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MP3 Player Shoppers Guide
An anonymous reader writes "Says this three-part rundown of the latest DAPs "When Sony execs crowed a few weeks ago that their latest MP3 players were THE iPod Killers one thing was obvious. They were oblivious to the fact that the term "iPod Killer" had already gone from clever market-speak to running joke." Still, quite a few neat players here and I bet most don't scratch up as bad as iPods do."
While on the subject, what players can people recommend that support Ogg Vorbis? Support may be either as-shipped-by-the-factory, or available through something like Rockbox. I dislike moving parts, so Flash is preferable over hard drives.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
...a website which, when most seem to think über-long flash intros, banners everywhere and convoluted stylesheets are acceptable and good, chooses to use plain old-fashioned HTML?
High-fives to whoever designed the website. The layout is nice and clean, and is pretty much guarenteed to load in any browser. If we had more websites like this, the web would be so much more tolerable.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Do any of these support gapless playback, or do DAPs still suck for albums with transitions, like Abbey Road or Dark Side Of The Moon?
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
I saw a player at WalMart last week that takes Compact Flash, and cost about $40.
There weren't any on the racks, though. They were all sold.
I think we have an iPod killer here, folks.
People who think they need to carry around their 'entire music collection' are being pretty anal. Build a 'playlist,' stuff it in your player, and go out and enjoy listening to it. The only people who need to carry their entire music collection with them at all times are the homeless.
resigned
after the two stories - one about the rootkit and two about Sony's EULA i think i will not buy a Sony product when it comes to an mp3 player...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...and what interesting Sony software do you have to install to use one of these? Does it uninstall as well as their little rootkit that comes with their music CD's? I wouldn't touch a Sony product with a ten foot pole right now.
they don't scratch as easily, but I wouldn't touch Sony products with a ten-foot pole anymore. They will need to prove themselves over and over again to make up for pushing Atrac and Memory Stick down peoples throats, let alone the recent DRM debacle of their music division, before they will regain a semblance of credibility.
If you're in the market for an MP3 player, do yourself a favor, bend over and get an iPod. Really. What it lacks in barely-missed features is made up by style, capacity and a whole ecosystem of third party accessoires and software. And don't forget, iPods have a decent second hand value.
Not getting an iPod now is like not getting a PC in the 1990s. Sure, you can always buy something else if you want something different just for the sake of it, but your idiosyncrasy is going to cost you in the end.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
I really dislike AAA batteries that almost all portable mp3 players require. I can see it's a design choice to make the player smaller, but you'll have to keep buying the batteries to use it. My old mp3 player wouldn't work with rechargeable AAA batteries because they have lower voltage. I had to make a hack to have it use external AA rechargeable batteries, and it wasn't pretty. Only one player in the review is mentioned being capable of using AA batteries, Panasonic D-snap.
Does anyone know a nice flash memory based player that works with rechargeable AA batteries?
Today it runs the open source Rockbox firmware and supports virtually every major audio format in use today: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, A/52, AAC (experimental), FLAC, Shorten, Apple Lossless and WavPack. It even has a 33 shade greyscale JPEG viewer.
The thing is, the DRM for iTunes is easily crackable, and very lax.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
And you were at Wal-Mart, which caters to the bottom end of the market. Their customer base are generally non-tech-saavy people to whom price matters more than anything else. Apple caters to an entirely different crowd.
Those big boxes of vinyl albums aren't in an easily convertable digital format, and never will be.
I have a fairly large number of "vinyl rips" on my DAP; they're all rare recordings that only exist on vinyl so if I want to listen to them on the go I have to digitize them. Frankly, it's nice to be able to listen to them all I want without causing further wear to the precious vinyl. Interestingly, the sonic advantages of vinyl ("warmer" sound, etc) all carry over into digitized vinyl rips provided you use proper technique. Once again, your experience doesn't necessarily generalize to the whole world.
No mention of the MobiBlu cube player? I got one and I love it, has FM and voice recording and equalizer, not to mention SRS WOW and an OLED screen. It's tiny and and the only clue people have that it's some kind of player is the headphones, and they come over and ask about it. Everyone is amazed by how small it is.
I disagree.
/Ex
Case in point, I spent a month of this summer in Europe, and had access to a computer twice, let alone access to my mp3 collection at home. I had about 8 gigs of music/podcasts/lectures, and managed to listen to about 2/3 of it while I was on the road (just the flights over and back were 35 hours in airports airplanes)
I also used it as a portable hard drive for my digital camera, as I could connect them directly, and thus never ran out of space on my camera (well, except the day in rome where I grabbed the wrong memory stick, and forgot the adapter in the hotel...)
Granted, this is a "once in a while" type thing, but it was worth the $400 I spent on 30g ipod photo + adapter to not have to buy a bunch of gig sticks and hope I didn't run out or lose any of them.
Now that I'm home, my main computer's m/b freaked out, and so I've been without my music collection except for the music I have on my ipod and on cds. Do I need the 30 gigs? no, but it makes this stuff a whole lot easier.
Well...can you give them a reason why they should want something else?
Your Mozilla/IE example isn't quite applicable because IE is so flawed and crippled compared to Mozilla. iPod may not play Ogg (only people on Slashdot really care about that anyway), but it plays MP3/WAV/AAC/AU/Apple Lossless/MP4/MPG, has the best audio output quality (ever since the Shuffle), and clearly has the best user interface and experience.
The iPod clickwheel is like Mozilla's tabbed browsing. It's hard to imagine not having it.
Fact still remains the same. Have you compared the sound-quality again? I have, and it still is behind.
IMHO, iPod almost always loses out on features and sound quality compared to some other 'less popular' devices.
At the risk of modded down as troll, let me say that its hard not to notice that Apple/iPod is to DAP what Microsoft/WIndows is to OS. Just because its popular does not make it better. In fact, most of the times, popular is NOT better. And that is because the average user is not a power user.
I believe the grandparent was using the term Trojan Horse in the classical sense, rather than the malware sense. iTunes is used to sneak in QuickTime. A lot of people now have QuickTime installed as a result of iTunes requiring it who would not have installed it as a stand-alone download. It does not imply that anything underhand or illegal was done.
Um... but the classical sense does imply that something underhanded was done... Or were the Trojans just sneaking in to throw a surprise party?
I will agree that the sound quality of 4G and lower iPods was not spectacular. However, the new video iPod has AMAZING sound quality. It's to the point where my amp makes it sound noticeably worse (whereas with every other source I've ever listened to, it's made it sound noticeably better). Listening to a new iPod directly attached to Sennheiser HD600s is just amazing. (But not loud enough for soft classical pieces.)
My other car is first.