Ipods and mp3s and things

[Terry Smart]

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way! Thanks guys.

Don't you sometimes feel though that the gadgets themselves are getting over-cluttered as well? I'm still (now half-heartedly!) looking at mp3 players, but it's getting harder to get a simple one; they've got voice recorders, picture viewers, alarms, clocks etc, all 'features' I don't want but that invariably push the price up and give it more chances to go wrong! I feel the same way about mobile phones, but that's another story.

Anyway, at the moment the one that's taking my eye is the Creative Zen Stone which looks to do what I want and at a very good price to boot, but I'm still open to suggestions.

 

[jaymar]

Hi Terry, I've just ordered a Creative Stone Zen Plus for my wife(Amazon) so when it arrives I'll let you know how simple it is to use. I've never used an mp3 so it should be a good test.

 

[Terry Smart]

Your wife's an Amazon? Oh, I see what you mean...

Thanks Jaymar, will appreciate your comments.

 

[Dog]

This won't help you much Terry but I was looking for a bog standard no frills MP3 player that would play tracks in the order I wanted them played and in the end I opted for a bog standard portable CD player, made my own CD's on the PC and although not as compact as an MP3 player nor possible to store hugh amounts of music I can at least listen to the tracks I want to listen too in the order I want to listen to them in...I guess I'm just old fashioned in my approach to certain technologies :roll:

 

[Terry Smart]

If old fashioned means wanting to do things how you want to do them rather than how someone somewhere thinks they should be done then there's a lot of us in the same basket!

I wouldn't mind if we were given the choice, sort of 'you can do it your way but we think you might find this easier/better', but to force us to do things 'their' way simply grates!

Thanks for your input Dog.

 

[tnimble]

Both the Samsung YP-K3 and the Creative Zen Stone support UMS. (device pops up as an external harddisk, so you can just drag and drop anything to the thingy).

The differences seem to be:
- Samsung 2.5 times the battery life of the Creative
- Samsung also supports OGG Vorbis
- Only the Zen Stone plus has an display
- Both the Samsung and the Zen Stone plus have an FM radio but the Zen stone doesn't
- The Samsung has an picture viewer
- The Samsung comes in 1, 2, 4 or 8Gb the Zen comes in 1 or 2 Gb.
- The Zen Stone is a bit cheaper than the Samsung

 

[Terry Smart]

Wow, thanks tnimble, a very useful comparison.

I really need to get my head around which features I really need at the moment and I guess which features I might kick myself about later if I haven't got them.
Much of this will depend on how I intend to use it I suppose; as I say, I have a very basic mp3 player at the moment which suits most of my needs, in fact one of the only reasons I'm thinking about changing it is because when you turn it off and back on again it starts playing from the beginning again rather then where you were. It works with a memory card which I can increase the size of, but having too much on there defeats the object as it just means more tracks etc to skip through.

 

[Michael7]

Don't you sometimes feel though that the gadgets themselves are getting over-cluttered as well? I'm still (now half-heartedly!) looking at mp3 players, but it's getting harder to get a simple one; they've got voice recorders, picture viewers, alarms, clocks etc, all 'features' I don't want but that invariably push the price up and give it more chances to go wrong! I feel the same way about mobile phones, but that's another story

Very true, I had an Ipod video and two Archos jukeboxes and realised that the colour screen and other bells and whistles on the Ipod dont improve on what its supposed to do, So I sold the Ipod and bought a bench jointer.

 

[tnimble]

Wow, thanks tnimble, a very useful comparison.

I really need to get my head around which features I really need at the moment and I guess which features I might kick myself about later if I haven't got them.
Much of this will depend on how I intend to use it I suppose; as I say, I have a very basic mp3 player at the moment which suits most of my needs, in fact one of the only reasons I'm thinking about changing it is because when you turn it off and back on again it starts playing from the beginning again rather then where you were.

I ordered a K3 on friday, and had the honor of receiving it yesterday. The player is well designed and working perfectly. I created a few directories and subdirectories on my I: drive in the Music folder. (You can also place playlist files, jpg, and text files which the device understands. But also any other file type and use it as a USB memory stick).

You can browse the folders and select individual files, whole directories or playlists. Long file name scroll automatically.

When playing a file (or directory) and you switch off the device and turn it back on again it starts playing the same song from the position you stopped at.

Also the radio works very well.

One thing to mind. There are two versions of the player.

An player that uses the MTP protocol with which you can only upload mp3 song through windows media player 10 or later. This player is ment for the international market to enforce the Microsoft Digital Right Management to prevent you from listening to illegally obtained music.

The other player uses UMS and shows up as a external harddisk so you can drag and drop anything you like. This player is targetted to the eastern market and does not enforce Digital Rights Management. This player has also more features and functionality.

If you would have bought the internalational version you can update to the eastern version by uploading two files to the player, where to get the files and how to upload them can easily be found through google.

It works with a memory card which I can increase the size of, but having too much on there defeats the object as it just means more tracks etc to skip through.

 

[Vormulac]

I'm glad I mentioned the Samsung now! For what it's worth, the ones my mates have got can use the drag and drop system or Samsung's own software, so they have not been constrained to using WMP10 to load their tracks up and they just bought them online (Amazon).

For what it's worth, my mp3 player is an iRiver ihp-140, it's nearly 4 years old and it still outperforms the ipod - the one thing it can't do is show videos (but why would I want to when I have a book to read?).