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iPod Alternatives for Mac OS X?
pazu13 writes "I had a first-generation iPod which treated me badly and finally died, after roughly two years of use. I bought another one last year, but after a battery failure several months ago and a sad iPod icon this morning, I think it's time to take my business elsewhere. However, I own a Mac (which has treated me well), and Apple's market dominance seems to have driven most competitors from their own platform. XNJB appears to provide Mac-users more freedom of choice, but outside of this does anyone have a good recommendation for a non-Apple Mac OS X-compatible MP3 player?"
I personally have gone through probably half a dozen or so mp3 players and I have to say I'm very pleased with my Cowon. Cowon makes one of the best sounding mp3 players around and is guaranteed to work with both Mac and Linux. The storage space on their flash based players is a little small, but otherwise I really can't complain.
I imagine you've seen the official list of compatible players for iTunes on OSX
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The iRiver H3x0 is very affordable, has great community support, has easily replaceable batteries and hard drives, and runs Rockbox like a MFing champ.
Some of those MP3 players doesn't require special software, you just plug it in and drag over mp3 files from itune. :)
The Neuros and any player that supports Rockbox (which includes iPods, incidentally).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I have a creative Zen Neeon, better sound quality than an ipod shuffle plus you get a screen (I paid the same price for both one year apart and got 6 gigs in the zen compared to 1 in the shuffle). Just plug it in and copy music to it as if it were a thumb drive (disclaimer: I don't know how it handles DRMed music, I don't have any but I have heard some complaints about it not handling fairplay too well). I am yet to find a song it wont play
Plus creative supply better headphones than Apple (I tested the creative headphones with an ipod just to make sure).
It doesn't have to be a Creative Mp3 player, just pick any one that acts like a flash disk when you copy music onto it. I've heard good things about iriver. Ipods seem to be about vendor lock-in or as I prefer to call it iLockin and iRestriction.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Rockbox does the library management itself. Drop your music on the player, and it will index everything for you when you boot it. It does it in a background thread, so you can still listen to music and play games while it's updating the database.
If you're not familiar, Rockbox is seriously awesome. It supports Ogg / FLAC / Apple Lossless / WAV / AIFF / MP3 / MIDI / MOD / (many others that I don't use), and has software DSP for crossfade, gapless playback, crossfeed (makes headphones sound a bit more like speakers), "party mode", pitch and speed adjustment, software EQ, hardware EQ, cool games (Frozen Bubble!), etc., etc. Everything is very customizable (and themable). You can even customize exactly what happens when you unplug your headphones (I have mine pause, and when you plug them back in it rewinds by one second and restarts playback; much better than Apple's default approach).
Anyway, check it out. It's worth the slight difficulty in installing.
My other car is first.
Archos provides an iTunes plugin for their line of MP3 and video players. I'm not confident it'll work for iTunes video transfers (but it might), but it works fine for MP3s. Just make sure you make the Windows DRM partition very small, and the USB mode is mass storage.
There are many iTunes plugins as well for any mp3 player that appears as a mass-storage device, and a lot of good MP3 players support mass storage mode (for DRM-free music). I believe the Sandisk Sansa appears as a mass storage device. As do the newer satellite radio receivers (like the XM Inno and the Sirius Stiletto).
I think you're in the minority of people to experience two Ipod issues that close together (I know many of you know friends who have Ipod problems, but given how many people have Ipods, that's not saying much).
Coming from the other side of things, I've wished since about week two of owning my Creative Zen Touch (40GB) that I had bought something else. Namely, the Ipod. The company is a pain to deal with if you have support issues. So is their player. Disconnected three times after being on hold 17 minutes each time (HMMM....). If you just want something to listen to music with, their players will work. But don't expect any of the promised firmware updates to fix any issues with the player, so make sure you know all the current problems with it. The problems with mine? Scrolling is horrible. 10x worse than the Ipods (which is perfect). You move your finger down the strip and the UI responds half a second later. On top of the that, it's innaccurate and un-predictable. Sometimes moving your finger a mm will move the song selector one strip, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it'll jump down three. You simply can't select songs safely when you're driving. In contrast, the Ipod's scroll wheel is predictable and goes where you want it. Every single time.
Other issues:
-after about 6 months of use (coming up on my second six months, had to send the first in to fix the harddrive) the "forward/skip" [>>|] button halfway breaks. By that I mean sometimes you want to fast forward in the song (this is another thing I'll get to later) so you have to hold down the forward/skip button until the slider gets to the point in the song you want to listen to...so you let go of the fast forward, and then, strangely, the player skips to the next track. Apparently sometimes taking your finger off this button after having it held down tells the player to stop fast forwarding and skip to the end of the song.
-As for fast forwarding, it's the most un-intuitive design. It isn't easy like on the Ipod, where you press the middle button and then move your thumb around the wheel. When you do this, the Ipod moves the slider that marks what part of the song is playing. You find the part you want, stop moving your thumb on the wheel, press the middle button again, and it plays. On Creative's players, you have to press forward and hold it down for [what feels like, I haven't timed it] 5 seconds to skip 30 seconds. A total PITA. Like to listen to your songs gapless? Be prepared to hold that button down and watch the UI for 15 seconds--(the slider movement speed increases exponentially, which means) when you finally hit the minute mark you want to listen to, you let go and find that it keeps moving ahead for the equivalent of two-ish minutes. Then it starts playing. So until you get used to letting go early, you'll be holding "|" down for another 5 seconds till you get to wherever you wanted. On top of all that, the player doesn't anticipate "jee, you know, this guy is scrolling forward and this part of the song isn't in my memory, I better spin up the harddrive to be ready for it", it waits until you've stopped fastforwarding, and then decides to spin up the harddrive, load that part of the song, and play it. And then if you overshoot where you were fastforwarding to, it does the exact same thing, it stops spinning and waits till you've stopped fastforwarding to spin up the harddrive and load that part of the song (which can't be good for the harddrive anyways, I'm sure this is what broke my first harddrive. Thankfully no problems with the warrant replacement). Like I said, don't expect to use this when you're driving.
-If something about your player breaks, be prepared to pay the shipping costs [and insurance if you want to be safe] on your end as well as $35 (when mine broke this was how much it was, I think it might have changed now) as a "processing" fee.
-good luck finding player covers if you want it protected. There's two that I know of, but they're both only available online. One is leather and costs something like $
Try these folks; IPod Rescue who are the same as Powerbook Rescue and who fixed my clamshell iBook in 2002 and it has stayed fixed!
Dog is my co-pilot.
It sounds to me like the point of failure in both cases was the hard drive.
And almost every MP3 player on the market uses either the Samsung or the Toshiba. No matter what you buy, the failure rate of the drive will be about the same.
Instead of buying another player, why not look into dropping a new drive into your current one. It's not hard to do (I just did it with an old, beat-up 3G iPod of my own), and instructions are all over them internets out there.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
or maybe like any sane person he becomes wary of said company that makes the faulty products and does exactly what he is doing, research for something better. Realistically as far as features, reliability and price goes apple is WAY WAY down the bottom of the market. Style and name is all they really have going for them.
Amarok runs very well for me from Fink (FINALLY! Thanks RangerRick et. al. who made that happen), and Amarok supports the 3 or 4 MP3 players I've tried just fine (Archos and iPod mainly are what I've used).
I have 1.4.4, after many fits and starts with bad libxine1, etc, everything seems to have evened out and it works.
Give it a shot.
I like music
Look online again, Apple released a utility specifically designed to fix bricked shuffles.
You can't go wrong with Archos. They do a nice range of players. I use an aging Archos Gmini 400 (sadly discontinued).
The nice things about them are:
1. Very Good build quality
2. Large variety of players from simple music only to full blown media players.
3. Mount as standard USB mass storage
4. NO DRM what-so-ever
5. Supports mp3, wav, ogg, wma, wmv, divx, xvid (some formats are player dependent)
6. Windows Media Player can sync to it (as can many other freeware library managers)
If my Gmini died, I go straight to the web and buy another Archos, no question.
-Jar.
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