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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.
"Sony execs crowed a few weeks ago that their latest MP3 players were THE iPod Killers"
What we didn't know, is that the Sony MP3 player actually DOES kill you if you copy non-DRM music to it. Look it up, it's in their EULA.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
They won't put a dent in the iPod sales, either.
This issue is user experience. You can add all the gadgetry you want, but it becomes a complex tool. People want their music device simple, easy to navigate and elegant. They don't want the kitchen sink thrown into the tool.
...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
iPod wasn't just providing same stuff with some click wheel. It brought a rather unused concept into masses.
Therefore, iPod may be killed by a new concept only. Let it be... direct audio->brainwave projection or audio-pills.
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.
iRiver - most of their models support ogg. And beats mp3 anyday. iRiver H320 (out of production) works like a charm with ogg - though is not flash. iHP-120 is a flash player.
Also, you will get FM, inline recording, voice recording, and better sound quality as a bonus (over iPod)!!
Yes, I think the iPod killer will be something twice as expensive and twice as bling-bling.
Maybe they will include headphones that glow and light up to let everyone know you are using the iPod killer. Also, the headphones will include a big subwoofer so as you walk by or at the library everyone will know you're listening to an iPod killer.
I'm sure it will come with clothes and jewelery too as you can then integrate it to your look - the goth with the iPod killer look or the nuMetal kid + iPod killer look.
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
Looks like sony wants to have their cake and eat it too. If its not legal to rip their music. Then how is their MP3 player supposed to be filled? I guess its ok to rip OTHER peoples music.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
...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.
rename iPod $sys$ipod
If I had the cash allocated for an mp3 or ogg player right now I would go with the Neuros 442. It's got a 40 GB drive, lets you record audio and video from numerous sources, tonnes of features. Plus the company supports open source development. Shouldn't we all be supporting a company like this? Or has someone here had bad experience with Neuros?
Look at the new video formats supported by iTunes and iPod Video. The H.264 320x240 AAC format will quickly become a standard much like the MP3. Everyone is converting funny videos, music videos, TV-show episodes and full length movies into H.264.
QuickTime is now installed on most Wintel computers from using the trojan horse iTunes. QuickTime is far more popular today than Real and close to Windows Media. And QuickTime 7 with H.264 is fricking excellent. Even Sony disitributes their stuff using QuickTime today.
And you can easily encode your own (and DRM-free) stuff into H.264 with QuickTime or with open source stuff like mencoder. Much like iTunes and iPod allows you to use ripped and even pirated MP3s in your collection
Steve Jobs is a truely excellent player. This part of the game will be really fun to watch.
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.
Sony will only have an XYZ killer when they abandon Digital Restrictions Management. Who wants to buy restrictions?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
It really depends on your usage. If I were jogging, or commuting, I might want a limited storage flash player. I have a CD player in my car for that, and a dozen burned CDs. Yet I also have a 20gb Archos MM. I use it for a portable HD, usually having ~10gb of music on it. I rarely use it for an MP3 player. Unless I'm on a trip. Nothing sucks more when on a road trip than having to listen to the same damn songs over & over. Well, ok, listening to the radio or not having any music at all would suck more, but just barely.
Different devices for different uses. That's the beauty of Apple's ipod scheme. They have an ipod for just about every possible use, and most price points. All using a similar interface. When my Archos bites the dust, I'll most likely get some flavor of ipod.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I briefly looked at the list, and I didn't see any player supporting AAC format (Of course, I guess that apple don't license their format for other players). All my music collection is managed by iTunes, and most of my files are AAC. If I wanted to buy a portable player, what choices I have other than iPod?
The iPod Killer must come with an iTunes Killer!
perception is reality
HD-based players are still too pricy for the average consumer. Yet the price of them hasn't changed significantly in years. Surely the drives in them are cheaper and easier to produce than they were in 2001 - so why has the price not come down significantly?
Instead, the consumer is forced to make ridiculous compromises like "will you pay $100 less and get 1/10 the storage?" Or, "How about $200 less, and you don't get a screen or any control over the playlist either."
I look over that list, and pretty much all of them, within their subclass, are IDENTICAL. The only difference is the brand name and the particular shape of the player. And, in fact, it seems like the entire industry is becoming LESS innovative, not more, especially with Rio leaving the market. I couldn't even tell you the difference between most of those.
And then people wonder why Apple has all the market share. It's the only brand name most people can name, the only one they've heard of, and none of the other models offer ANYTHING substantial to recommend themselves over it. And in the meantime, no one seems willing to try to open the market up a bit by making good players available at affordable prices.
It seems like, once again, an example of the music industry collectively shooting itself in the foot, and then whining about why no one else lives in the same world they do.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
The only people who need to carry their entire music collection with them at all times are the homeless.
Nobody needs to carry music anywhere. MP3 players are about fun. I think it's more fun to just slap every CD I have into my hard drive MP3 player and not worry about shuffling playlists back and forth.
I just upgraded Tunes on an XP box the other day, and I'm pretty sure it told me that it was going to install QuickTime and gave me chapter and verse on the progress as it did so. I believe I even agreed to it in the click-thrus.
That would pretty much mean it's not a trojan, but something I decided to install and use.
I suppose I could have just modded this troll, but I'll be posting to this thread - the rest of the comment rates insightful, but that seemed like a cheap shot.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Is it seen as a USB mass storage device ? If not, you have failed. I do not want to see any kind of your proprietary software on my PC to get access to your device.
I am suprised that the iAudio X5 was not mentioned: its a superb device, marred by only 2 possible flaws that I know of:
Maybe the fact that you cannot buy it in retail stores was a problem for the reviewers. Even so, video support, Ogg, USB host, full USB mass storage implementation, long battery life ... its hard not to gush.
I bought an iPod because it was the first HD-based player I'd seen which supported AAC (I jumped on the AAC bandwagon when the Ogg one was just getting ready to leave, and seem to have stayed on it). At the time, the only other players I was seriously looking at were made by Philips, and could play AACs from a mini CD. The iPod was smaller than the Philips device, and much smaller than the stack of CDs I'd have had to carry.
It's quite a nice device. The user interface is not perfect - I filed a series of UI bug reports with Apple (none of which have been fixed in firmware upgrade, by the way, although they have been locked in the Apple bug tracking system. I think a few have been fixed in newer iPods). It is, however, far better than anything else I've seen.
Is it possible to make something better than the iPod? Yes.
Are Sony in a position to do it? Probably not.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I noticed that iRiver's line of MP3 players is (mostly) absent from this listing.
I recently got an iRiver IFP-899 and absolutely love it. I don't have any particularly overwhelming urge to store my entire music collection on a portable MP3 player, so a very expensive iPod or any of its very expensive clones are pretty much overkill for me.
Simply put, the iRiver is a great middle-of-the-road MP3 player. Rather than copying and pasting the specs from the corporate web page, I'll just list a few things that I particularly like about it.
With prices on the unit dropping to almost $150, even Apple would have a hard time beating that. At $50 more, the iPod nano has double the storage but still only half the features.
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?
PlaysForSure just means it has the ability to play DRM files. Cowon, iRiver, etc are labeled as PlayForSure, but they work fine in Linux and play ogg and mp3 files.
I've got an iPod killer for you...
/.
MP3 player, that runs Linux, plays back Vorbis, Flac, Speex, and of course Vinyl...
Add in a 3D 16:9 ELED screen for playing back Divx, Theora and Tarkin videos.
For navigate, throw-in a "buckling spring" scroll-wheel.
That'll be an iPod killer... at least on
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!"
You can bet that when the musc player industry comes up with Audio Pills, Apple will have a cherry flavored chewable version while everyone else will go with suppositories.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Plenty of models have FM radio but what's so hard about AM? I want to listen to talk radio and have MP3 as a backup for when hosts I don't like come on. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who want to listen to sports broadcasts.
Shouldn't we all be supporting a company like this? Or has someone here had bad experience with Neuros?
No, people just don't care. Recording? Most people don't care. Most walkmans couldn't record, and portable CD players sure couldn't. Didn't stop them being sold. Open source? Who care, most people aren't interested in futzing with the internals. I suppose it's a good product for people who like Linux, though. So would have been an open source (open firmware?) walkman back in the 1980s. Most people wouldn't have cared to buy one, though.
AAC in many ways is Apple's version of WMA; although technically it is MPEG4 standards-based in practice it is nearly as proprietary as WMA (perhaps intentionally so; I believe patent law is involved). It also doesn't live up to the quality hype; a 128kbps iTunes track *does not* sound equivalent to a 192kbps LAME-encoded MP3 track. It is, perhaps, somewhat better than generic CBR MP3 at 128k but then so is WMA; Ogg Vorbis (according to nearly all listening tests) is markedly superior at 128k. At 160kbps Ogg is transparent to most listeners, at 192kbps virtually everyone.
The next generation lossy audio codec winner might be AAC (or it may not), but technical superiority won't be the reason why. It will have far more to do with market penetration and entrenchment.
My wife has had a Soniqcast Aireo 1Gig for 10 months. She (and I) LOVE it.
It has an FM tuner, as WELL as a built in FM transmitter, adjustable to ANY FM Freq (not just 5 or so).
Think that is neat, that is nothing compared to the built in 802.11b wireless! you can leave your Aireo in the car, and have it sync up with your PC in your house late at night. Or, if you're sitting near a WAP out and about, you can connect up to your audible.com account and download books, or newspapers over the internet!
Sonicast is now selling a 20Gig model with similar features. (or will be soon)
The only 2 donwfalls are that the interface on the player is so-so, and you need MS Windows to Sync playlists.
http://www.soniqcast.com/
I personaly enjoy my Archos AV480, no wireless or FM, but It can store/play/record video, and works well with Linux, MacOSX, or Windows.
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
I fail to see why including an FM tuner in a personal digital audio player is some great "feature." I use a personal MP3 player precisely because commercial FM radio sucks the sweat from a syphillitic donkey's testicles. WhyTF do Creative and iRiver think that's a killer addition to the capabilities of their products? Now, a digital audio player with integrated XM/Sirius real-time receiver (not recorded from a base-station), and a user-replaceable Li-ion battery pack - that'd be an iPod "killer."
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
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.
The reason there are no competitors to the iPod is because the iPod got it right way before anyone else. Like with any technology, a competitor has to be twice as good or half the price to really make any headway. The fact is that no competitor will EVER be twice as good or half the price because the iPod has already maximized both.
Did GP poster say Fairplay DRMed AAC? No? Well then, isn't AAC an open format? At least as open as MP3 or anything a Sony 'iPod Killer' is going to support. I know I rip all my CDs to AAC. It isn't lock-in. It's lack of support from vendors. And if those vendors want to steal iPod marketshare, they'd better make switching as painless as possible. Re-ripping an entire CD collection will not be painless. They'd better get on the ball as far as importing from an iTunes library goes too, otherwise, they're going nowhere. And it isn't like reading a simple "iTunes Music Library.xml" file is hard. They're selling half the product you get with an iPod. All they've got is hardware. It's no wonder they all fail.