iPod Alternatives

blog
41

“Not so much. The iPod drives the iTunes store, and the iTunes store drives the iPod. It’s a closed model for a reason, and it works. Remember that Apple is a company that exists to make a profit; they are doing very well at this with their current system. :)”
-Peter Hosey

The idea is that it could do better by offering a subscription service. I have several iTunes users in my family, they all agreed that they’d much rather pay a flat fee for unlimited tracks.

This whole ownership debate over buying / renting is misplaced. You don’t own anything when you buy it from the music store. It’s a locked down DRM’d track either way. At least with a subscription you could download the track again if you lose it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Apple is stubborn.

42

There has never, and will never be any alternative to the iPod. Shame on you!

43

I recently bought and then returned a second-generation iPod Shuffle. I liked the player, but I couldn’t get iTunes to talk to the thing. And my experience with Apple support demonstrated that Apple actually hates me. I replaced it with a Creative Muvo V100, which I’m finding a little disappointing.

And I think the reason is a curious one; it tries to do too many things, and ends up doing many of them rather poorly.

The iPod didn’t do so many things, but it did what it did exceptionally well. It didn’t bother me that the iPod Shuffle couldn’t work with a playlist, for example. Yet the Muvo’s clumsy, folder-based almost-playlists scheme is frustrating, even though it can produce results that could not be emulated in any way on the iPod.

No Apple fanboi, I, but I think there is underappreciated virtue in simplicity.

44

lack of fm is a killer … i buy music , but not before I’ve heard enough to like it … this feature alone (or lack of it) is an iPod killer for me … great interface , great looking gadget , great store to buy music from , but ignoring normal listing patterns ? hmmm … don’t call us we’ll get back to you.

45

I’m actually leaning towards picking up one of the Neuros Audio players (the DAC, not their set-top boxes). It supports OGG, has open firmware, integrated FM support, and comes with all the necessary car adapters. Have any of you played with one?

46

“This is hardly the point. Basic features like FM radio should be INCLUDED and not aftermarket third-party add-ons.”

I’m not so sure about that. It should be included if everybody (or nearly everybody) who wants an iPod wants a radio; clearly Apple has only seen enough demand for an add-on, not building it into the iPod. Either that or they’re working on it.

“[The statement that using the Finder to manage music is bad] is quite ironic coming from Apple users who constantly remind us how great it is to “install” applications by dragging and dropping them rather than running setup.exe installers. So which is it? Easier? Harder?”

Different issue. You only ever drag one or more applications to one folder; very few people (I’m one) divide their Applications folder into subfolders. For most people, a flat list works just fine here, because they just don’t have enough applications installed for subfolders to be worth it. And rarely does somebody install more than one application at a time, and it’s never more than a few.

Music is different. I have over a thousand songs on my iPod, and my library is small compared to those of others I know. That’s not something that can be easily navigated with a flat list, so subfolders (categories, artist/album hierarchy, etc.) are required here.

But that leads to the issue of putting multiple things on the iPod. If you’re only putting one album at a time on it, that’s easy, but the initial fill and any subsequent large fills must be done a few songs or an album at a time. That will take awhile to do manually.

With iTunes, you drag all the songs to your Library or iPod (in the iTunes window), and it adds all the songs to the flat list and also to any Smart Playlists, automagically. And navigation into artist and then album can be done without any Smart Playlists, using the Browse view (which is mostly the same as the iPod’s Music submenu). No matter which way you want to view your music — as a flat list or a hierarchy — iTunes lets you have it, and adding music is easy either way.

What’s the argument against iTunes, other than “It’s not the Finder/Windows Explorer”?

47

"My wife would never use a drag’n’drop player"
Drag’n’drop isn’t a limitation, it is a liberation. Drag’n’drop is one way of doing it, but if it’s available as a regular fs any app can put music on it very easily. No need to reverse engineer a database in order to make the player compatible with your favourite media player. This leads to a much wider, much richer variety of applications to manage the audio on your device that works with lots of other devices.
Drag’n’drop does not mean you can’t have good integration with your media player. Indeed, it means you can have good integration with many media players.

Back when I had a media player that worked like a regular fs I wrote a small app that fitted my routine. Plug it in a weekday morning, it filled it with one style of music. Plug it in the evening, it fills it with the latest comedy podcasts, or failing that sleeping music. It looked at what time it was, and only filled it up with a certain length of music (i.e. that time until 2am) so that if I accidently fell asleep it wouldn’t keep playing and run down the battery (which, btw, I could actualy replace with another rechargable battery, so the effective battery life without proximity of a computer was far longer) I wouldn’t even attempt doing that with my iPod.

48

Exactly, at least i went through the “trouble” to read all other posts before putting my own crap on here :wink:

No need to reiterate what everyone should already know right?

49

WOW. That is the largest collection of incorrect “facts” about the iPod I’ve ever seen!

  1. “The iPod does not support WMA”. No, it does not. You know why? Because WMA (protected WMA) is not supported on the platforms the iPod supports (read: OS X). Come back to me when Microsoft supports WMA music stores on anything besides Windows. Why not support non-protected WMA? Because licensing fees would need to be paid to Microsoft, for one, because it would buy nothing for anyone who wasn’t foolish enough to rip into WMA in the first place, and because it would then cause additional confusion (why isn’t this wma file working? Oh, it’s protected …)

  2. “I’ll never understand why the iPod chooses to deliberately ignore FM radio” I’ll never understand why people care about FM anymore. It’s bland and boring where I live, and I see no reason to pay for an FM tuner in my iPod, especially when the two locations where I am most likely to listen to it (home and in the car) have far superior FM antennae and tuners for use. BUT, if I DID want to pay for it, there are several FM tuners for the iPod. They hook right on and allow tuning using the iPod interface for the most part.

  3. “there’s no voice recording” Again, for the handful of people who want voice recording in an MP3 player, there’s a wide enough selection of cheap voice recorder attachments. I’ve got one of these myself, although I rarely use it because … well, there’s just not all that much I need to record. But, when I need it, it’s right there ready to go.

  4. “no EQ settings” Um, here you start going into the pure BS category. iPod has had EQ presets forever.

  5. “no gapless playback” Again, BS, although at least this is a recent addition (5G iPods and iTunes 7).

  6. “The iPod requires custom software to work” That’s a feature, not a bug. Dragging files to the player is a crap interface for 99% of all users out there. I’m sorry using an application designed to manage music is an affront to you instead of using a general-purpose file manager for everything. But, Apple wisely chose to piss off the 1% of close-minded geeks in favor of bringing incredible ease of use to the rest of the population. Quite simply: my wife and kids all use iTunes to manage music without a problem, while the file-transfer based device they had before the iPod got music loaded on it twice, and never got updated again.

  7. “You can’t even use it as an external hard drive without setting up a separate, special partition on the device first” I don’t know what the hell you’re smoking here, but every iPod I’ve used (granted, I didn’t use the original Windows iPod, which I do believe had some funky partitioning scheme) came from the factory with one partition, which holds music files in a hidden folder and is ready for use as an external hard drive out of the box.

As for supporting FLAC and OGG: yeah, that would be nice, although I certainly don’t see it as a killer omission for me or mine. But is it really enough to determine which MP3 player you purchase, given the myriad of other differences?

50

Huh.

I’m still using my Creative Nomad II.

51

Although Apple is exemplary of how proprietary software is done right, the iPod is an uncomfortable and expensive silo for me.

If only there were a viable alternative for me on Mac. My 3G iPod is getting cranky.

Bastards at Creative didn’t churn out a Mac interface :stuck_out_tongue:

52

Don’t you want to manage your music at a higher level of abstraction than files and folders?

Sure. But realize that all modern audio players ignore file structures in favor of the ID3 tags (metadata) in the files. That’s why I went through this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000653.html

The file structure is A) very flat and B) largely irrelevant. You can synthesize any file structure you want based on the audio metadata, anyway, using a tool like Media Monkey (which rocks, btw).

Call me lazy but I don’t want to have to manage my music library

Then use whatever sync software you want. And a well designed DAP gives you the option to use whatever you like. I like to do the Simplest Thing That Works, and in this case, it’s drag and drop, because my audio library doesn’t change very much over time.

53

I own the Iriver U10 1G which is basically the same as the Clix. I love it and i would never ever buy an Ipod for the simple reason that I don’t like the hype.

54

sorry using an application designed to manage music is an affront to you instead of using a general-purpose file manager for everything

This is quite ironic coming from Apple users who constantly remind us how great it is to “install” applications by dragging and dropping them rather than running setup.exe installers. So which is it? Easier? Harder? Or It Depends?

http://www.xvsxp.com/applications/installation.php

Most OS X applications use a “package” design to let users easily install an application. Application packages are essentially folders that contain all necessary files for the application to run; however, they appear as single files to the user. The advantage to this is that a packaged application can simply be “drag-installed” - the installation process merely involves dragging the application package to your Applications folder. Uninstallation, therefore, is essentially the same process in reverse - drag the application package to the Trash, and empty it. Since packages are self-contained, all the files related to the application are removed.

55

Y’all are missing the point. For me two primary features of an audio player are ease of use and portability. Therefore hard drive based players are automatically excluded from consideration. Guess what, a year from now we’ll have 16GB nanos and 4GB iPhones for $250. Personally, I don’t see a reason to own anything larger than 4GB 1st gen nano that I already have. It has a couple of days of music on it, and that about covers my needs. Try as I might, I can not fill it to full capacity - there’s just not enough music that I’d want to listen to every day. And I much prefer buying physical CDs and then ripping them onto my nano. I’d bet most other people either do the same or use bittorrent.

Portability is where it’s at right now. When I go to the gym, I don’t want a freakin’ brick in my pocket. If you look at the dimensions in that lengthy comparison, you will see that iPod beats anything else in terms of portability (and nano beats anything else in its class, and shuffle beats anything else in its class). This is why Apple stock closed above $90 today.

Although I do agree with Jeff on the need for FM radio. That’s the only feature that I think is missing in nano. I want portability, dammit. Build in the freakin’ radio.

56

"1. “The iPod does not support WMA”. No, it does not. You know why?.."
It also does not support other very common formats like ogg. All my music is ogg, and I’ve not been able to find a format that iTunes supports that will compress my music at a low enough disk space at the same quality as ogg. Now that may be me missing something, if someone knows how, please tell me. But still, the lack of ogg support, amongst others, is terrible. Stop picking on the specific example and realise it should support other formats.

"2. “I’ll never understand why the iPod chooses to deliberately ignore FM radio” I’ll never understand why people care about FM anymore."
A personal opinion that many disagree with. Not a falsity.

"4. “no EQ settings” Um, here you start going into the pure BS category. iPod has had EQ presets forever."
Pre-sets, not settings.

"6. “The iPod requires custom software to work” That’s a feature, not a bug."
Call me crazy, but I don’t use iTunes as my media player. Again, because all my music is ogg (and again, if you can find me the right settings for another format I will happily use iTunes). And there are other people who don’t use iTunes for a variety of reasons. Or many of the other plugins/apps that are for use with iTunes (none of which are easy to set up in my experience, though I may have missed one). This forces us to manage two music libraries. Our normal media player, AND iTunes/custom app. If the database management was moved from the software to the firmware (and I could be talking out of my arse here, apologies), we could have our drag and drop support (as well easier plugin support for other media players) AND the excellent interface iTunes provides.

57

http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/ipod_shuffle_20061120/apple-ipod_shuffle_848x496.mov

Flawless work.

58

You say, the 4gb iRiver Clix meets your criteria. But for their website I read, it comes with an installation CD and needs, WinXP SP1 or higher and Media Player 10 or higher.

What about problem 5?

59

iriver has a new MP3 player out - the S10. It’s really small and nice!!! Nicer than an ipod shuffle.

Scroll down and look at how tiny the S10 is!
http://product.iriver.co.kr/p_s10_review.asp

Do a review on this! =o) I’m gonna get one… hehehe

60

I have a 30gig Creative Zen Vision:M, it currently has over 50 movies and around 500 MP3’s on it and I still have mucho room to use as jump drive, or for more crap. I love my Zen, even with a $150-$300 price tag.