Help with iPod choice please.

[Kyle]

I am going to get a iPod with money i have had from xmas. I am not sure which one to get at the moment. I do a lot of walking training and i want it for mainly playing music while i do this. I have looked at at a 8gb Nano which appeals but also does pod casts photos etc. But i noticed that the 5th generation video ipods are only about few quid more. How is this so?

What are the benefits (apart from video) of me spending a little more eon the video ipod rather than the Nano.

[petectid]

Larger screen 2.5" more storage space 30 Gb Nano is 1.5", 8Gb and probably not as robust.

[Ric_]

@Kyle: Is there any particular need to get an iPod? Other manufacturers make some niceplayers and you won't have to use the ridiculously annoying iTunes.

[russdev]

Also I would wait a few weeks if going to get ipod just in case they announce anything new in ipod range at Macworld.


IMHO Irivers are much better got an old h320 here it is very good...

Russ

[Kyle]

@Ric,

I am open to suggestions.

Point me in the direction of others please.

[PiqueABoo]

Slight diversion.. whatever happened to gizmos like this and recording capabilities (e.g. Creative NJB3 had an optical input)?

Did RIAA et al jump up and down on them?

[Ric_]

@PiqueABoo: IIRC, Archos players can record direct (from TV too).

@Kyle: I personally use a Creative Zen Portable Media Center device because I watch the TV progs that I record using Windows MCE on it. This kind of device is probably a little bulky mind.

The iRiver and Creative players always get good write-ups... I have a friend with a small Creative Zen Muvo (?) and Russ always raves about his iRiver.

If you use a particular piece of software for managing your music library, try to get one that works with it rather than being forced to work in a way you don't like - hence why I don't have an iPod!

[john]

I don't own a seperate MP3 player as I just use my phone (sony walkman phone) but those who ask me I say ignore apple as they are just market leading due to brain washing and there are better goods out there, and they have all agreed with me. The Creative stuff seems nice and I have played with them and its good stuff, the Archos has also been well reviewed and I know someone who got an Archos (cannot remeber model) but he certainly loves it.

[mac_shinobi]

I have a 2gb black ipod nano and I recently got a sony ericson w810i which has a walkman, battery on the phone doesnt last too long if I use it for both music and phone calls, where as at least if I have my ipod on me I can use my ipod for music and then just use the phone for music as a backup in case the ipod dies on me.

[kingswood]

I have been looking at the Sansa e2xx series...very nice, and quite cheap too. If you are going to use the pod for exercise you really need a solid state version like the nano or the cool little shuffle.

Benefit of the bigger version is more space, bigger screen etc. It's been said before me. I would really look at a nano.

[webman]

The guy at codinghorror wrote this about iPods which I fully agree with:

That said, I have some problems with the iPod.

• The iPod is boring. How can I properly rage against the machine with the same standard, factory issue music players that everyone else has? I don’t want this to devolve into a knee-jerk rejection of all iThings, but let’s be honest here: when every soccer Mom carries an iPod, it’s no longer a cool technical accessory. It’s completely mainstream. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t matter to me.
• The iPod has no support for subscription services. I’m a member of Yahoo Music Unlimited, which gives me unlimited access to a massive library of music for 6 bucks a month. I can stream any of this music to multiple PCs, or I can download it to my hard drive or mobile audio players. And it’s in a very respectable 192kbps 2-pass CBR format, too. For that same six bucks a month, I could buy a whopping six tracks from the iTunes store. While I can certainly understand the desire to own music, why not give us a choice? Apple’s insistence on purchase-only models is a huge mistake.
• The iPod does not support WMA. Although Jobs grudgingly made the iPod Windows compatible two years after its introduction, he still gets his jabs in. The conspicuous lack of WMA support is a not-so-subtle f*ck you to the Windows community. And what of OGG? Or FLAC? Clearly, the hardware is capable, but the political forces inside Apple won’t allow it. You’d figure a company that had the guts to make a stunning, wholesale switch to x86 processors could deign to support a few alternative audio formats on their music players. But no.
• The iPod lacks features. I’ll never understand why the iPod chooses to deliberately ignore FM radio and its rich history in the music industry. Heck, you might even want to record FM radio. That’s just crazy talk! And the list goes on: there’s no voice recording, no EQ settings, no gapless playback, etcetera.
• The iPod requires custom software to work. Every music player on the market should have this down to a science by now:
  
  
  • plug in the USB cable
  • drag and drop your music on the device
  • disconnect the cable and ROCK
  
  The iPod fails miserably on this count: it requires iTunes installed (or another custom application) to transfer any music to the device. You can’t even use it as an external hard drive without setting up a separate, special partition on the device first.

Of course, use iTunes if you want, but you shouldn’t be forced to use iTunes because the hardware is a brick if you don’t. How did Apple get this so very, very wrong?

As Ric_ quite rightly says, there are better alternatives out there

[Norphy]

OK, I'll admit it, I've just bought an iPod. These are my answers to the points made above

1) "It's boring and mainstream". Who cares? It works and it works well. The interface is fantastic, the screen is bright and clear, browsing music (assuming it is tagged properly) is effortless even with a large collection. For god's sake, it's a tool. Just because it's mainstream, it's no good? Are hammers too mainstream for you too? Grow the frack up.

2) "No subscription service support". Boo freaking hoo. Who wants to buy their music on subscription? All it would take is for Napster to go bust or for Yahoo to pull the plug and all of a sudden you've lost access to your music collection and you've poured money down a drain. At least with iTunes, the licence remains as long as you have a copy of iTunes. And anyone with any sense would buy CDs and rip them to MP3 anyway.

3) "No WMV/OGG/FLAC support". This is a minor bugbear on mine but that said, the vast majority of my music collection is in MP3 format anyway. I should imagine that is the case with the vast majority of people. MP3 is good enough for a portable music player and OGG and FLAC are probably a little too obscure for most people anyway.

4) "The iPod lacks features". Now this is a personal thing but it has to be said, I did not drop £165 on a 30GB MP3 player just to listen to the radio. The whole sodding point of the thing is to carry around a large proportion of your music collection on the go. I don't want it to be able to play videos, play games, make the tea, do my accounts, have a contacts list or anything else besides play MP3s.

My iPod (a 30GB G5) does have EQ settings. It has gapless playback. It has a few silly games. It has a calendar and a contacts list. It has a notepad. It has a stopwatch. I personally thing that most of those extras are pointless (It's an MP3 player ffs, it should play MP3s and leave it at that. Leave games to Nintendo, stopwatches to Casio and contacts and calendars to PDAs) but they exist and are as good as they can be considering the interface.

5) "Requires custom software". Yes, that is annoying. But then, so do a lot of the competitors. The Zune does. I think the hard drive based Creative Zens do. The problem here I think is one of organisation. With the iPod when you sync the device you don't just copy the music across, you also update the things database. If you don't have an internal database, the player has to generate it on the fly which is OK on smaller players but a bit of a PITA when you have 20GB+ of files. Admittedly, I've never seen an iRiver so I don't know how well it handles things.

As for the "can't use it as an external hard drive without setting up a seperate partition", that's rubbish. You can and I have. You plug the iPod in, the PC sees it as a standard removeable storage device and you can drag and drop at will. The only thing that doesn't happen is that the database doesn't get updated if you copy music across with that method.

There is plenty of alternative software available to sync your iPod. XPlay, Media Monkey and Ephpod can all do it by themselves, MGTEK dopisp can use Media Player 11. Hell, when the iPod first appeared on PC it used *spit* Musicmatch.

When all is said and done, the iPod is the No. 1 player out there for a reason. Yes, marketing has a lot to do with it but marketing along does not sell a product. It was the first harddrive based MP3 player which wasn't the size of a housebrick and that had a decent interface. Yes, I know the 6GB Creative Jukebox came before it but that thing was the size and weight of Barbados and had a two line LCD display. Crap crap crap.

As I see it, the main advantage of the iPod is the huge amount of third party hardware that is available for it. You can't go into a branch of Currys without falling over iPod cases, FM transmitters and receivers, speakers and all manner of other accessories. You can buy interfaces which let you control the thing via the CD Changer Control on a car radio. Companies like Alpine have released iPod specific head units. Car manufacturers are putting dedicated iPod interfaces in.

It isn't the cheapest player out there. It may not have the richest feature set. However that doesn't mean to say it isn't worth buying.

Anyway, lecture over . Back to the original point, what is the benefit of the 30GB Video over the 8GB Nano? More storage space, a bigger screen and probably quicker to sync. However it is inheirantly more delicate as it is hard drive based instead of flash based. Battery life isn't as good either.

[russdev]

But in my thinking got to have lot of music to fill an 80gb mp3 player.

Ok I dont have biggest CD collection in world but have about 100ish CD's and this holiday have ripped them all at 80kbs came to about 4 gig then add in downloaded music from emusic and others and comes to about 6 gig.

Most people are never going to fill in 20gb let alone 80gb mp3 player as for play list the old version of iriver (not sure about new versiona)this is where it lacked as to create playlist files aka m3u files. So can't create on fly but can do all rest search by genre, album artist etc etc

But then anything is better than my old mp3 player a gogear dont't touch them they are really bad mp3 player always froze up, you did have to use special software and no alternative on the net.

The thing that makes iriver stand out for me is the in built microphone (hence why I got in first place to record edugeek stuff) is very good quality .


Anyway it i peoples own choice on what buy and what works for them but if buying ipod do wait few weeks till after macworld just in case they are releasing something good..

Russ

[Domino]

But bang it into hard drive mode and you can use it for more than music and video.

I carry around a load of portable apps on mine. as well as installers for the more usefull pc-repair apps

[Geoff]

"No WMV/OGG/FLAC support". This is a minor bugbear on mine but that said, the vast majority of my music collection is in MP3 format anyway. I should imagine that is the case with the vast majority of people. MP3 is good enough for a portable music player and OGG and FLAC are probably a little too obscure for most people anyway.

You can fix this with Rockbox.

"Requires custom software". Yes, that is annoying. But then, so do a lot of the competitors. The Zune does. I think the hard drive based Creative Zens do. The problem here I think is one of organisation. With the iPod when you sync the device you don't just copy the music across, you also update the things database. If you don't have an internal database, the player has to generate it on the fly which is OK on smaller players but a bit of a PITA when you have 20GB+ of files. Admittedly, I've never seen an iRiver so I don't know how well it handles things.

You can fix this with Rockbox (or just reformat the thing to fat32).