I-pod question/advice

[Ryu]

I'm interested in getting an mp3 player and almost everyone says i-pods are the way to go. Their just so expensive I dont know about spending that much. Are refurbished i-pods alright to get and if so are there any specific vendors I should check out? Or should I just get another type of mp3 player?

[stickycoins]

I have an I-Pod Mini and I love it. Yes they are expensive, but I'd be wary of a refurbished one....I've heard that I-Rivers are pretty good and a little cheaper. My .02

[One-Fang]

I have an I-pod mini as well. It's good, but I don't know that it's really worth the extra cash. I forked it out because I wanted a reputable brand and lots of information on the 'net should it actually kark it. Kind of an insurance policy. :)

If the lower priced ones come with warranties - why not go for it? I think now, looking back, that I should have. An officemate has a cheapo brand one that he puts on our system occasionally. It plays fine. What else do you really need from an mp3 player, in the end?

[stormtreader]

I have a Creative Zen which i love.
If you only want an mp3 player/radio, theyre good.
They dont like being shaken around tho -no jogging/working out (walking and stuff is fine).
In the UK you can pick one up new for about £120.

[Mr. Rager!]

Personally, I love my iPod. I'd probably rock a refurbished one if I had to. My music collection is on iTunes and with the iPod, it works like magic almost. It's too easy.

[Immortal1982]

I'd go for the Zen too. I just bought a 20gb at a Wal-mart last month for 199$. It did me well for vacation and still gets plenty of use when im doing work around the house and yard.

[LostMyMind]

I've been thinking about getting a mp3 player (ipod or not). My concern is will it have enough volume. Many times I get a tape walkman, or even a radio walkman and I can't hear it when it's turn all the way up.

I've heard that Ipod can be quite loud, but how loud are we talking about? I have about 70 to 80db lost, which means I need it loud just to bring it up to where I can barely hear it. Does anyone know of a specific model that can crank it out?

(sorry for hijacking your thread Ryu)

[PuckishOne]

I also have an iPod mini, but my fiance has the Creative Zen Micro, and I have to say I prefer that one. More memory for the same price, and from what we've seen so far the quality is the same as the iPod.

My major complaint with iPods is that they only accept music in one format, which means that anything you, say, burn to a PC for downloading, has to be converted during the download to your iPod...not difficult or anything, just time-consuming and annoying.

[digilight]

I sadly don't have an MP3 player (I just use my computer at the shop for mine). My dad, however, has 2. He has (I believe) a creative one a 20 or 30 gig, and just looking at it, it definantly is not a good one to take for a jog or a workout. He's used it at parties and such and tends to fall asleep in his chair listening to music when he can't sleep in bed at night (he has a real bad back, 15 operations on it, and total lack of nerve conductivity in one leg and very close to total in the other). He also has another player (sorry I don't know the brand) but it uses a SD Memory card. I know he payed around 70 or 80 bucks for the player at Sams club (its his second one of this model, the first one finaly crapped out on him after about 2 or 3 years of heavy usage). Its very small and would travel well for a workout or a run. You pickup a 4 gig card for around a hundred bucks and you got a ton of tunes for a while.

As far as the volume goes. I believe that certain software will allow you to adjust the volume of the MP3's when you rip them. If you rip them with a higher volume that may also help you get a louder volume for playback.

[protege]

Since my iPod is currently dead (failed hard drive), I'm without an mp3 player. That is, unless you count the iTunes software set to 'party shuffle' on my computer.

iPods aren't exactly cheap to get fixed. Apple wants about $250 to 'exchange' mine. Since I know that I can get a new drive for it at less than $100 and have the instructions on how to replace it, I told them to go screw themselves :angel:

[LostMyMind]

As far as the volume goes. I believe that certain software will allow you to adjust the volume of the MP3's when you rip them. If you rip them with a higher volume that may also help you get a louder volume for playback.

Yeah, however that leads to distortion on some players :( That one thing I can't stand is distortion. Every player has it's (internal amp) max volume before distortion happens.

[Ryu]

so, so far, getting something other than an i-pod works just as well as an i-pod, is that what people are saying?
btw, i dont only want it for music, i also want it for podcasts if that matters

[Mr. Rager!]

btw, i dont only want it for music, i also want it for podcasts if that matters

I could be wrong, but I think then you'd have to get an iPod. Just join the iPod family, it's a lovely family. :D

[gbm85]

Podcasts are generally distributed in MP3 format, so any player should be just fine. There are even programs that will automatically download your podcasts for easy synchronization.

[Gopher]

At risk of offending the ipod loving masses, I think they're a bit limp.

I bought a Nano a couple of months back and I'm pretty unimpressed. I made the change from one of the old Sony Netwalkman MP3/ATRAC players, I had decided that I needed more capacity. The ipod is a nice design and that was the main reason I bought it.

My general views on the quality and the dynamics of the sound are that the ipod is pretty lack lusture. I found that tracks which would normally have a nice bit of punch and a clear bassline to them on the Sony would become rather flat and any attempt that the ipod made of producing clear base would either fail or end up with the beginings of distortion.

It took me ages to tweak and fiddle the settings to get them to a level were I would only describe them as being adaquete and apparently using the EQ also causes the battery to drain quicker. If only my old Sony had more memory :(

I would recommend checking out Sony's range, admitedlly their "Sonic Stage" software (their version of itunes) can be a little cumbersome at times however the quality of the sound make this a small price to pay.

You can use MP3s or if you want to save space further you can compress the files with their ATRAC3 format which I have to say is very impressive with regards to lack of degradation of quality, ie virtually non-existant.

[toolbert]

if you want a cheap mp3 player you really can't go wrong with a shuffle. Problem is that you also can't control how the songs are played since they're always on shuffle lol. The nano really doesn't do anything fantastic (besides its small nature) that mp3 players around the same price will do. I think for about the same cost, you can get an mp3 player that's also a AM/FM radio and can record FM streams. I agree with Gopher for the most part; its kind of ridiculous that Apple has such a hold on the market when there are much better mp3 players and other devices can handle things like video, pictures and to some extent music better than an i-pod can...but Apple still holds the markget strong.

[VicSilver]

Count me in as another vote for a Creative Zen. I just bought myself a 20G Zen Sleek Photo/MP3 player (and yeah, it has FM radio as well), and I adore it. (And it was only $180).

I've never owned an Ipod but I regularly "borrowed" my sister's, and we had nothing but issues with it. I have nothing but love for my Zen....my husband wants to pick up a Zen micro for himself after playing around with my Zen, and he has never ever had any desire to own an MP3 player hehe

[Seanette]

I have an RCA Lyra, and like it quite well. It's nice and compact, good-size display, controls I find easy to deal with (unlike the iPods I've played with at the Apple store), easily expandable (takes SD cards), and VERY tough. That poor thing has survived an amazing amount of clumsiness on my part and is still doing just great. It was nice and inexpensive, too. :D

[protege]

I just *fixed* my iPod! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Ok with that out of my system :D I don't have to spend any cash on it. When I accidently dropped it months ago, I thought the drive inside was trashed. At least that was what the Apple tech told me. (If you really want a new drive, Toshiba sells them for less than $100, and it's pretty easy to take the thing apart with a screwdriver.) Anyway, all I did was pop the cover off, and reseat the drive connector. That was it! Soooo now I no longer have to take piles of cds in the car, or have to listen to the crappy music at the gym ;)

[Ryu]

how many gigs should I get if I'm going to have podcasts and possibly some music on it mainly for before/between class and maybe when walking or driving somewhere? All the ones I see online are 6-8 for around 180, dont know how much that actually is in concern to mp3s especially when their podcasts. Anyone able to offer average size of podcasts and songs?

[stormtreader]

Mine is a Zen Sleek - its got a 20GB hard drive in it.

It has a nice program bundled with it as well that is *very* easy to use for moving files back and forth from pc to zen.

MP3 are usually about 3-5 mb i think, and 1 gb is 1024 mb, so 1 gb should hold about 200+ mp3s easily, more like 250.
I dont know what size radio/podcasts are, but if you put 500 mp3s onto a 6gb mp3 player, youll still have 4gb left for podcasts.

[Mixed Bag]

Since no one's given you any advice a-tall I just had to jump in. :lol:

Some months back I did quite a bit of research and, based on the reviews mentioning breakdowns, I got it into my head that I'd want a flash drive rather than a bragging-rights-capacity hard drive (I have a huge collection but mostly recycle the same thousand give-or-take songs). I was never interested in the cheap low-capacity players, but now that the iPod nano was up to 4GB I figured that was just big enough to consider respectable.

I was torn between that and the Sandisk Sansa e270 6GB flash player, also with a colour screen (retail $280--the series also has cheaper, smaller ones). The Sansa has built-in voice recording and doesn't scratch if you look at it too hard, among other perks (last I checked you had to pay for extra performance gizmos for iPods and they didn't fit nanos--I use a Mac but I can't stand Apple's recent marketing of slickness over practicality when I don't even find the slickness particularly attractive). I also think that on the Sansa the battery lasts longer on a charge and is user-replaceable, and that pictures can be viewed more conveniently while music is playing. If only Sandisk was officially Mac compatible and worked with iTunes features...so I decided to listen to the radio in the car and my collection at home until the field becomes more compatible--besides, an 8, 12, or 16 GB flash player would be even cooler! :cool:

[symposes]

Zen touch, 20g model. STill havent filled it up, and it sounds fine to me.
supposed to have 24 hour battery life.

[SongsOfDragons]

I have one of the new 30GB iPod videos. I am in love with it, it's exactly what I was looking for. Yes, you do need to convert a lot of stuff, and I just changed laptops so it took like three hours to convert about 500 songs to ACC, but the iTunes software is simple and easy to use. And believe it or not, the video quality is fantastic. I reckon the only downside is how much money Apple milks you for it.

[Mixed Bag]

MP3s work in iTunes--what did you have to convert for?

[PuckishOne]

MP3s work in iTunes--what did you have to convert for?
I've been told this before, too, but when we merged our music library, anything I wanted to put onto my iPod that hadn't come directly from iTunes, I had to open/play the file first, then manually drag/copy the file to the iPod in order to overcome the "wrong format" error messages.

It's not a bug, it's a feature, right? ;)

[Gopher]

MP3s work in iTunes--what did you have to convert for?

If you burn a CD using windows it will burn it as a WMA not an MP3, itunes does not support WMAs so it will convert them.

[Acolyte]

iTunes can convert may formats-WMA, MP3, MPEG, AAC, ect. You can set what format it changes to.

[LostMyMind]

If you burn a CD using windows it will burn it as a WMA not an MP3, itunes does not support WMAs so it will convert them.

That's by default, you can switch to mp3 rip with window media. I can't stand wma. I ripped my entire CD collection about 15G of mp3