Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market

kurtz_tan writes "Creative Technology is spending 100 million in a marketing blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market which is now led by the Apple iPod (54% of the market last year for MP3 players that use hard disks). Creative is second with 16.5%. Does Creative Zen sound as cool as Apple iPod ?" And reader TheMediaWrangler writes "The Register reports that Apple will build a stockpile of flash-based iPods to be shipped as early as January or February of 2005. AppleInsider had the original scoop."

Comments

the comparrison

[BRUTICUS]

So what is Creative's best player? Or closest contender. Has anyone here compared the two?

Rightful my ass

[rsilvergun]

If anyone has a rightful place in the audio industry it's Aureal. Not trolling, I'm geniunely annoyed at the state of PC audio. It's not that the Audigy is bad, it's that for $200 bucks I expect a lot out of my Soundcard. My old Aureal was great, but Linux support was weak (at least at the time). Aureal was going to open the whole driver, but then they got bought out....

It's not just me, I've heard plenty of others complaing about the state of PC audio. You just don't have to try as hard when you're as far ahead as Creative. Yeah, recent C-media cards are pretty good (heck, for $7 bucks they're amazing). But creative's got name recognition and all. I'd just like to see PC audio competing a bit more like PC video.