Thanks for the links in the article, I was reading one of them and found out there is a new version of the Rio Carbon software that added a capability I wanted.
Count me as another who will require that any future player I get has to suppost folder drag and drop. I don’t use my computer as my major music source I use my computer to feed stuff to my player.
It is far easier to drag a folder with the album(s) I want on the player and have them there then go through some software and flag the file(s) for synconization.
Then when I want it off the player, just right click and delete.
No addition skills or learning some other software just to take control of the music and audio books I listen to.
Finally just because you don’t want a feature does not make it a lie when someone else requests it. Also when discussion feature of a product few consider adds ones as being part of the product or not mentioning them misrepresenting the facts about the product; if that was the case I could claim my $15 flash pen comes with a 25-inch display since I can plug that into the ad-on of a computer which is connect to an ad-on TV and anything on that flash pen can be displayed on that TV.
First an example of lock in : Microsoft said to Samsung that in order to be MTP compliant, a device cannot support OGG Vorbis in the US. So Samsung had to pull that feature off the firmware of their US device. If you download an international version of the firmware, ogg is supported.
Compared to iTune, the only reason why you don’t need to install software to access your MP3 player with it is that it’s installed with Windows Media!!
I can see this is a great topic, freaky long thread already.
Further up there’s a link to th eiRiver S10, that thingy looks absolutely great.
Just for the record and my own peace of mind, even though i’m kindof your typical Apple user, owning a whole bunch of their computers and even dedicating most of my spare time to writing software specifically for them. I Don’t think the iPod is perfect by far…
I seriously detest Apple for taking away firewire support on the newer models, the person that made that decision should definately be taken outside to be shot. iTunes, once a great app to have in the background on my 450Mhz cube while coding, never got in the way, but they bloated it bigtime with version 7
Apple is just as bad as Microsoft and equally evil as well. There’s some really insanely great stuff coming from Cupertino for sure and the same can be said about Redmond (did anybody ever realize the amount of sheer genius put into .NET?)
Bottom line is; the iPod suits my fancy good enough. That’s obviously no guarantuee it will for anybody else. And though it kinda annoys me to great extends to see every second person on the streets wearing white earplugs, that will not keep me from wearing mine. Not until i find the sony plugs that came with one of my minidisc players anyways.
Red.
Oh and P.S. the iPod really should support FLAC and probably OGG as well.
"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 think that you meant that Dragging files to the player is a crap interface for 99% of all iPod users out there… there is a difference, it’s also very bad to quote random statistics to support a bad argument…"
First, 99% of the time you see a statistic of “99%” or “90%” it was made up on the spot. It’s common knowledge and anyone suspecting that “99%” came from a careful scientific study of the matter needs mental assistance.
In any case, I’m missing your point. Drag-and-drop, in my experience, is a crap interface that leads to people just not using a device. As I said in the part you chose not to include, this comes from personal experience with players prior to owning an iPod.
So, is it just a crap interface for those who own iPods? Maybe, but you’re confusing cause and effect there!
""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.”
On the first count: the falsity was pointed out right after you stopped quoting. FM radio is available for those who want it as a cheap add-on.
On the second count: “pre-sets” are “settings”. If “settings” is denoting something else, perhaps you should specify: a 3-band graphical equalizer with three levels per band, a 5-band GEQ with 5 levels per band, or a 20-band GEQ with over 100 levels per band? Which exactly is needed to qualify as “settings”?
Again, it’s a question of usability for the non-techno-geek versus featuritis. I personally see no need for more control of equalizer settings, but I’m far from an audiophile. That having been said, it’s hard to imagine an audiophile being satisfied with pretty much any MP3 player out there!
Finally:
“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.”
I already said this in my original post, but to repeat: I agree that iPod should support Ogg and Flac. Not something I’d qualify my purchasing decision on, as I said, but definitely a silly omission (unlike, say, WMA and FM and multi-band GEQ).
It’s just ridicolous to read some of the comments here, Jeff is correct on all points but apparently everything Apple creates is just great even through there are clearly players that are way better at everything.
The Apple fans should ask themselfs why they keep getting fooled by this company, buying overpriced players, buying overpriced computers.
I just don’t get it but I guess that’s what branding is all about, making people feel like they bought the greatest thing on the planet even though it clearly isn’t.
The rabiat comments from some people here just proves that they deep down know they have been fooled.
“It’s true that a filesystem-style player can have many varied apps written for it with lots of choices and configurations and no take-it-or-leave-it standard. That’s precisely what kills it for many users.”
Why does having the option of variety stop them from shipping good software with the device? You could have a billion and one other programs to put music on your ipod. I could write my own. And most people could use iTunes. There are many OS’s you can install on your PC. What do most people use? Windows. You can install many different Office suites, but what do most people use? MSOffice. Are they complaining about all the alternatives?
The hold of Apple’s iPod is akin to the hold of Microsoft Windows. At some point in time it was the best or only thing out there and people started to use it. And by-golly we simply DO NOT LIKE CHANGE apparently. And why should you get an iPod, well because everyone else has one of course!!!
You have a choice, some people simply choose not to choose.
I WON an iPod (4GB) before Christmas last year from Paper-Mate. For free, it was great. Once it was stolen, and I decided I was going to replace it (paying for it with MY money), I decided I did NOT want an iPod. After checking out everything that was available, both online and in the stores, I made a decision. I bought the Creative Zen Vision-M. I utilize my contacts and hard drive in there, have about 800+ of my favorite songs now, and I continue to add/change my music (EASILY!), set up the radio, and more. The Zen Vision-M rocks! I have that pretty pink one at the top of the page. Creative Zen Vision-M is #1 in my book!
It’s completely mainstream. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t matter to me.
I agree, thats why I have been a happy owner of a Cowon X5 since May. It has everything you mentioned above + video support.
The iPod has a better external interface, but the forced controls over music organization/songs/HD usage made me stay away. I’ll give up some external shine for some internal freedom and power.
And to all the nano + flash player users: Why would you want to carry so little music? It would be painful to me if I had to switch out files nightly/weekly. I prefer to just have it all. 3200+ songs and counting.
my minidisk player still hasn’t been beat by the ipod and i have an optical and an 1/8 inch stereo input for recording oh yeah and fm/am/tv I like the way everyone defended their ipod with an “attachment” or some other seperate option as a quick fix and is plugs into either mac or pc with any program [i choose realplayer] i also find it assinine that someone knocks fm by relating it locationally to their area “i only have crappy fm stations” [paraphrase] yeah it’s portable for a reason maybe you want to hear the news on the road unless your simpleminded to think the ipod is cool if it is so awesome why does apple keep coming out witha cheaper crappier version instead of expanding on the version they have?
It’s just ridiculous to read some of the comments here, Jeff is correct on all points but apparently everything Microsoft creates is just great even through there are clearly players that are way better at everything.
The Microsoft fans should ask themselves why they keep getting fooled by this company, buying overpriced software, using proprietary formats.
I just don’t get it but I guess that’s what branding is all about, making people feel like they bought the greatest thing on the planet even though it clearly isn’t.
The rabid comments from some people here just prove that they deep down know they have been fooled.
I love to hear the Mac zealots talk. Especially when they say things like. We are happy to pay buy song Jeff why would you want it any other way. Why would you want to drag and drop music.
I think it is fairly easy to say the current model sucks regardless of player. You have to have capacity to do anything. This of course is economically driven. Bandwidth providers do not compete on price. Hardware manufacterers do.
I was playing around with Urge with my Girlfriend. We passed play list back and forth using Windows Media player by dragging songs out of urge (You can also drag artists complete works or albulm by album or song by song) A 100 songs takes up about 6 kb in a playlist.
So the future is Wireless. You will not carry around your music you will just stream it from some server. (your own or a paid service)
Once Apple, Creative, IRiver, M$ get this through thier heads and setup deals with a cell phone provider to actually not rip you off. Innovation will truely happen. Cell phones are currently an artificial market. The idea of minutes is a profit model not a necessary evil. Just look at AOL in the beginning of the mainsteam internet. They use to have metered service.
Zune will die. Apple is for the zombie masses who do not get that some things should be a feature not an add on. The best current solution is Creative Zen you can have as little control (full synch of lib) to granulaur control (you drag what you want). Not binding you to a platform is not a weakness its a power Apple zealots. I should not have to hack my device to do this. Also I shouldn’t have to have to construct my player from 30 dollar add ins to get basic feaures.
One of the main reasons I bought an iPod is so I could take advantage of the cottage industry of add-ons.
At the moment, my iPod is pimped out with an Agent18 case and a SendStation USB/Firewire combo adapter.
If you want to rage against the machine, ditch the white ear buds. With alternate headphones and a stylish protective case, most people won’t even realize you’re packing an iPod.
Steve Jobs may be a hardware guy, but he understand separation of concerns better than most of us software guys.
I’m a gadget geek, and I agree with many of the “must have” features in your ideal music player. I bought one and gave it to my sister.
It could do voice recording. My sister hated this. She said after her 2 hour jogging sessions she usually wound up with 20 minutes of discontinuous panting she had to delete because it was too easy to switch into and out of “record” mode.
It had drag and drop to load the music. She loathed this at first. She did not want to take the time to change the filenames to something descriptive so she always used it in random mode since she could never find the song she was looking for.
It had FM radio. She liked the idea of this feature, but quickly found that she liked FM radio better in her car than on the run. Cars have better antennas. Car drives for short trips won’t mean constant commercials or hearing the same song played four times in two hours. This is a fault of the commercial FM stations in her area (Atlanta) but it’s something she didn’t really notice until she was using the radio for her daily runs.
Adding in some problems with the form factor, she came to really despise my gift to her. Over Thanksgiving she proudly showed me her new iPod Shuffle (the matchbook sized one) and I very much see now that my “ideal” music player as a lazy, geek doesn’t even come close to the kind of music player she needs as a marathon runner.
“the same audience for which the Mac is designed…those who don’t WANT to be geeks.”,
Maybe you should think it twice next time you say it and I would definitively recommend you to do a little bit of research about who are using Macs, or to go to a (non-ms) conference where geeks tend to concentrate (like OOPSLA) and see how many mac-geeks you find, and who are them. I promise you will be surprised. I also recommend you this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
And to Jeff Atwood, I usually like your posts, and I certainly think that you are right in some of your points about iPods (for example, FM and OGG), but when you say:
“How can I properly rage against the machine with the same standard, factory issue music players that everyone else has?”
Don’t you have the same feeling when you use the same operating system that everyone else has?
