Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT: Portable MP3 Players

Hi all. Are there any MP3 enthusiasts out there with player recommendations?

I'm currently going through the process of ripping my CD collection to mp3s. I've been using the LAME encoder with Variable Bit Rate, and I've been pretty impressed with the results. Not far off from CD sound quality and about 1/10th the file size.

Now I'm considering picking up a portable mp3 player. I've never owned an mp3 player before. I'd probably go for the "jukebox" type with a large hard drive (20-40 GB). At this point, I'm most impressed with the ipod and Rio Karma, but I'm very interested in additional input.

Thanks in advance!
Scott

I've owned various players, all w/ varying reviews. It really depends what you want to do w/ it. If you want something for training (running for me), I like my Creative Labs MUVO 256MB. It's lighter than a pack of gum and VERY easy to add songs. It's a USB so drag and drop. I hate most of the s/w packages so I kept it simple. I also use it at work to move big presentation files and datasheets (6 MB or bigger) between machines and for customer presentations.

If you like playlists, like orgazinzing your songs w/ s/w, and want to have A LOT of songs w/ you, I wouldn't go any less than an mini iPOD. I don't have one but covet it. If that's not enough, the 15 GB iPODs are nice.

The new video/MP3 players are interesting, but I don't know if they have as good a GUI as the iPOD. And if you want the video portion, despite what Apple claims publicly, they ARE working on the video iPOD.

My wife has an iPod, and I'm an admitted partisan, but I'd say that no one does it better in this case. Great UI, very easy to use. Of course, she also knows more about it than I do...

BTW, 15 GB iPods are no longer available new; they've dropped the 20s in price to be where the 15s were.

I've had my 4th generation 20GB iPod for one week now and I've been very pleased with it. I'm getting use to the idea of carrying my entire music collection with me. I plan to eventually use it in the car and never have to take us space with cd's again.

Shut up! I can't stand it any more. My iPod's headphone jack broke and now it's just a 'useless' external hard drive.

And repairing it required replacing the entire circuit board at $150. That's half the price of a brand-new iPod.

OUCH!!! I know that has to be painful. You have my deepest sympathy.

Bad typo. I meant to say "repairing it requires"

I didn't pay for the repair.

Thanks for the input, guys. Seems like the ipod has a ton of satisfied users out there. Any concerns about compatibility with the Windows environment? I've heard claims (though no real concrete examples) of ipods being more difficult to work with using Windows.

Does anyone out there have experience with the Rio Karma? It's 20 GB, handles OGG and FLAC files, and is about $50-60 cheaper than the 20 GB ipod.

Considering you got it free by telling your procurement chain it was an external hard drive...

I am a Windows user and so far I've not had a single problem at all. I use USB 2.0 as the connection and it's still a fast transfer. I rip all my cd's with Windows Media Player 10 and it does just fine (although I've never use it to listen to music) *bleh* Even though iTunes tends to be the prefered choice, there's a few other programs that can be used with the iPod that are a bit more organized than iTunes. The one I've used is EphPod so you might want to look at that as well. Hope that helps.

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Considering you got it free by telling your procurement chain it was an external hard drive...

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Hey!!! Now that's an idea!

Uhm-Uhm........
The40 gig portable harddrive otherwise known as an ipod is a( great tax write off) fine piece of photo equipment, I can download tons of photos on it, and I hear it plays music also.

Can't you open it up and solder a new jack on?

Hey there. I have a Rio Karma and I love it. Its battery life far surpasses that of any of the Ipods (16 hours with 128kbs mp3's. I get about 12 hours with everything at 192kbs Ogg Vorbis), and it features gapless playback, which was pretty important to me; I hate the pauses inbetween tracks mp3's have. It plays FLAC files too, if that hasn't already been mentioned. It might not be quite as "slick" as the Ipod, but I paid to have a great functioning player with lots of options, not just one that looks cool.
If there is one problem, it seems a lot of people have experienced HD failures with them. Luckily (and knock on wood) I haven't experienced any problems, which is great, cause I bought mine from a seller in the US before they were available in Canada, so I have no warranty. Not sure if the HD failures were an issue with early ones, because I don't hear about it much anymore, but I'd suggest going for an extended warranty, cause the the Rio warranty is only good for 90 days.
If you have any more questions about it, feel free to ask.

Thanks for the info, guys! I might PM some of you as I get closer to a purchase if I have questions.

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Can't you open it up and solder a new jack on?

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If I were feeling really brave, perhaps. But it's not a standard mini-stereo jack. It also has pins and contact points that support the in-line remote control. I'd have to find that specific part somewhere. Perhaps an iPod graveyard?

The Stats:

Player: Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra
Size: 60GB
Battery Life: 14 Hours (I get about 12-13)
File Formats: WAV, WMA, and MP3 (I mainly use 192-320 mp3's)
Connection: USB 1.1/2.0

I really like it, it's a bit bigger then an iPod, but I used to carry around the Jukebox 3, which is the size of a CD Player, with the weight of a 20GB laptop hard drive :P, so this is nothing.

- D