MP3 Player You Own?

[sremick]

It's not rhetoric. I have nothing against the player itself, but the fanboyism that goes with owning an iPod. It's more of a fashion accessory. I NEED A DAMN RADIO.

Plus for all the glitz and "gee whiz" associated with Apple products, they suffer from Apple's closed-off restrictiveness. The limited CODEC support of the iPhone and iPod Touch effectively rule them out for me. Not everything I want to play is in MP3, AAC, QuickTime, or MPEG4. DivX and Ogg Vorbis have been out for years and are supported by the competition. So the competition gets my money, despite the fact that the Apple devices easily have the horsepower to support these other CODECs if Apple would only get the stick out of their posteriors. Plus, I need a device that interfaces via UMS and doesn't require some special piece of software (that requires an OS I don't even use) to get at what is in-reality just a glorified USB flash drive.

I'm hardly a "Creative fanboy" or an Apple hater, but for all the quality of their products and design Apple sure make a lot of stupid decisions and unnecessarily limit their products.

 

[DBloke]

Umm... maybe because people use them for more than songs?

One word: videos

Music vids ?
Thats all you need when your jogin

 

[sremick]

Music vids ?
Thats all you need when your jogin

Heh, I'm pretty sure people use their portable media players a lot of other places besides while they're jogging.

Music videos, TV episodes, movies, etc. Heck, I watched Children of Men on my Palm T3 on my flight back home from Las Vegas.

 

[DBloke]

I used to have a c500 (had to get rid of it due to it not workin)
It had a media player (not the defualt one)that could play allmost every format
Only prob is a lot of stuff I have has subs

 

[Brawny]

DT: I'm ashamed...128kbps for the likes of MUSE!? They are a 256 or better band!

 

[[DT]]

DT: I'm ashamed...128kbps for the likes of MUSE!? They are a 256 or better band!

Most of my stuff I tend to sample to 192Kbps, probably ripped that in a rush or with a new tool before I confirmed the settings.

Honestly, I don't think much needs sampling up towards 256, if you do, I'd have two comments:

1) Are you using reference level phones? I'd challenge you to tell the difference on 192 vs. 214 vs 256 on the OEM earbuds. I can tell some difference on more modern recordings in extreme samples ranges (say 192 vs. 256+) with my Sennheiser's. For portable buds I'm using Shure E3C's, and even with the pretty outstanding dynamic range they have, I don't notice too much difference.

2) If you're super concerned with the quality (and an iPOD is far from anything audphile-ish anyway), I'd just make the leap to a Lossless format, or if I'm really listening, do it from a better source, better amp, real loudspeakers, etc.

Music videos, TV episodes, movies, etc. Heck, I watched Children of Men on my Palm T3 on my flight back home from Las Vegas.

Yeah, on several trips to DC, I did seasons of 24, movies (Thank You For Smoking), etc. I was pretty impressed with the video quality and presentation even on the small display.

Hey DT, what do you think of Rockbox on the gen 5? I wasn't aware it had come along so far since the last time I had checked, so now I'm intrigued...

I'm torn. I don't like or use iTunes - originally I was using Anapod from Redchair - great little $15 app that allows you to move A/V to/from your iPOD. Even has some extra utils for photo management, outlook contact conversion, etc.

Then it got a little funked up, I couldn't regen my activation key, several problems relating to Redchair (the developer), but I eventually got it working again.

I eventually made it to RockBox as a total solution for several items:

Simple filesystem access (drag and drop, file structures in MY format)

Extended audio CODECs like FLAC (lossless)

Better UI (with themes, custom icons, etc.)

Better controls (things like shuffle with a filter, user defined meta data and queries)

I understand it is easily reversible too (and free so why not).

Plus I wanted to tinker around with it - I had more fun fooling around with it than I did the iPOD (I think you're probably like me in that regard )

Downside:

*Poor* video support - the last version I used had a couple of CODEC to handle a few formats the native OS doesn't, but at the time, it wasn't using the onboard video acceleration hardware, so...it...was...slow. To the point of not really being acceptable.

You can boot back to the OEM OS easily enough, but since it uses it's own file structure/DB/Meta formats, you have to use iTunes to have access to stuff in iPOD OS mode (or Anapod, it just has to go through the old interface).


I have exclusively used video when flying, so it hasn't been a huge loss at this point (haven't flown since installing it). As much as I love everything bout RockBox for audio, if you're using your iPOD for video, I can't really recommend it at this point (improved video is there #1 dev request/effort).

 

[Brawny]

]
Most of my stuff I tend to sample to 192Kbps, probably ripped that in a rush or with a new tool before I confirmed the settings.

Honestly, I don't think much needs sampling up towards 256, if you do, I'd have two comments:

1) Are you using reference level phones? I'd challenge you to tell the difference on 192 vs. 214 vs 256 on the OEM earbuds. I can tell some difference on more modern recordings in extreme samples ranges (say 192 vs. 256+) with my Sennheiser's. For portable buds I'm using Shure E3C's, and even with the pretty outstanding dynamic range they have, I don't notice too much difference.

2) If you're super concerned with the quality (and an iPOD is far from anything audphile-ish anyway), I'd just make the leap to a Lossless format, or if I'm really listening, do it from a better source, better amp, real loudspeakers, etc.

I'll use FLAC or WMA lossless for bands I care about.
And I had a pair of Bose quietcomfortII's...then my sister's cats chewed the cord...

 

[[DT]]

I'll use FLAC or WMA lossless for bands I care about.
And I had a pair of Bose quietcomfortII's...then my sister's cats chewed the cord...

Did the cat sound pretty decent afterwards?

 

[Brawny]

It made an interesting noise when it hit the wall. :thumbsup:

 

[darksamus]

A gig is not enough space. That would only fill like 200 songs for myself as I take all my music in VBR, 192, 256 or 320.

I have over 100 gigs of music and I actually listen to all of it, since it's good music. Downloading single songs to me is a waste of time.

 

[yoshi500]

Philips SA9100 2 gigs

 

[+Maniacal=Maniac+]

I'm Saving Up For A Creative ZEN... 4gb...

Not A Stone... Not A V... Just a ZEN

 

[Chewy]

I have a 4gb 1st gen(I think...it has more squared off edges then the new ones and isn't as wide)

Despite it being really small its actually extremely durable. It went through the washer and the dryer and survived with no harm done!

To the ipod haters: Why? Why do you hate an MP3 player? What is so bad about it?

 

[uloseiwin]

4 gb nano, the ones with video. They're pieces of crap, dont even consider getting one. Your better off getting one of those giant videos, 4 gigs can barely hold any video at all.

Ipod's are really overrated...

 

[manred]

To the ipod haters: Why? Why do you hate an MP3 player? What is so bad about it?

In my opinion, there is nothing bad about it. I just don't want to have one because everyone else does. I just want to be the kid who goes to school and people will say that I have a cool MP3 player.
Take my YP-K5 for example, I am still the only kid in my school who has one. The next one I'm getting is the P2 which no one has.