[Poohbah (Gsq)]

Discuss.




Slightly more detail: Belgium got the last laugh as always, and broke my MP3 player. It's a Creative Zen. I've never ventured into the world of ipods before, but I am not adverse to doing so. My budget is unspecified, if it's something a bit awesome I don't mind spending money on it. I don't have many (any) toys, so this might be my chance.

Having said that, I'm aware there's a new ipod out today. I don't think I really need to be THAT up to date....!

I mainly just want to listen to music that I already have on my computer. A few other fancy features might be nice (I have a old phone with no fancy features, and have no plans to get a fancy features phone anytime soon, so I am currently fancy featureless.)

Anyway, commence the pro/anti Apple bickering..... NOW.

Thank you

[SJ Del (The Train Man)]

Stick with Creative. Or maybe iRiver or Archos.
I regret the day I was seduced by the shininess of the iPod

[Gaz]

Well today was new iPod day, so lots of cheap old model ones will soon be on the market.

[Joinee Michelle]

I love my zen.

[Poohbah (Gsq)]

My brain hurts.

[Mr Phil]

I'd go with something you can drag and drop MP3 files into. That's part of the reason why I went for an Android phone.

[Gaz]

if you want a reasonable and not too expensive smartphone that can do most smartphone stuff, you could do an awful lot worse than a Sony Ericsson xperia x10 mini (massive name, tiny phone). It does run Android so will have sat nav, a decent browser, facebook, twitter etc, but it has a lot of Sony enhancements so the media player isn't too bad, the camera is alright and the smaller screen size means it doesn't suffer too much from Android's big Achilles heel, which is chronic battery drain. If you text/email loads, go for the slightly pricier x10 mini pro as it has a keyboard. Either way, you shouldn't be looking at more than £120-£200 to buy one of those from eBay contract-free (i.e. stick in your current sim and away you go*), depending on model, and on a contract they should be free or very cheap. Another alternative would be a palm pixi or palm pre (the pixi is the cheaper but not quite as fast), but I have a feeling they may be exclusive to O2 so possibly not suitable.

If you want a decent non-smart regular phone with some bells and whistles and for it to be good at handling music, then a Sony Ericsson walkman phone is a good bet and they come in a huuuge range of styles/prices depending on what other bells and whistles are thrown in (GPS, radio, camera quality etc). They're usually drag and drop to load music these days and virtually all decent music management programs will allow you to export playlists of songs.

If you don't want a phone and are just after a bog-standard MP3 player, then you can't really go wrong these days - again, just look for ones with drag and drop that play MP3 and ideally AAC too (most decent ones should). I've got all my stuff in iTunes and that works fine with my Sony walkman MP3 player that I use for running (just export a playlist and load it all on and away you go).

*with the caveat you might need to buy a plug-in for data or you'd be looking at a hefty bill down the line!

[Lethal Biddle]

Del aka TrainMan, on 01 September 2010 - 08:39 PM, said:

Stick with Creative. Or maybe iRiver or Archos.
I regret the day I was seduced by the shininess of the iPod

What he said.

[SJ cDave]

Poohbah (Gsq), on 01 September 2010 - 06:15 PM, said:

...broke my ... Creative Zen.

I mainly just want to listen to music that I already have on my computer.

Just to confirm, what format is it in?

MP3? WMA? WMA-from-an-online-shop-with-much-DRM?

[SJ cDave]

Gaz, on 01 September 2010 - 10:35 PM, said:

... and the smaller screen size means it doesn't suffer too much from Android's big Achilles heel, which is chronic battery drain.

I rooted my Hero, and now underclock it when there's no heavy processing going on. My battery life has more than doubled.

[Gaz]

Crazy Dave, on 02 September 2010 - 08:31 AM, said:

I rooted my Hero, and now underclock it when there's no heavy processing going on. My battery life has more than doubled.

Very handy I'm sure, but not something the average user will be arsed to do though really and doesn't mean the battery life still isn't as good as you'd get on a non-android device. You shouldn't really have to bodge around with the guts of the OS and/or install third party task killer apps to be able to squeeze more than a day out of the battery under normal use, and it's still something Google need to address better.

[Joinee Hathorn]

Crazy Dave, on 02 September 2010 - 08:31 AM, said:

I rooted my Hero, and now underclock it when there's no heavy processing going on. My battery life has more than doubled.

Is there a sensible direction you can point me in order to investigate this then.... on another note the OS update is quite good, the camera now has some basic functions!

[SJ cDave]

Joinee Hathorn, on 02 September 2010 - 08:51 AM, said:

Is there a sensible direction you can point me in order to investigate this then.... on another note the OS update is quite good, the camera now has some basic functions!

Find the "Android Development" forum for your device on xda-developers.

As Gaz pointed out, it's often not for the faint hearted. On some devices (the Nexus one especially), it's quite easy. On the Three UK Hero, it involved using a hex editor to write over the physical bits on an SD card. The HowTo threads are usually surprisingly well written.

In any case, doing this sort of this may well "brick" your phone (as in turn it into an unresponsive lump of plastic), so beware if you do try, and never, never remove the battery while an update is installing.

[Joinee Varwell]

This doesn't really answer your question Lou, but I absolutely love my iPhone - does so much all in the one gizmo, and synchronises flawlessly with my Mac laptop. Bit of a jump to change everything, but speaking personally it is well, well worth it in the long run.

Del aka TrainMan, on 01 September 2010 - 08:39 PM, said:

I regret the day I was seduced by the shininess of the iPod

Really? Out of interest, why?

[Silver Joinee Johnd]

I recently bought my Sansa Clip+ on the basis of it being rated the top mp3 player for 2 years running on anythingbutipod.com

It's tiny and awesome.

http://anythingbutip...layers-of-2009/
http://anythingbutip...plus-review.php

On Amazon it's only £40 for the 8gb version, and accepts micro SD cards so you can add more if needed. Battery life - had it for a few weeks now, playing it for about half an hour every day and have only just had to do a 2nd recharge, which takes less than an hour anyway. The default firmware works well but when they release a stable Rockbox version for it it'll be even better.

[SJ Del (The Train Man)]

Del aka TrainMan, on 01 September 2010 - 08:39 PM, said:

I regret the day I was seduced by the shininess of the iPod

Joinee Varwell, on 02 September 2010 - 11:05 AM, said:

Really? Out of interest, why?

Mainly because of its dependence on iTunes. My previous iRiver was simplicity itself, simply drag and drop files from the PC onto the player. iTunes puts another stage into the process, sometimes doesn't do it properly, sometimes refuses to fetch podcasts for days at at time. I can't add a song to an existing playlist without using iTunes.
But also it has a non-standard socket for charging and syncing (my iRiver had mini-USB) and doesn't even ship with a mains charger! I can't record on it as standard (that needs extra hardware and apps).
Oh, and there's no manual, you're forced to find it out as you go along.

[Joinee Varwell]

Del aka TrainMan, on 02 September 2010 - 05:34 PM, said:

Mainly because of its dependence on iTunes. My previous iRiver was simplicity itself, simply drag and drop files from the PC onto the player. iTunes puts another stage into the process, sometimes doesn't do it properly, sometimes refuses to fetch podcasts for days at at time. I can't add a song to an existing playlist without using iTunes.
But also it has a non-standard socket for charging and syncing (my iRiver had mini-USB) and doesn't even ship with a mains charger! I can't record on it as standard (that needs extra hardware and apps).
Oh, and there's no manual, you're forced to find it out as you go along.

I see. I have to say I love iTunes, although also having a Mac it all just connects together so well. I do appreciate that Apple stuff isn't necessarily smooth to be just partly in, though. I take your point too about the manual, but I find it so intuitive I don't need one and when I am stuck a quick Google usually solves it.

[GJ Drought]

Not sure why so many people dont like the ipod. i've had my ipod for about 4 years with no complaints does everything i need it to. including a variety of playlists for when i want to listen to specific stuff ( like learning a language or a certain band) and lets me copy video onto it so when im away i can still watch a film or TV show (on any TV with a scart too as i got a cable for a few pounds!)

itunes really isnt that bad either, i'd hate to have to switch to something else now as this keeps me so organised!

plus it has "genius" whis frankly is awsome! ( you select one song and when you select genius it builds a playlist of songs all similar to the song youve picked!

[Gaz]

I appreciate people's mileage with iTunes can vary (though find me any program which hasn't pissed at least some people off and I'd be genuinely amazed), but as has been said it does do what it does pretty well for most people most of the time. And you can more or less drag and drop music out of it, because I do just that with my Walkman.

Totally agree about the charger though - I wish Apple would ditch the proprietary iPod socket. Or at least sort out wifi sync.

[joinee_doug]

Two words:

Robo Disco.

[SJ cDave]

SJ Buzz Drought, on 02 September 2010 - 09:15 PM, said:

itunes really isnt that bad either, i'd hate to have to switch to something else now as this keeps me so organised!

This is why I don't like iTunes. I've gone through too many players and PCs to want to be tied into something it's difficult to get data out of!

If you've spent £100 on DRMed audio books from iTunes, then that's £100 down the drain if you switch to a non-apple player in future.

[Gaz]

To be fair, if you've spent £100 on DRM'd anything from anywhere it's going to be equally non-portable initially (Amazon/Audible also have it, for example, and they do some weird and secretive stuff like refuse to tell you how many times you can burn to CD), and publishing houses do like to keep DRM on books because their inherent value is considerably more than a single music track. iTunes also has some of the slackest DRM around with the least restrictions in the few places it's still applied, there are tons of programs for removing it, or you can just burn it to a CD and rip it back. It's not the DRM-free ideal, but very few options are and it's certainly better than some.

As for getting stuff out selecting a playlist and dragging it to your desktop is hardly arduous!

[Silver Joinee Johnd]

My annoyance with itunes is twofold:

By default itunes doesn't update music file tagging information (title, artist, album, genre etc) as part of the music file, it makes its own list somewhere. All well and good if you only use itunes forever. However I know several people who wanted to try another media player, but when opening up their music in other players found out that all this information had disappeared, much to their initial horror that all their time spent organising their music information had been wasted, thus forcing them back to itunes. This is Not On At All.

For people in the even more unlucky state in that all their music is purchased online and usually in the DRM-protected m4p format or whatever rather than mp3 etc, itunes won't even let you burn a CD of your own music. You have to download and use an m4p to mp3 conversion utility just to do something like this, which can harm the audio quality.

It's a fair enough music player. Just don't expect an easy ride if you want to do anything slightly unusual with your music.

[Gaz]

Uh, I don't know where you got point 2 from, but iTunes will happily let you burn CDs of DRM'd music. I know this because I've done it many times. The only limit it imposes is on the number of times it lets you burn a playlist with DRM material in. But will also let you create a new, identical playlist if you want.

Also, all Apple DRM is AAC. So if you're having problems burning m4p files because of DRM, then.the problem is with whoever applied the DRM to the file and the restrictions imposed, not Apple/iTunes.

[Silver Joinee Johnd]

Gaz, on 04 September 2010 - 10:50 PM, said:

Uh, I don't know where you got point 2 from, but iTunes will happily let you burn CDs of DRM'd music. I know this because I've done it many times. The only limit it imposes is on the number of times it lets you burn a playlist with DRM material in. But will also let you create a new, identical playlist if you want.

Also, all Apple DRM is AAC. So if you're having problems burning m4p files because of DRM, then.the problem is with whoever applied the DRM to the file and the restrictions imposed, not Apple/iTunes.

Not being an itunes user, I admit that I'm only speaking from experience helping people out with stuff. When I say burn a CD, I mean not as a 18ish-track regular CD (which does indeed work fine) but as a more useful 'mp3' CD (which doesn't), little point doing the former these days unless you're planning to play the CD in a very old player. Strange how you say all Apple DRM is AAC - this person downloads literally all their music from the Apple store and it is all m4p format. Never used the Apple store myself so not sure about the details there.

What is good about itunes and ipods of course is the perfect compatibility with Last.fm scrobbling of stuff played on the ipod. Probably not important for most people though.

[Gold Joinee Spaca-Sweeney(GA)]

I've had an iPhone for a couple of years now. I like the phone, hate the battery life when you actually use it. I dont like that you cant drag and drop stuff to it and everything has to go through iTunes. I have only bought Apps from iTunes as i dont want to get tied in.
As for sincing with my PC, crap, takes ages so now i dont bother. I just update my outlook when i get a new contact on my phone manually.

I might have a creative zen touch (20gb) if you are interested.

[Worm]

Living with my new Sony Walkman (X1060) and loving it, apart from a few foibles (can't play podcasts sequentially for instance)

But really wanted to post to recommend MediaMonkey. Organises my music, and syncs to my player nicely.

This post has been edited by Worm: 17 September 2010 - 09:12 AM

[spannz15]

I *HEART* my ipod. Had one for a good 6 years now, never had a problem.
I can even do some of the stuff people are complaining about like drag and drop files onto it. Don't know why and mine is the first ipod i've come across to do that, maybe its a bit dodgy but hey ho. I still just go through itunes anyway.

[joinee wolfman]

YMAJ Mr A, on 04 September 2010 - 11:10 PM, said:

Not being an itunes user, I admit that I'm only speaking from experience helping people out with stuff. When I say burn a CD, I mean not as a 18ish-track regular CD (which does indeed work fine) but as a more useful 'mp3' CD (which doesn't), little point doing the former these days unless you're planning to play the CD in a very old player. Strange how you say all Apple DRM is AAC - this person downloads literally all their music from the Apple store and it is all m4p format. Never used the Apple store myself so not sure about the details there.

i think iTunes and the iPod is aiming to wipe the cd out for good. you can digitally send someone a collection of tracks as opposed to putting it on to a cd.

my nano is the best £120 i've ever spent. nearly 2 years of constant use and it's still going strong.

[PJ Stevie G]

YMAJ Mr A, on 02 September 2010 - 04:14 PM, said:

I recently bought my Sansa Clip+ on the basis of it being rated the top mp3 player for 2 years running on anythingbutipod.com

It's tiny and awesome.

http://anythingbutip...layers-of-2009/
http://anythingbutip...plus-review.php

On Amazon it's only £40 for the 8gb version, and accepts micro SD cards so you can add more if needed. Battery life - had it for a few weeks now, playing it for about half an hour every day and have only just had to do a 2nd recharge, which takes less than an hour anyway. The default firmware works well but when they release a stable Rockbox version for it it'll be even better.

I bought exactly the same thing for the same reason. Cheap, good and 8gb.

Also it works easily if you want to use it with Windows Media Player, great for running and good sound quality too.

Also, curse you Belgium!

[Gold Joinee Spaca-Sweeney(GA)]

Lou, im still tring to find the Zen, stand by

[Poohbah (Gsq)]

Cool, thanks Mr S!

At the moment I'm quite enjoying being at the mercy of my broken one's "random album selector" button. It has good taste sometimes.

[Distant Joinee Mandoran]

I love my Zens and they have been running smoothly for years despite taking a few bounces down staircases. I am not happy with the way Apple works, and having to use iTunes to help manage junior's collection has convinced me to never ever go there myself. Absolute nightmare with DRM, using different iTunes installations (laptop-desktop-his mum's machine) where as far as I can see you have to go through hoops to access your own music from machine to machine.