Slashdot Mirror
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?"
iTunes still supports more or less the same set of 3rd party MP3 players they used to however many years ago when the iPod came out.
Since the iPod got big, Apple stopped writing drivers for other peoples players, and the player manufacturers stopped developing their own iTunes plug-ins with Apple's SDKs for fear of assisting 'the competition' (a brain-dead move if you ask me, there are bound to be some disgruntled iPod owners who don't dislike iTunes, and if one of the also-rans had good iTunes support they could scoop them up easily).
I know, I almost got a used 20GB Zen from a friend for about the same price as the iPod Shuffle I ended up getting. But when I looked at the Zen's support under iTunes, the plugin hadn't been updated since the days of iTunes 3.0, and lacked support for basic things like playlists, or adding the first song to an empty player (you had to use some other software to load the first song back onto the player if you emptied it completely, the plug-in only worked with a populated device). And as much as people like to complain about it's minor quirks, and as much as I preferred SJMP back in the day when Apple bought and reworked it, iTunes has really grown on me over the years.
So I went with the shuffle, and never looked back. Given that it's become a more or less permanent fixture in my pocket, I'm actually really glad I got something small and rugged.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I once killed a pump at the gas station. Got out of my car, reached for the button but the 1" static bolt off the tip of my finger got to it first. I left with the thing doing a solid tone sound and with garbage on screen. The gas station closed the next week.
Beat that.
My wife had an Cowon iAudio U2 for a while. It was a great player - tiny and lean on batteries, yet had lots of features and played several formats. After 9 months of use, the battery developed a pretty critical problem where it wouldn't hold a charge and the player would lock up. I could "jump start" the player by removing a battery terminal, partially charging it, and rewiring it, but the battery life was pretty bad afterwards. I probably could have sent it back for repair, but we decided not to bother. The problem with it is that it's essentially useless even as a flash drive unless the battery is holding a small charge. Very peculiar.
She ended up buying an iPod Nano. It's a temperamental little thing and it locks up fairly often. Quite frankly, I don't see what the buzz is about. The iPods are average at best. It also has its own internal battery just like the iAudio U2 did.
If I were to buy another player, it would probably be an iAudio that uses standard batteries that may be easily replaced. It is compatible with any platform that can use USB storage devices and it sounds good and supports more formats than most players - including FLAC and OGG Vorbis (my personally preferences).