Tell me about mp3 players

If you're willing to put up with a bit more in terms of size (larger than an iPod, smaller than a Discman) and see value in having on-board recording capabilities (*amazing* for field recording, sampling, etc), I'd strongly recommend taking a look at the Jukebox 3, which would be my next purchase if I had the cash. (Sean C has one, he can tell you more.)

The thing I like about Creative's stuff is that (for better or worse), they've been the go-to people for generalist PC-audio stuff for years now, and have a genuinely good idea as to what people are looking for as a result. It's the little things that make or break an item like this, and Creative are usually pretty good about providing them.

I don't know much about the Lyra, but I'm weary of RCA products in general. The Archos player looks cool (built in FM tuner! recording functions!), but I'd have to do more research before saying anything conclusive.

I hate to seem like I'm sloganeering, mainly because I despise some of their PC products, but another good thing about Creative is that you can be virtually guaranteed that they'll continue to develop the product long after you buy it. Since releasing the JB3, they've made substantial upgrades to the Jukebox firmware; these significant improvements have been backwards-applied to older Jukebox models, proving that you're not going to fall victim to built-in obsolescence if you take the plunge.

As for your questions: firewire isn't massively important if you're planning on doing batch transfers overnight, but once you start getting into storage spaces consisting 10 gigs and up, I'd imagine it could be a very handy option. Of course you'll need a firewire port on your computer, something native to newer Macs but not necessarily on PCs. In terms of how much money to spend, urg. How important is fidelity? Portability? Warranty? Aesthetics? Support? Storage space?

The reason I'm personally happy to go cheap on these is that I barely even want the player as a player; my problem is more that I don't have a high-speed connection at home, and thus wind up downloading loads of music elsewhere that I can't, currently, bring back to the burner and run off onto a disc. In other words, what I'm basically looking to spend money on is a portable hard drive for mp3s. A portable drive itself would pretty much do it for me, but so long as I'm spending money on such I thing it seems silly not to just get a player in the bargain.

Ronan your volume question interests me: the last time I got a disc player I decided to spend a little extra and get a Rio that can play from mp3 discs. I was appalled to find that the volume was too low. Even at its highest level it was only enough for listening in a completely quiet room -- which means completely inaudible on planes, trains, etc. So I returned it.

Poor SNR (Signal To Noise Ratio) was a significant problem with early MP3 players, almost across the board. Even at max volume, the output on many would either be a) not loud enough or b) plagued by an ugly veil of obscurant white noise.

Since signal output and noise levels are linked, loud volume carriage often also means better fidelity. The newer Jukeboxes boast a 98dB SNR, which means that you'll not only get a loud signal, but one delivered clearly. I believe that the iPods are in this range as well; not sure about the competitors, though. These are the kinds of differences that account for some of the price discrepancies.

Also: unless the various computers you'll be using all have firewire ports, I'd suggest that firewire isn't an immediate requirement for your needs.

but i've had one for a year now and i'm never looking back.

What Martin said?

Great minds think alike?

I could talk about the tragedy of the wreckage of my Christmas plans (short version: job cuts vacation short by two days; Dan leaves Joei in Cincy so that he can spend time with his family in Akron in abbreviated time frame since she has singing commitments until Xmas Eve; gigantic fuck-off snowstorm keeps Joei and sister from coming to Akron Xmas Day for dinner; Dan ends up spending $1200 on a plane ticket to make it to work yesterday and arrives at the office to find that NO ONE IS THERE) but it's still making me furious.

That said, I don't think an iPod is suitable for what you want unless your work PC already has firewire ports. Have you thought about getting one of those USB flash keyrings for this? It seems ideal as they usually don't need drivers.

So, I bought this CD/MP3 player, and although I had seem many expensive ones, I found one from some off-brand for 50 bucks. It worked perfectly, granted it ate batteries like none other, but for all intents and purposes - sound as a pound.

...Then I tried the MP3 CD. I burned about 220 songs onto a CD... for some odd reason my player only read 50. I tried again, different songs, it only read 60 this time. Very frustrating.

Anyone know why it would only read certain songs?

Then again, the main issue with my player is have a very limited amount of space compared to the new mp3 players (it holds about one album).

But isn't this maybe one of the advantages of the other, cheaper models? My roommate has one and he managed to swap the drive with a cheap laptop harddrive and double his space.

I would love one of these but I don't have the money right now. When I do have the money, these mp3 players will probably be way better than the ones you can buy now, so I'm kinda OK with the situation.

Yeah, mine too, but at least on mine I can buy expansion cards for relatively cheap and store additional stuff and it's very carriable - the cards are tiny, smaller than those stupid Playstation memory cards at least.

I don't know much about MP3 players, all I care about is being able to load up an album or two for subway rides and that's it. Plane rides I'm willing to bring my regular discman and CDs, because what kind of trip would I be taking on a plane by myself where I wouldn't bring a suitcase? I don't do other types of travelling. Regardless, my uncle got an iPod thingy for Xmas and it was tres cool, had like 20G storage which stores like thousands of songs. If I for some reason wanted to listen to my entire MP3 collection in one shot, I'd definitely buy an iPod...Plus the iPods look very cool with the stainless steel, but the asthetics run into the same problem as my new color cell phone - it looks cool but the steel and the screen smudge really easily, so if look are at all a factor you'll have to clean it a lot.

I just pulled the one I own out of my purse. It's called iRock I think. My mom bought it for me. For the money I'm sure she spent (ie not much) it's pretty good. The sound is good, expansion not expensive, but it doesn't have the track names show up, as it does on the iPod, which annoyed me until I realized that, hello, I'm not exactly loading up songs that I am unfamiliar with.

Could be something to do with the files being in MP3PRO format, or not having an .mp3 extension or being at an unsupported bit-rate.

My Sony DVD player will play MP3s off CD-R(W), but has restrictions on how many folders or files it will play and doesn't recognise anything encoded at 64kbps or less.

A HA HA HHA HAAHA AHA HA

-- Michael Jones (tourajsig...), December 28th, 2002.

Thanks Mike.

I think it's the bitrate... what is a bit rate/can I adjust it?

David: there's no way to alter the bit-rate of a file after it's been created - it's like recording to videotape in LP mode and wishing later you'd used SP so the picture was better. If those files are derived from yr own CDs, you could re-create them.

The Volt player itself has a pretty intuitive interface, and generally does alright re:skipping and whatnot. It does eat batteries pretty fast when playing normal redbook cds, but not on mp3 cds, since it powers down after loading a song into memory.

I think they're around $150 US these days.

That Creative Jukebox 3 (as referred to above by mark p.) looks, in theory, as if it could be the death of my MiniDisk for mic recording purposes except there may be some problems with glitched recordings.

iPod
Pro: incredibly small; great user interface; FireWire; game onboard; ability to handle your contact list; looks REALLY COOL
Con: incredibly expensive; no recording; incredibly expensive; also, incredibly expensive
Other Pro: You can have the Beck logo engraved on the back! By Apple!
Other Con: You can spend $50 for that privilege

Jukebox 3
Pro: both FireWire and USB; good interface; recording capability; extra battery slot; other accessories
Con: big as a CD player; won't allow you to sort by album under artist (sorts artist's entire catalogue alphabetically)

Lyra
Pro: less expensive; comes with car kit; good-sized hard drive
Con: uses proprietary secured file format (because it's from a company that also dabbles in the music end of things, after all) which means no sharing of audio files; not overly attractive; USB 1.1 connection means it's pretty slow to transfer files

Any CD-based model
Pro: media is cheap, and you can flip discs in and out very quickly; plays regular CDs too
Con: your burner has to be top notch or player may not read the CDs properly; no recording capability

One of the problems you'll spot with a lot of the other MP3 player brands is that, while they do the job okay, they're butt ugly, have questionable user interfaces and have suspect construction...if you're planning to carry this thing around a lot, the last thing you need is one that has a casing that will fall off 4 months down the road from moderate usage. I think that's the best thing to recommend both the iPod and the Jukebox 3: they're definitely proven in action. I've used my Jukebox so much that the paint has worn off the buttons, but apart from some minor scratching of the bezel and the display window, it's holding firm. (Since the iPod is all clear plastic along the front, it'll probably look less attractive when it gets worn, I'm betting, but I bet it will also stay together pretty well.)

A con with the PC version is that you need to have W2k or higher - I don't, so I have to use Ephpod instead, which is no problem, but does suffer from not being able to calculate how long playlists are - I was making a playlist to make a tape and had to remake the list in Winamp to see if it would fit the tape.

I like it's portability and connectability - you can hook it up to your car, play it through an amp at home or use it on the move. And, as it's basically just a hard drive, it's helpful for file transfer between machines - transferring video files downloaded at work for example.

1. get win ipod, use on windows machine
2. someday get apple computer
3. convert ipod to mac format
3a. install xplay on the windows box
4. use ipod on both computers

does this work??

major downside: usb 1.1 - i can't see it being too smart to launch a product in 2003 with the old usb?!?!

also interesting: user programmable menu system/open source software??

if not, just look for reviews.

http://www.gizmodo.com

mostly news but almost always links to reviews.

then i saw this!!!!! it kinda is the same price as some mp3 players but it is sexy!
ps it is expensive there, you can get it for £112.

revive?
pros and cons of iplayers?
creative zens, archos, zunes??

I own a couple of Zen Stones by Creative. 2GB each. They are sized similarly to an iPod Shuffle, and also have a tiny external speaker, which feature I like a lot. I'm not even sure they make these any more, just because my liking something is like the kiss of death. They work well for my needs.

Say I've got a 500GB external hard drive with a fuckload of mp3s on it. I want a simple, small player which I can plug into that hard drive and play music from its library, with no actual computer needed. Does that exist?

ooh, good question.

I would like to know if anyone has recommendations for portable flac players. I was looking at some that ran on SD cards at Radio Shack, can't remember the brand name. I think they went up to 8 gigs which is enough space to really tempt me.

cowon s9 is rumored to work very well w/ flac. samsung p3 supports flac but not flac 1D3 tags, so you can't really browse for them except through the built in file browser

hmmm I think it was a samsung. thanks for the info, no tags would make me crazy

been geeking out comparing these things all year since my little creative zen died but i'm trying to be good and not buy one. if i see some after-christmas sales love i might take the plunge, probably leaning toward the samsung (not on the flac train yet personally) maybe even an ipod nano now that they have radio but probably not. i can hear suze orman giving me an atomic level DENY atm

Are there any mp3 players that work with Macs that aren't iPods?

why yes abbott those two i listed do

looks like sony walkmans don't support mac officially but you can drag and drop; playlists, podcasts and the like would probably be either unusable or clunky.

i mean you can play podcasts the same as any other files but some players are more elegant than others at syncing and presenting such things (neither the samsung or the cowon are great at this iirc)

Got a cowon s9 32 gig for Christmas today from my girlfriend. It seems to play every flac perfect except for 24 bit ones, but I didn't expect it to play those anyways. The screen really is a million times better than the ipod touch, more colors, crisp - it doesn't compare. It also plays every xvid I have put on it, unlike the ipod you don't need to reencode stuff to get it to play. Still figuring out all the different skins you can use for it.

i wrote iplayers instead of ipods.

pardon me for asking but why do you want a portable flac player? to hook into a larger stereo system?

I don't want a portable flac player for anything other than after downloading it, I don't need to change it to anything. I can't hear the dif between a v0 and a flac, but I can hook it up to a real stereo and still not hear the difference :).

I want a portable flac player for radio shows and it would also be very handy for DJing live (xp). I have lots of stuff on flac and very soon it's all gonna be on an external drive, I'd like to be able to just throw flac files from the folders into a player and take them places.

why won't iTunes just accept flac?

Still mighty happy with my Cowon S9. Have found a couple of xvids and wmv's it didn't want to play (red X symbol, probably a weird screen format the S9 can't resize) but then I just resized those to 480x272 with Any Video Converter (freeware) and then it did work. Using Asurada's Asuci Squarescape music & main menu skin GUI thingy.

I'm almost out of storage on my iPod Classic and am thinking of getting something with SD card compatibility / better sound. Does anyone have any strong opinions on the Cowon X9 or the iBasso DX50?