Need help deciding? to Ipod or not??

I think that you can only use iTunes or software you can buy to transfer music to it. You have to use a third party program to get music from it to a computer. The battery on the latest iPods is supposed to have fixed that short lifespan problem they had.
You can have the iPod set up to automatically update everytime you plug it in, or to do it by hand.
It sounds as good as any other MP3 player I've used. As long as the encoding rate is high enough.
If you already have a decent player that works for you, I'd say to just skip the iPod.
I'm a bit pissed right now about mine though. A couple days ago I was charging the battery, and then unplugged it from the wall. The backlight came on, then went off, and after that it was dead. It's being sent back to Aple now for repair.

You have to use iTunes to transfer files - but the MP3s can come from anywhere. I have MP3s from several sources (including ripped in MusicMatch and Winamp) that run perfectly fine under iTunes & on my iPod. The sound quality is among the best - but if your MP3s aren't up to snuff, it won't matter how good the iPod sound is.

my 2 cents on mp3 players.

i say skip the ipod, yes they have gotten batter of the last few years with the following things:

- fixed battery problem
-lowered price to get battery replaced
- added color screen, picture viewer, and now video playback
- build quality has much improved (we are talking ipods, not nano or mini)

however, this is why i would skip it.

-it requires 3rd party software to sync in any OS you try be it linux, windows, or mac os. in the long run this is a pain. you have been spoiled by auto-mounting as a usb hard drive, and you'll admit its the best way to sync...PERIOD. (my iriver is the same way....love it)

- unless hacked properly, makes it a pain to share your music with your buddies. there have been stories where an unhacked ipod has been hooked up to a buddies pc and suddenly all your tunes got replaced by your buddie's wtf? that said, why must you hack a player for it to work right in those terms.

- the color screen is only 64.000 colors. there are players with 260,000+ colors. i know they are meant to play music, but if you have whipped it out of your pocket to show off, why not have it be show-worthy.

- white is not parctical. white gets dirty, and those headphones, you'll be a theft victim like no other. there is a bread of pocket theves out there who target people with the white headphones. you can't miss them.

- sound quality is good, but can be better. that said, when ER first launched the ER-6 it would not work with the ipod (although it works with other players...i am successfully using a pair with my iriver) and the reason is because the amp (if you wanna call it that) is too weak and just cant produce the highs high enough and the lows low enough to make the best use of the headphones, so ER was forced to make a revision ER-6i that would require less juice and thus be more compatible with the ipod. furthermore the use of propriatary codecs (ACC) and lack of open source support (ogg vorbis) is pretty sad. 90% of my tunes are 192kbps vbr ogg (my iriver plays ogg). playing that via my ER-6 is like orgasm to your ears. Furhtermore, as an avid linux user, ogg support is crucial. Might not be the case for you, but consider what codecs it can and can't play before you buy.

- the "cool factor" can be a bad thing. since ipods are everywhere, thats just the thing, they are NOT cool anymore. if you ahve something original, people will give you a 2nd look, unlike all the ipod owners out there.

now for some suggestions.

now as an iriver owner i should probably suggest an iriver, but at this point there is not much to look at. the H10 line sucks pretty bad.

that leaves you with Achros and Creative for the most part. To be honest i love the Achros GMini 400. one of my friends had it and abused it like no other, the build quality was excellent, the sound quality was very good, and the screen was just fantastic (and yes, it plays videos).

I'm debating myself if I should get an ipod also. I have also been looking at some of the Creative Zen players. Anyone have any feedback on them?

*edit* crap, didn't even see the Ipod Nano alternative thread.

Reasons?

i dont mean to be an @sshole but this is how i feel. the ipod is a great mp3 player. anyways hope you enjoy what ever you end up getting.

Its a triviality, unless your not a Windows or OSX user in which case its a reason not to get one. I personally use Itunes as my music jukebox and organiser on my computer, and its a hell of alot easier than having some nuts folder hierarchy.

No comment, I don't have hacked firmware, and to be fair if a friend wants an album I have I just give them the CD. Of course if all your music is illegally downloaded then I guess that might be an issue...

New Ipod screen has 260,000+ colours

You tell him later to get some decent third party headphones (which I agree with - the ipod ones are fairly crappy). Theft risk is a risk with phones Mp3 players etc. White can be cleaned, or he can get a black one.

AAC is not a bad codec at all. I typically encode at 192 or 256 kbps AAC. Sounds great to me. Ogg support would be nice, but I don't really see the point.

I can't really comment on this, its all kind of relative. I got my Nano because I wanted a mid capacity ipod because of the itunes (which I had been using for about 9 months) integration, the neat interface and of course the sheer aesthetic value of the thing, however I didn't really want one of the mini's which were kind of clunky. The nano is one neat little toy.

To be fair all of the ipods are great music players, they have a really superb interface (click wheel etc) and look really good. If you want something a little exotic (like decent linux support, line in recording etc) by all means go with something else. All in all it dosen't really matter.



Finally, to the original poster.
Sound quality sounds great to me, mp3's can be played from any source. It will only have problems with DRM'ed files that you don't have under your Itunes account. No idea about DRM'ed WMA's. Apple lossless I haven't really used, though the quality is supposedly as good as Flac but the files are a bit bigger, as already said I use 256 Kbps AAC. Ipods don't actually show up as another drive in my computer. Instead you plug them in, Itunes detects that the ipod is plugged in and autosync's it with a playlist, or playlists you have set up.

Considering that the iPod series still accounts for 75% of all MP3 players sold,. I'm not sure where the "they're not cool anymore" argument comes from. Besides, people don't buy an MP3 player to be noticed.

iTunes is 3rd party software? Besides, disk mode allows you to use the iPod like an external HD. I also prefer to be able to have more organizational control over my music than simply copying a folder to the player.

AAC is not proprietary - the AAC Protected codec that is used for iTMS is. And the majority of people are not using ogg, so it wouldn't make sense to dump a more widely used format for it. In fact, AAC is the MP4 standard.Here's a list of what the iPods play:

I would also point out that AAC Protected uses PlayFair, which is a far more reasonable attempt at DRM than the garbage Microsoft is trying to force down its customers' throats.

never buy 3rd party batteries. they can damage, and even kill your player. in regard to itunes being 3rd party, although yeah, apple makes it, as they do with teh ipod so its the same party as the ipod, its still one extra piece of sh*t you have to install on your box. my iriver (and many other players out there) require NOTHING installed, you can have a fresh install of WinXP and the iriver will connect to it, and the US version will even Sync to it via WMP9. And what if you are not using windows, say you're using itunes, there is no itunes for linux, so you gotta use a program like gtkpod to get connected. drag and drop folder hierchy is the shit. don't knock it till you try it. my iriver supports both, folders, and organization done through WMP, i use folders because its just so cool. in fact, here is how its broken down. makes finding the right song a breeze. having it go the folder route has another benefit, the boot-up time is much, much shorter vs having it organized. and we can't forget about the all time importance of FM radio, FM recording, a microphone, and line-in recording

You never answered my question as to why the H10 line sucks, abf.

i like the h10's. i have an ifp180t and im pretty happy with it. i use my axim x30 more though, even though the sound quality is pretty meh, it can play any format out there.

You don't need iTunes for an iPod.
XPlay works just fine.
That's all

the point is not that if you need itunes or not, the point is you need SOME TYPE OF SOFTWARE.


now as to why the H10 sucks:
i meant it in a good way. I like the top model iriver players. The H100 was solid, the H300 was amazing, but the H10 sort of comes short of the expectations. Ok, now it has that scroll pad instead of the buttons on the H300 or the joystick on the H100, but thats trully a mixed blessing, in my opinion, the scroll pad doesn't work very effectively (reminds me of the dell dj wheel in a way). Its clear benefit over the H100 and H300 is the size, it is a much, much smaller player than the previous models, and the screen is very good and colorful (just as the H300 screen). Now that said it is missing some features of the H300, such as the microphone and line-in recording. Although its great that it still features the FM radio and picture and text viewers. There have been clearly quite a few complaints on the topics of build quality and battery life, which is quite out of character for iriver because with all their other players, they have that factor nailed.

Well nuts - you need windows to run the damn thing anyway. Regardless of if your using iTunes, Windows or anything else to move music onto your mp3 player, your still using software and a GUI to do it. I just think that iTunes is better, especially when you have a fair amount of music.

you know what i meant. granted you'll be using an OS and a USB driver. you don't need a gui, you can always do it in text mode

so to correct myself: you need software other than the OS to get it working.

besides, itunes is a resource hog

You forgot that the H10 doesn't support .ogg files abf. At least, it doesn't explicity state that it supports them...

double post...

Since iTunes isn't 3rd Party software, the first part of your statement really isn't applicable to the issue at hand. Furthermore, you are touting WMP to categorize MP3s - all adding track info does in WMP is add it to the file properties. It does not apply standardized track tags, in contrast to iTunes, Winamp, MusicMatch, etc. That's why you can have a fully catalogued set of MP3s in iTunes, MMJB, etc., and if you put them in the WMP library, the track titles will not match.