Help Needed! MP3 Players...

[Trilby]

Help! Yes, I've googled. No, I can't find answers. My 14 year-old son wants an MP3 player for Christmas and I don't know anything about them. What is a good price? What, exactly, are they? Do you have to subscribe to a music network to get songs? I know all of you know this--I just happen to be monumentally "out" of it and electronically challenged, to boot.

Thanks!

[Happy Monkey]

iPods are the standard bearer at the moment. You have to sign up for their service, but you only have to pay when you buy music - it's free to put mp3's you've already got or to rip CDs you've got.

Of course, iPods are more expensive than others.

[Elspode]

Here's the sum total of what I've learned about mp3 players so far:

1. Cheap mp3 players usually suck in most important ways such as build quality, features and capacity. That said, the most affordable mp3 players are the solid-state/memory card-using varieties, typically with a capacity ranging from 128 megs to 512 megs as a built in base. Nicer ones will allow the use of a memory card, and one gig cards can be had right now for around $60, give or take. A decent basic player of such a variety will cost you between $80 and $120 if you buy well.
2. HD based varieties offer both vastly increased storage (typically from 4 megs up to 60 megs, with price increasing proportionally as storage increases). Typically, features and usability are also proportional to price. I am using a Creative Labs Zen Touch 40 gig. It performs well, has a nice big mono LCD screen and an interesting, if not always precise, touch-control surface. Disadvantage? This particular model has no bookmarking feature, making audiobooks basically inconvenient, if not outright impossible to deal with. User software to load it up is great, and USB 2 is blazingly fast for the transfer of files. Full album of mp3's at 128k sample rate takes about 25 seconds to load. Ripping takes longer, but that's a different subject.
3. IPODS are awesome, but comparable Creative units can be had for about 25% less money, along with other brands. Creative seems to have the best competition out there among major players, but there are literally dozens of other manufacturers doing a fine job. Archos comes to mind, but their stuff is also pricey. Excellent quality used units can be found on Ebay (that's where I got mine, and it was virtually unused. I purchased it for $70 under best retail price I could find, shipping included).

Bottom line? Research online. Set a budget for the purchase, then go hunting on the Web. Virtually all units will come with their own software for handling the files. Some of that software will rip CD's, some will not, but there are lots of excellent standalone apps out there, the best ones are actually free through Sourceforge public license software sources. Some units will function as a direct "extra drive" with Win XP, some won't, so if stupidly simple ease of use is important, make sure you check that aspect in advance. My new one does not appear as an extra Windows drive, but my old ones did. No big deal in my case, but it might be in yours.

Good luck!

[dar512]

MP3 is a music compression and file format standard. MP3 players can store and convert MP3 files to music. The player consists of some file storage mechanism, mp3 conversion firmware, and an amplifier.

The main difference between the players is the storage mechanism. The great majority of the players use either flash memory for storage or a very tiny hard drive. The flash storage models range from a few MB to 2GB of storage. The hard drive models are generally 5-40GB. The flash versions are cheaper and fewer moving parts - so less to go wrong. The hard drive versions can hold a lot more songs.

Another major difference is how the music gets from your computer to the player. The easiest method (I think) is the sort that acts as a usb removable drive. Then it's just a matter of plugging the thing in and dragging and dropping the songs from the computer hard drive to the player. Some players use proprietary software to get the music from the PC to the player.

The ipods are well thought of, but I'd avoid the shuffle models. I think it's daft that you can't choose what to play. ipod is not the only viable choice.

99.9% of my mp3s come from converting music from my cd collection. There are also lots of free mp3s out there from bands just getting started - and a lot of podcasts as well.

If you do want to get music from a service - itunes etc. beware that they are generally in a DRM format. You're player has to be able to read that format in order to play those files.

Good luck

[SteveDallas]

HD vs. flash memory.... you are generally paying more per unit of storage with the flash devices. This may be an acceptable tradeoff depending on use... flash memory is solid state and essentially immune to being jostled around. While you won't have to leave a hard drive unit sitting on your mantel for fear of upsetting it, the chances of hard drive failure are higher than memory failure. (My 40GB ipod's drive died about 13 months after I got it... it's currently out being fixed courtesy of the Best Buy service plan I bought on it.)

Also, it's ipod vs. the rest. ipod is really the fashion leader (although after digging around I decided it was the best bet for me, and I'm as unfashionable as they come), so if your kid has his heart set on an ipod, he might rather have a cheap ipod shuffle than a Creative unit with more capacity.

No matter what brand you buy, you will be able to copy existing CDs to it, and/or buy music online. I still find my best bang for the buck is to buy CDs, used wherever possible, but then, your son probably doesn't listen to the same music I do!

[lumberjim]

get him the ipod mini. in pink if he's been bad.

edit: looks like they stopped selling those now that the nano is out. oh well. the nano looks good too.

[BigV]

You guys are great! Bri, they really know their stuff, but only SteveDallas hinted at my main contribution: style. I am sometimes asked if I dress in the dark, my fashion sense is so retarded. But I am (a little more) in tune with the vibe I get from my kids. They asked for iPods. Even my "pre-teen" (he boasts, now that he's in double digits :snicker: ). I immediately made the mistake of talking technology with them about capacity, software, compression, bit rates, file sizes...you can imagine the result. :yawn:

*Best* deal? Entirely subjective, and only partly based on specs and capacity and price. No wonder I killed the conversation. There are two questions here. The technical one: what is the best player? And the emotional one: What do I want to feel like when I have this thing.

The emotional question has to be answered first, and the good news is you get to contribute. Does he want to be seen wearing those iconic white headphones? Does he want to carry around a lot of music, thousands of songs, or will mere hundreds suffice? Does he have a computer already? What's your budget? What's your opinion on copyright wrt music file sharing? How strenuously do you wish to impose that view on your son? Is the music more important than everything else, or does the gadget matter in some way? Is he able to ...

timeout. I can see I've blended the two thoughts. What I hoped to convey is that the questions are what do you want to accomplish, and then track down the hardware that helps your achieve that goal. That's the way to get to the *best choice*.

I'll save my wind for another argument.

[Trilby]

Thanks! You all are awesome!

i really appreciate it!

[jaguar]

iPod nano will cause much son-mother loveness this christmas. iPod nano cases, popularity they will have. Long must one ponder, apple sells iPods for less to students via it's education website.

Short i mourn the death of my original 20G iPod, hard concrete it hath felt one time too many for the 60G iPod a natural replacement is. Joyous this is, for it bringeth more space and pointless little videos!

[Trilby]

jag--are you drunk?

[dar512]

That or maybe channeling Yoda - or both.

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by BigV

my "pre-teen" (he boasts, now that he's in double digits :snicker:

My daughter prefers "tween".

[Clodfobble]

The only one I ever hear is "practically an adult!!" And she's not even in the double-digits yet.

[mbpark]

There are many mp3 players out there.

The one that people really want is the iPod. Kids don't want Zips when they can have Nike .

Here's my ratings:

1. Creative - garbage software needed to load music on. However, you can drag music on like a hard drive, which makes up for it.
2. Sony - the worst possible software you can use. Period.
3. Dell - uses MusicMatch Jukebox to load music on. This software is more than likely the reason why Dell sells so many P4-class machines, as it's a complete hog on system resources.
4. Apple iPod - iTunes isn't that bad. They must have ported a good chunk of MacOS over to get this to run on PCs. Is significantly improved since their first versions. iTunes Music Store supported here .
5. iRiver - very nice device, however uses Windows Media Player to load music on.
6. Archos - build quality leaves a LOT to be desired. User interface has issues. This is for techs.

You may want a device that is easy to configure, doesn't use buggy software like MusicMatch, Sony, or Creative software, and is the popular device out there.

You can also get iTunes gift cards in almost any major store.

In short - the iPod right now is the best-supported device out there. When you can buy iTunes cards at Walgreen's or CVS, it's popular .

[LabRat]

HELP hubby wants an MP3 player!!

Everyones appreciated!!

Do these recommendations still stand? Bri, what did you end up getting your son? I'm out to Google for awhile. Be back soon...