s as it transfers them to my flash MP3 player... But I paid $35 for it, which is a bit less than my SO paid for her iPod... I expect more from the iPod.
Out of the possible solutions, he doesn't mention MiniDisc (which uses Sony's proprietary format). It's great for doing portable recordings (so long as you get a model with a mic jack) and has extroardinary battery life, with the extra bonus of only neading 1 cheap AA battery.
just look here
actually, I didn't even know about this till I saw it in someone's earlier post in this story.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Clicky Clicky
Also, if you want longer battery life, Belkin offers a cheap add-on pack that extends it considerably.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I own a "docking" IPod. This is my 3rd mp3 player and the best one.However, there are some things I don't like about it:
1 "Touchpad-like" controls- you touch it in a pocket, and it skips a song or does something else
2 Sometimes those buttons don't respond- have to touch up to ten times (not sure if I got a bad unit, or this is typical)
3 Can't "drug and drop" mp3 files on iPod- must use a software
4 Doesn't understand file names or directories- identifies fiels only by ID3 tags
5 Battery life- have to charge it as often as analog cell phone. Forget about overnight trips without a charger
6 Forgets the last played track after being connected to a PC, sometimes does it for no reason at all. Very annoying to audiobook listeners.
7 Clip on the remote is designed in such a way that the controls face outside only when clipped to a shirt with buttons on the left- ladies style.Does it confirm a popular Slashdot opinion that Apple is for gays?
I recall one of the biggest holdups to ogg support in portables was in the hardware. I think it was that none of the portables shipped with an FPU, and ogg required one. So perhaps you bought a player before there was technical ability for portables to support ogg. I'm sure someone will post a link or two and take any potential informative mod points i might have received were i more motivated to research futher.
Really? I'd say the Neuros pretty much satisfies all of those complaints: Battery life is VERY good in my experience. You can't beat the price right now: Something like $220 for the 128mb flash/20gb hdd combo. You can use the flash backpack for jogging if you're worried about damaging the hard drive. You can record 44khz 16-bit WAV through either the built-in MIC or the 1/8" mic-in (there's also options from 160kb/s to 64kb/s MP3 recording, as well as a couple lower WAV qualities). DI (the developers of Neuros) don't believe in DRM, so buy your music from wherever youw ant. Oh, did I mention it has a built in FM tuner and FM transmitter? In my opinion the Neuros beats the iPod hands-down in features. Granted, it may not look as cool, and it's a little bit on the big side, but they're working on that for future versions. I LOVE my Neuros.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
There is an integer only version of ogg available.
Hope that helps.
I probably would go with the belkin battery extender if i needed more battery life.
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http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proc
But the time I get now is more than enough for me.
Here is a better portable audio player that does the stuff the article talks about (and some more) and has a very reasonable price - Neuros.
- First off, it comes with a small memory card and optional 20GB HD attachment, so you can go light when you are jogging and attach HD for long road trips;
- Speaking of road trips, it has an FM transmitter that lets it play any audio on any FM radio without extra connections;
- It has FM radio, and is able to record directly from FM radio to MP3 format;
- It has a microphone and a voice recorder;
- It has full Linux support;
- It has Vorbis support;
- The whole package - the unit itself, software, USB cable, earphones, 20GB HD attachment, regular charger, car charger = $230.
That would be less than half the price of iPod. I would like to see some reviews of this baby.
I think you might want to take a look at the Stereophile Review of the iPod. If you read the article, what is actually (between the lines) reviewed is the DAC of the iPod, which is incredible. I'll attest to this*. Sure, MP3 generally sounds like ass, as to lower bitrate AAC files, but that's a product of lossy compression, not the player itself. iPods themselves sound absolutely wonderful, especially if you use the line out (often from the dock) into your stereo.
*At home I have my iPod dock in the living room hooked to a mid-range NAD receiver and some Gekko speakers. It just sounds amazing.
Oh, more stuff for you. This is just looking at the specification BEHIND the dumb features that have you floored (proprietary transfers over FM...only a true geek would get impressed by that)
128 meg Neuros: $230
2.5" x 4.3" x 1.3" x 5.9 oz
Res: 128x128
Input: USB 1.1 max 12 Mb/s
Time to full charge: 8 hours
The backpack adds a further 7.6 oz to a pleasant 13.5 oz, or 3/4 of a pound en total. And the unit size becomes 3.1"x5.3x1.3"
20 GB iPod: $399
2.4" x 4.1" x.62" x 5.1 oz
Res: 160x128
Input: USB 2.0 / Firewire, max 400+ Mb/s
Time to full charge: 3 hours (at 80% after an hour and 20 minutes on the charger is usually enough for my hour and a half workout)
So what you have here is a unit which is, i admit, check full of neat ideas and features for $170 less. But it also takes twice as long to charge, up to 40 times as long to copy files (USB 1.1 is absolutely unacceptable for a hard drive and you KNOW this), is nearly three times heavier, twice as thick, an inch taller, has 20% fewer pixels, the headphone jack is on the bottom (which is just wierd)...the buttons aren't inlaid, the hand interface just looks unwieldy (with buttons on either side of the face, how do you GRAB it without pushing them in all the time? Even with a lock they'll jam up pretty quick).
All in all, it looks like an iPod knock off that tried really hard and nearly succeeded in being a better unit. You're right, integrated FM and microphone are neato...and these are two features Belkin and others are trying their damnedest to shove into the iPod...but they're also features most people will never use.
There's a design rule I like to follow, one that I think always makes devices easier to use: make common things simple, and complex things possible. I think Apple has done that -- common things, like selecting songs, copying songs, and walking around with the thing -- are easier. I think the Neuros has taken the opposite approach...laden the device with features, tried to keep it smallish (and yeah, 13 oz is still pretty small, smaller than those 2 lb Archos machines) and succeeded in making a device that I would probably buy if the iPod hadn't been invented.
Hey freaks: now you're ju