iPod Alternatives

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I just want a player that works, is well thought out, and has good quality audio. I’d really like good quality recording too (“voice recorder” to me equals “low quality recorder”).

I’ve tried Creative products before. I don’t like them. I tried a friends Zen - it was counter-intuitive, and didn’t allow for enough file hierarchy to organize my audio properly. And it couldn’t be used as a bulk-storage hard drive. I don’t trust that company to make good products or supply necessary information to operate them properly.

I don’t like proprietary. Apple tried that before and I think they lost the PC market because of it. Don’t be surprised if the same thing happens to iPod.

There is much talk about features, but what about audio quality?

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Back in the days of the first Rio dragging and dropping the 30 songs that it held was nice. But how, exactly, do you manage things by dragging and dropping when your music player holds thousands of songs?

“it’s no longer a cool technical accessory”: And then you go out and buy a Creative Zen Vision:M and a iRiver Clix?!

“there’s no voice recording, no EQ settings, no gapless playback”: And your wife was complaining about this?

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Regarding Daniel’s comments on format support being excluded so that people are forced to buy music through iTunes: I have a 1st gen. iPod shuffle and I’ve never bought music off iTMS. It’s not even available in my country. I rip my CDs, I buy music off emusic.com (which I’m very pleased with) and listen to it all on my shuffle. Works dandy.

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All your points are very good reasons why the iPod isn’t right for you. But calling these things a mistake on Apple’s part seems to be overstating the case. They sold 22 million iPods last quarter. I think they can handle not selling another one to you.

On your point regarding iTunes vs dragging and dropping files, I think this is the really interesting part of MP3 players. Drag drop is simpler in that you don’t have to install an application on your computer to use your device. But if you decide you’ve had enough of a track, and want to delete it, you’ve now got to delete it from two places, your MP3 player and your computer. And how about creating playlists, rating tracks, playing stuff on your computer on Shuffle? All of these can be done without an application, but iTunes tries to simplfy this complexity by taking everything you do with your music, and putting it all under the control of the iTunes interface.

I can understand that those of us with years of managing ourselves via our filesystem might find this a wrench, but I’m personally much happier managing everything via iTunes. It seems like less effort. And I suspect that for the vast majority of the public (i.e. people who really aren’t fans of computers), it’ll be nicer too.

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Jeff – I am an extremely happy iPod user. I’ve owned 4 (starting with a 10 GB model, and culminating in one of the newest iPod Nanos), and before that I owned 2 different Rio MP3 players.

I think your Reason #5 should say “proprietary softare” rather than “custom software.” Also, as many others have pointed out, the iPod now supports gapless playback, and is usable as an external hard drive with no partitioning necessary.

However, I think all of your reasons against the iPod are valid. No, it doesn’t have a subscription service available. Yes, you need to use their proprietary software (iTunes) to use it. No, it doesn’t have a built-in radio or recording abilities. And yes, even soccer moms and grandmothers have iPods.

The iPod is not for everyone. I would certainly be considered an “Apple Fanboy” by people who use that term, but I accept that what is right for me is not right for everyone. You can find cheaper music players that have more features and different options.

I hope you are happy with your next player, and I promise to never push my iPod on you or arbitrarily claim that it is “better” than whatever you happen to choose.

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“When connected to a Windows XP or Windows Vista machine, MTP support allows you to drag and drop music directly on to the device-- without installing any software. It’s not ideal, since it’s tied to Microsoft, but it’s the best I can do”

Does that mean you prefer to run Windows rather than install iTunes?

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Want to talk about mainstream? Rage against the machine.

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I think the only valid complaint you’ve raised is that the iPod is mainstream and thus not cool for geeks anymore. But in my opinion, the alternatives are just too poor to switch, even if owning an iPod hurts my geek cred.

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you care about Ogg. teh funny.

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Personally I see your frustration but currantally Apple does have a hold on the market. There are pleanty of cheap alternatives but Why settle for something that isn’t top of the line. Now the Microsoft Zune is cool. Unfourtunatly they are really up to par with the iPod yet.

Also as a seacond note, the only soccer moms with iPods I know are the tech challenged ones who have their husbands put dumb music on it then they can’t figure out how to use it so they just leave it in the car.

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And would it be too much to ask for an on-off switch, instead of hold down the play button and stare at the screen for five seconds to make sure it’s off?

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I had to write to say that I totally agree with Jeff. I’m sorry guys…but I got an iPod Photo for 600 bucks as soon as it came out and my husband got the Zen Vision:M and it does DOUBLE what the iPod does for half the price (for you math geniuses out there, that means 300 bucks!). And this was as soon as the Zen came out too! I am not happy when I see that I paid more than 500 bucks for something that does not have built-in radio and recording capabilities. See the word BUILT-IN? That’s what it’s all about. If you go out and buy all of the gadgets you’d need to do at least what the NATIVE Zen Vision:M system does, your iPod (at least mine) will end up costing almost a THOUSAND bucks…not to mention that it will look like a huge ugly monster with all those things connected to it…where would you put a monster like that in the car? I just put the remote controller device in my iPod and it was so heavy that it was falling off the device I purchased to hold it close to me in my car! And, by the way, I have tried connecting more than one device at a time and I can’t. Either there are not enough jacks to hook all of them together or the thing gets heavy like hell. So NO…NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!! No WAY I am buying an iPod again. And NO, not all of the add-ons are cheap. Actually, many of them aren’t. Well, unless the guy who said that in this post is a millionaire. But I’m not…I have a budget at home. Finally, not all of those devices work well. Some eat part of the iPod’s battery life to do its work and some are just plain rubbish, like the external drive that is sold to transfer pictures to the iPod without using a computer…my experience: pure trash.

Guys, the fact that Apple has the market now doesn’t mean in ANY way that it will have it forever. Just ask Nintendo, who was the video game master for many years just to end up getting beat by Sony.

I have an iMac and a PC at home and I connect the iPod to both. And let me tell you, the fact that the iPod saves files using the same folder structure than other programs that run in the iMacs (such as iPhoto) bothers me. This is because iTunes just stores the music “randomly” (and with this I mean randomly within a structure that is convenient to Apple…because I know it’s not really random). Yes, I got Sharepod, which solved this problem…but WHY in the WORLD would I have to go through such a hassle of going on the Internet and spending hours looking for programs that would help the iPod do the things I can do with the Zen Vision:M by just hooking it to a computer and turning it on??? And for half the price??? No, people, forget it!!! And no, it is not as easy to find hidden folders in Windows. Of course, for me, an electrical engineer with a DSP background, it is extremely easy…but for people like my mom or dad, it’s not. Or even for somebody who is too busy to learn how to do this is a hassle. I have many, many, many friends as young as myself that are not interested in computers and, thus, don’t buy the iPod players because they get scared at the fact that everything has to be done through iTunes. Even that is complicated enough for them not to buy the players! These are the people I end up seeing with USB mini players because, of course, for them is much easier to drag and drop files (my little brother is an example). Guess why these little players haven’t gone out of the market yet!!! They are a significant chunk of the business too! A friend of mine who just started College said “Nah, to hell with iTunes…I want something I just plug-in and drag and drop stuff. That’s it!”. Needless to say, she purchased a MuVo player. And this was a girl who just started College. I graduated from College five years ago. So there you have it, not all of the young people out there are tekkies.

I am very, very sorry for Apple. Now that the new Zen Vision:M has USB host capabilities (and it’s BUILT-IN, thank you very much) I am moving to the Zen too…I will give my iPod to a poor kid that I met several weeks ago and I will get myself a Zen. I feel sorry that the new Zen doesn’t support radio recording but, as you may already know, there is always a way around that. But at least I had to search for only ONE program to do that, not like in the iPod, in which I have to buy various peripherals and download multiple programs to get it to do what the Zen does already right out of the box. Sorrryyyyyyyyyy!!!

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Look,Jeff is ABSOLUTly right!iPod is utter crap!i mean,the only good thing it has is that u can use it on a mac or on a windows,wich to me really doesn’t matter because i dont use mack!the iPod is ugly!the zen vision m is elegant!i bought one a few months ago and its just perfect.rock on with the drag and drop 2,jeff!ur absolutely right

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I just want a decent mp3 that is going to work seamlessly on my windows (respect) system, looks relatively respectable, will get me through a 20+ hour flight without the battery life worrying me and that will not fuck me over after 9 months of buying it.

And I want a decent amount of space too - none of this 1/2 GB business.

I’ve always said that I’d never buy an iPod.
Always.

But lately I’ve been looking at the 30GB Ipod Video, (having a few friends who’ve had no problems with it whatsoever) and all I want is to find out whether my earlier suspicions were solid or not.

Can anyone tell me
a) Is it worth it?
and
b) What are my alternatives?

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Here’s a better alternative to the ipod nano. Feel free to go to the site and post feedback.

Live your life…
Love your music…
UDsound

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Zune

ha hahahah ahhahahhahahhahha

thanks for that one

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As a Korean who is accustomed to using generic, ‘crappy’ mp3 players,

The mere fact that one has to install some big program (which needs ANOTHER program, Quicktime) just to insert music in…

I got my iPod as a gift, and I’m seriously considering on passing this over to my brother. Yeah, he’ll love this one.

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I’m ambivalent about this one. I think the primary audience for the iPod continues to be the same audience for which the Mac is designed…those who don’t WANT to be geeks. My wife would never use a drag’n’drop player, but she’s all over the iTunes interface. Its easy playlisting, auto-syncing, and typical Mac-ish bubblegum interface make it easy for her to keep her nano running. She doesn’t WANT a portable storage device, or a voice recorder, or any of those things…she wanted something to play her music and audio books. She doesn’t care about formats, ogg versus WMA, Windows versus Mac or whatever…she just wants it to work when she pushes ‘play.’ All she has to do is pick a playlist or individual track, using the easy-as-pie multiple-choice interface, and she’s set. The iPod/iTunes combo is ideal for that kind of user.

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I agree with Rossen’s comments. I have an Archos 440 and you can simply mount the whole thing as a removable HDD. I use SynchroniseIT! to copy my music, I’ve no idea what software came with it.

It supports both DRM and DRMless WMA files too.

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I use a Cowan M3 myself (the predecessor to the X5), and agree with most of the points. Styling isn’t too important to me since it’s always out of sight in my pocket, but the rest are real downsides.

Particularly #3 and #5 - the limited format support makes it useless for me, and the requirement to manage it through custom software is a pain. I’ve no objections to being able to use an iTunes-like interface to sync it, but being forced to is entirely undesirable.