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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/
I personally get about 8 hours from my iPod. And when I need more juice I use this:
s ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id =148969
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 */
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.
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
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.
There is an integer only version of ogg available.
Hope that helps.
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.