HQ Mp3 Players Beyond IPod

REVIVE!

Right, this is ridiculous. Is there really no viable competition for a 160gb iPod?

I want a fairly large capacity (150gb+, probably 200gb actually) audio-only player - but all I can find are Archos machines, which in my experience don't remember what you were listening to, so every time you fire up you have to remember where you were and/or fuck around for ages, which in 2010 is just unacceptable...

I'm gonna have to buy a fucking iPod aren't I? Boo to you, everyoneapartfromApple.

Archos machines will remember what you were listening to now. The issue is their instability and bugginess.

You can always get an old iPod and add a 240Gb harddrive and load Rockbox. But otherwise, yeah, you're out of luck for high capacity storage at the moment in this awkward period while we wait for higher capacity & affordable SSD options.

Yeah I need at least 250 GB, I need it BADLY, and I don't care if it's a little chunky (anything smaller than a star trek tricorder is ok) but bugginess/instability is right out.

What generation ipods have big enough housings to custom a 240GB drive in there?

5th gen iPods work great: http://www.ipodzens.com/ipz_prductinfo.aspx?prd_id=321

Rockbox needs to be customized for it to work, there's a whole thread in their forums about it with stuff to download. I'm on the fence about it - like yourself, a 240Gb drive would be PERFECT for what I want to walk around with, but having to slim things down to 160Gb has been helpful to ensure the cream always rises to the top and I offload live stuff, demos, and lesser material. (Most people will find this exchange insane but, hey, that's their problem.)

Yeah 160 GB is challenging for me bcuz I have three fields of fiend-dom all of which are really sprawl-y: Classical, Film Scores, and Rock w/its attendant mutations. 160 GB is enough for two of those but not all three.

My deal is that I listen all day at my desk at work, and I like to be able feel 'at home,' with the lion's share of my stuff at the ready.

> My deal is that I listen all day at my desk at work

250GB external drive? and £40 of mp3 player for the journeys to and from.

(my 8GB flash player has everything i've bought this year and last and some of 2008s (>2k tracks). have been toying with buying another for all time classics but...)

> My deal is that I listen all day at my desk at work

>> 250GB external drive? and £40 of mp3 player for the journeys to and from.

Have considered this. But Mac at home, PC at work-- can I monkey with the HD contents at home and have it be readable by work PC? Thumb drives are fine going from one two the other but I dunno about larger drives.

you can use fat32 and you should be ok - lowest common denominator. a quick look shows amazong have a 250GB seagate that uses usb power - so only one cable, no other power supply - for £43. plus it's an off-site backup for your main stockpile.

my 8GB flash player has everything i've bought this year and last and some of 2008s (>2k tracks). have been toying with buying another for all time classics

That's exactly what I did - the iPod for the best of the main library and an 8Gb player (now with a 16Gb microSD card) for stuff I've picked up over the last year + compilations. It's a great way to segregate your recent stuff, too, so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

what are zunes like? I think they've just announced a 120gb one.

don't think you can get them in the UK though, but I'm sure there's a way...

wrinklepaws to thread.

120Gb Zunes have been out for a while - in fact Microsoft has moved away from HD based players. The problem is they're a closed environment so no third-party apps are available, you're tied to the Zune software.

I've gone through iPods... they intentionally make the duration of the battery life last about a year and then die for reason that they know your next purchase will be, once again, an iPod.

I got a Sansa Fuze for Xmas... no frills, menu is tacky, but the thing is: it works. All I want to do is listen to music, and you can install Rockbox on it. It has an knock-off scroll wheel which I actually find superior b/c it's a physical wheel you move, not a touch thing.

I never understood the need to get 160gigs of music all on your player at once, either. It's not THAT hard to plug your thing into the computer and swap out albums. Typically I don't need more than 6 different albums per week, and will listen to them all throughout, swapping them out for other things for the weekend. People who need EVERY FUCKING THING I'VE EVER AMASSED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE all in their pockets I truly do not get.

I've got an Archos 250GB and it's great, not buggy or unstable at all. Looks swish (it runs Android , great with movies, will play pretty much anything you throw at it, and fun to web browse too. I hear stability was touch and go with earlier models, but I've got no complaints.

Cowon reputedly make the most audiophile-friendly mp3 players, but they top-out at 32gb.

couldn't live with 6 albums, but 2000 tracks is fine. that said, the shuffling could be better - walking to work is 30 minutes each way and i still hear the same track on adjacent days.

had a cowon, a hdd based 20G M5. battery died after 15 months but i still use, almost daily, it as a portable drive. good format support. had an obscure make mp3 player next (ATMT X-Seven), which was tiny and took micro sd cards but seemed to have a 500 track limit = FAIL. now have an iriver lplayer which is great and i'd buy another tomorrow if they still sold them. only ipod i've ever considered buying was the old stumpy mini but all my cds are ripped to flacs / oggs so....

I look at the Archos devices now and then but if you look at the forum (which is skewed towards complainers, I know) it still seems the latest models have issues with them missing tracks in their internal library as well as a total track limit around 32000 (which would render the large HD pointless for music).

Total track limit seems completely asinine. Although since 30 or 40 percent of my library is classical music with 10-20 minute movements I would probably not run afoul of that.

If you install Rock Box in some of these things, can you also install some freeware thing that lets you read PDFs? TBH I never watch movies on my iPod but i wish I could read documents on it. And iTouch/iPhone does not have enough capacity from the music angle.

I don't know about a PDF reader, you'd have to do a little research on their site. I believe you can read text files using Rockbox, though.

I've gone through iPods... they intentionally make the duration of the battery life last about a year and then die for reason that they know your next purchase will be, once again, an iPod.
― kelpolaris, Thursday, April 1, 2010 7:33 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

I've heard this from a lot of people, but I bought my 80GB ipod back in 2006 and the battery still hasn't died on me. Granted, it only lasts about 4 hours before I need to recharge it, but that ain't too bad. And I use this sucker every day! Maybe I just got lucky. I am starting to run out of HD space, though.

Does anyone know if the Zune is supposed to better in terms of audio quality than an ipod?

my 2003 ipod finally gave up the battery ghost last fall. Still works if you plug it in - it's my car audio payer. Don't know what people are doing to kill the batteries so fast - none of my friends or family have got anything less than 4 years from an ipod.

One more question from me. Can iPhone/iTouch work with a portable HD without needing a proper computer to intercede? Like, if I have a 250 GB lacie drive that lived at my work desk stocked with my library, could I just plug an iphone directly into it and listen to shit?

I haven't seen a connector for that, though I've seen external SD card connectors which means you can add 32Gb of storage.

nope xp

xpost now that makes good sense. I had been wondering if there were memory augmenters that work the same as those battery augmenters they sell for long plane trips.

Yeah, it's here: http://www.zoommediaplus.com/

So wait, I can buy an iPod and then change the firmware to this Rockbox open-source thing? How and more importantly why? I've never heard of such a thing!

Also, idiot question, but all my ripped music is on mp3, and the last time I investigated iPods in any detail they seemed to favour aac files. Will iTunes convert all my mp3s to aac whether I ask it to or not (I have a long-standing FEAR that iTunes will eat my computer from the inside out), or will it leave 'em alone?

Anyone recommend this Archos 'media tablet' (ugh)? I have a 605 with a snazzy TV adapter thingum but I'm going to sell it.

no it won't convert your mp3s to aac, it will only convert wma's

> I can buy an iPod and then change the firmware to this Rockbox open-source thing?

i don't think you can, not with modern ipods as they've locked them down. could be wrong.

rockbox website says: "Apple: iPod 1g through 5.5g, iPod Mini and iPod Nano 1g"

but i know nothing about ipod generations.

xpost ipod/itunes does not mind if you have mp3s and will happily play them. iTunes preferences will be defaulted to import newly ripped things as AAC but you can change that preference as well.

So wait, I can buy an iPod and then change the firmware to this Rockbox open-source thing? How and more importantly why?

Only up until the 5th generation iPods. All the applications necessary are on the Rockbox site.

all my ripped music is on mp3, and the last time I investigated iPods in any detail they seemed to favour aac files

iPod's have no problem with MP3s. Besides, you don't want to convert one lossless format to another, you'll degrade the sound quality.

So, I bought a 160gb iPod Classic, surprise surprise...

I don't think you'll regret it. Will you stick with iTunes or try J. River Media Center or Media Monkey?

Off topic, but I highly recommend the Sony NWZ range as an alternative to the iPod Mini. Drag & drop and great sound quality (with Klipsch headphones). Mine's 16gb.

For what it's worth I'm diving head-first into the world of Apple, having also just invested in a refurbished MacBook Pro too! So I'm giving iTunes a go for the first time. I'm an all or nothing kinda chap...

I'm not a knee-jerk Zune hater but the new Zune software absolutely makes my head explode, my mother bought a 30gb one a few years ago (even though after adding 10 albums and 100 songs she asks me to help her delete things so it doesn't get overfilled) and the updated software is the worst thing in the world, absolutely unintuitive and confusing and ridiculous. Until a viable third-party app works with it or they improve their software, don't buy one.

looking around in the world of non-iPod mp3 players -- I mainly listen to music through my laptop, but I'm going to run out of space before long, and if I offloaded a bunch of stuff (backed up elsewhere of course) it'd make my daily stuff a little less "remember to clear space / run the clean-up app / etc" -- I guess the rebooted Walkman gets high marks, especially the hi-end model, but...anybody got anything they use and like?

I love my Cowon O2 unit:

http://www.jetaudio.com/products/cowon/o2/

great output sound, 16 GB, plays FLAC files as well as MP3 etc.

I should say that while I say "mp3" I actually mean "AAC" - the only stuff I usually have in any other format are mixes of my own stuff & Dead shows lol

the Cowon will play aac files as well fwiw

looking at it & reading write-ups, thank you! kind of excited to cast the net around on this stuff

I like my Sony NWZ A17 a lot. Roughly the size of an iPod mini but because it uses micro sd cards you can have a 200gb library on there. And have other micro sd cards with other huge libraries on them to swap in when you are in a different mood. Great sound, long battery life. About 300 bucks.

Cons: proprietary Sony USB cable, takes a good 15 or 20 minutes to rebuild its database when you stick a different high capacity card in.

Pono

FP ;)

Who's Zoomin' Zune? (THE OFFICIAL MICROSOFT ZUNE THREAD)

Oh, Wrinklepaws

I've been thinking of getting something like a Oneplus X as my next mp3 player - sounds good, spotify integration, no proprietary software needed, standard usb cable, sd card... and in Denmark, I can get a used for something like ~100 euros

Fiio X3 is worth a look if sound quality's your main driver and you're tired of iTunes syncing errors. Doesn't do fancy modern stuff like playlists though. Not easily, anyway. But it plays m4a and FLAC, as well as mp3 and probably others.

Yeah, I've been pretty happy with my Fiio X1, which is a cheaper and less fancy version of X3. There's no internal memory, you need a MicroSD card, but it'll take anything up to 128Gb. And it supports pretty much every file format, including FLACs and WAVs.

You can import playlists from the computer, but you have to create them on another application, which is a bit difficult. And of course you can create playlists within the player itself. Also, the internal options for various types or play are pretty good: you can play/shuffle all songs within a folder, or by genre, artist, album, etc. The "play by folder" option I especially like, because if you're anal like me and create a genre folder tree within the memory card, it'll play all albums within that folder in a row. So, for example, I have one folder for all house/techno/trance/etc albums, and when one albums ends it moves to the next one inside the genre folder instead of replaying the same album.

So yeah, if you want a player that does all sorts of things in sync with your computer, I wouldn't recommend the X1, but if you want good sound quality, lossless file playing, and decent options within the player itself, it's a good choice.

I really got spoiled by the iPod classic. Back in 2008, a 120 GB classic was more than enough to hold my entire music library, so I just synced my PC's library with that. Well, my PC's music library has grown, and music playing technology hasn't kept pace. All the pressure is on for streaming, but when I tried to put together a playlist for a friend's radio show last week half the songs I suggested weren't on Spotify. I just don't want to outsource the very important job of ripping off musicians.

I've looked at the available options, and most of them are luxury-priced - which means they're not designed to be practical. Aside from a superior DAC, which is important, I don't see anything any of them do that I can't do on my phone. The FIIO isn't luxury-priced, but the idea of me trying to navigate my library with a UI that doesn't come close to what Apple had come up with in 2008 seems like a fool's errand.

Right now unless you're an audiophile, I don't see much compelling reason to have a separate music player apart from one's phone.

battery life?

I'm not a true audiophile, but so much of my music consumption is done via headphones while I'm commuting that I'm extremely happy I decided to invest to the X1 + a portable headphone amp. Also, I like having a tactile player where you can change what you're playing with a couple of button pushes. With a phone, you'd need to unlock it, open the music app, change settings, etc. It's much more of a hassle if you're walking, for example.

I had a Clip+ but found the UI so bad and the battery so poor that I stopped using it. Dragonfly DAC + android phone + 128GB SD card works great for me these days. It's a touch more voracious on battery life, but I'm charging it overnight anyway and I haven't run out of juice yet.

re tactileness, I guess I'm not much of a skipper - or at least, the lack of ease of skipping on a phone discourages me from doing it, and I obviously haven't found it much of a sacrifice.

battery life?

― koogs

my phone has plenty of it - it was a big consideration when i was looking at phones. the screen isn't as big as the more modern ones, but i didn't need that.