Severian Posted December 9, 2004 Posted December 9, 2004 My wife asked for an iPod for Christmas. I have heard good things and bad things about iPods. Does anyone here have any first hand experience? What are the pros and cons of ipods compared to different similar MP3 (or whatever) players? Advice please...
Sayonara Posted December 9, 2004 Posted December 9, 2004 The best thing about iPod is the seamless integration with iTunes. Apparently.
JaKiri Posted December 9, 2004 Posted December 9, 2004 They play a wider range of formats. You're either in error factually or gramatically. IPods play very few formats. The iRiver (can't remember the serial, the 40gb b&w one) is the best one out there at the moment.
Lance Posted December 9, 2004 Posted December 9, 2004 iriver plays: MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF ipod plays: MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF I wouldnt buy iriver without AAC.
bloodhound Posted December 9, 2004 Posted December 9, 2004 go to tomshardware. they have tons of reviews of portable players. there are better players on the market than ipod. ipod has the current monopoly. i cannot vouch for its sound output quality. and you have to work REALLY REALLY hard to keep it in prestine condition. But the quality of the finish is overwhemly good. the controls are very simple. there are functions like calendars and games. its all cool. and the white headphones. they cool
blike Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 I got an iPod last Christmas. I love it to death. I use it in the car and to study with. The only complaint I have with it is the battery life. However, the battery life can be extended by creating and using playlists. I use playlists when I'm alone, but I always have people in the car who are fascinated with it and so the hard drive is constantly spinning up loading different songs (people never want to hear a whole song when there are a thousand or so at your fingertips). Playlists are simple to make. You can use iTunes to create it or you can create them on-the-go very easily. It's also insanely easy and fast to load songs onto it (if you have a firewire port). It usually takes about half a second per song, so if you're looking to throw a bunch of songs on it, it won't take that long. The biggest hassle is ripping all your CDs, but if you have a fast drive it shouldn't be that bad. My CD-ROM is embarassingly slow, as is my computer (takes them forever to encode). If you use iTunes to purchase music, which I've started doing, you'll save yourself a bunch of time and money. I just buy the singles I like and they go straight to my iPod (as well as to my computer). Right now I have close to 1,400 songs on it. The interface is easy to use. You can find any song you want within 10 seconds if you know the artist or title. You can sort by genre, year, album, song name, or artist. You can also shuffle songs, either within playlists or within the whole iPod itself. Besides all that, it just looks SO SEXY!
swansont Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 I got an iPod last Christmas. I love it to death. I use it in the car and to study with. The only complaint I have with it is the battery life. However' date=' the battery life can be extended by creating and using playlists. I use playlists when I'm alone, but I always have people in the car who are fascinated with it and so the hard drive is constantly spinning up loading different songs (people never want to hear a whole song when there are a thousand or so at your fingertips). [/quote'] I have an adapter for my car so I don't have to worry about the battery. ~2400 songs on the iPod (a little more than 2/3 full now), ~3300 on the computer - I don't copy over my "one star" or unrated songs.
chadn Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 I got an iPod last Christmas. I love it to death. I use it in the car and to study with. The only complaint I have with it is the battery life. really? I thought the battery life was great. I can listen to the thing almost the entire day and just plug it in at nite. Im also happy that it doesnt require you to buy batteries like the iriver. I had an iriver befor my ipod and without a doubt I prefere the ipod. irivers just dont have the memory of the ipod either. I currently have a couple of "books on tape" (yes I know theyre not on tape) on my ipod and still have over half my memory. Its nice when Im driving home from school to be listening to "A Brief History of Time" or something. In comparison to the ipod irivers just plain suck.
Severian Posted December 10, 2004 Author Posted December 10, 2004 Thanks for the info guys. I think I should do a little more research online but now I know what to look for....
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 iriver plays: MP3' date=' WMA, WAV, ASF ipod plays: MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF I wouldnt buy iriver without AAC.[/quote'] The iRiver 140 supports .ogg. IPod doesn't. Of course, I have bias because all of my music is in Ogg Vorbis, but there we go. Yah boo sucks to Apple for not including a very popular file type. In addition, the iRiver acts as a hard drive that can play music placed on it. It doesn't force you into any proprietry software. It's also cheaper. irivers just dont have the memory of the ipod either What the? The maximum size of the iPod is 40Gb. The maximum size of the iRiver is 40Gb.
swansont Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 The iRiver 140 supports .ogg. IPod doesn't. Of course' date=' I have bias because [b']all[/b] of my music is in Ogg Vorbis, but there we go. Yah boo sucks to Apple for not including a very popular file type. Very popular? An online petition to Apple has a whopping 302 signatures at this point. Forgive the appearence of conceit, but I'd never heard of it until now, and did a Google search. Their website proclaims that "Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format." If it's new, how widely could it have been adopted? If it's not widely adopted, how does that qualify as popular? Plugins apparently do exist to allow it to play in iTunes. Maybe Apple will include the format in future iPod software.
bloodhound Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 i would love if it could support loseless codecs such as FLAC and monkey audio.
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 I've had music in 2 formats from online sources: mp3 and ogg. By and large, people I know (both in real life and over the internet) use ogg for music of higher quality, when not using a lossless codec such as FLAC. Most of the high quality film rips I see nowadays have Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec. Admittedly, I'm in a rarified environment; however, re: the matter at hand, I don't see what advantages the iPod has over the iRiver other than it can play the Apple proprietry codec, and I don't really see the point of encoding music into a proprietry format in the first place.
5614 Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 isnt a MP3 player better? i mean, you can get sizes of up to a few GB... ebay: http://search.ebay.co.uk/mp3_1GB_W0QQcatrefZC12QQfromZR3QQsacategoryZ80020QQsalocatedincountryZ3QQsosortorderZ1QQsosortpropertyZ1 is selling 1GB MP3s for ~£100 (UK) which is cheaper than an IPod and MP3 are physically smaller and you can use them as USB keys or sticks (you know, the things you stick in your USB port to transfer data). most MP3 players can play multi-format so what are the ads of IPod over MP3?
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 i would love if it could support loseless codecs such as FLAC and monkey audio. The Rio Karma supports FLAC.
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 so what are the ads of IPod over MP3? The iPod.... is an mp3 player. MP3 is a music format, not a make of media player.
5614 Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 i meant whats the difference between: an ipod: and an MP3 player: ???
Lance Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 The ipod is a hard drive player. The other is a flash player.
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 If you mean the one you linked to, then the iPod is made by apple, and, as was said, is a hard drive player. This means up to 40Gb of storage, for about £200-250.
5614 Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 The ipod is a hard drive player. The other of is a flash player. so? does it make a difference to actual playback? i mean, the ipod holds a lot of data, but you can get (i saw) a 40GB flash MP3 player, so its not a question of size, from what ive seen there's not much difference in method of loading data onto it, playback or facilities, except that one is cheaper and smaller... so why would you want an IPod (such as the one i linked to above) compared to an MP3 player (such as the one i linked above)?
JaKiri Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 You CANNOT get a 40Gb flash player. That would cost in the region of £2-4,000 if it is at all possible. By and large, you don't get flash players over 512mb (although this is increasing to 1Gb now), and they cost in the region of £100 (these are branded ones, by the way). 40 (or 80) times the storage for twice the cost? A good deal, no?
swansont Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 ... I don't really see the point of encoding music into a proprietry format in the first place. That's one way of getting the copyright holders to let you sell it. It makes it a little harder to steal.
5614 Posted December 10, 2004 Posted December 10, 2004 You CANNOT get a 40Gb flash player oh yeah, sorry i was looking at: http://search.ebay.co.uk/mp3_40-GB_W0QQcatrefZC12QQfromZR3QQsacategoryZ91365QQsalocatedincountryZ3QQsosortorderZ1QQsosortpropertyZ1 which is ebay's mp3 40GB+ section... but its all ipods and no flash memory mp3s... so sorry about that
Severian Posted December 10, 2004 Author Posted December 10, 2004 OK, I am now swithering between the Apple iPod Mini 4 GB MP3 Player and the Creative Labs ZEN Micro 5 GB MP3 Player...
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