taimatsu | (no subject)

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Oh yes, and, MP3 players.

I really want to get myself an MP3 player. I used to have a 20Gb iPod, which I loved very much, until I threw it on a train station platform and it broke. I was going to same up for a new 30Gb iPod, but my beloveds have reminded me that actually other MP3 players exist and might be a better deal.

Criteria:

I want something which will fit enough music for a 5-hour train journey at least. My full music collection (when Robert has the time to copy me our joint stash) will be well over the capacity of most players, so I can't ask to fit all my music on a thing. But I want lots to choose from.

Something that does playlists in the manner of the iPod would be nice. I want to be able to play sleepy-music or bouncy-music or none-of-the-Beatles or whatever.

I don't care about that whole video thing.

It must be able to cope with the kind of files iTunes uses (AAC?) as that's much of what I have.

Ideally it would work with iTunes, or with some other non-evil software that will not be lots of hassle to transfer to and which has similar features.

I don't use the iTunes Store, so that particular DRM issue isn't relevant.

So, what do you suggest? I am not spending over £200 on this at all, ever; suggestions in the under £100 category and the under £200 category would be good, though I recognise the former may have trouble with the first criterion.

Talk to me!

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I thought the evil bit about iTunes was that your music would only play on iPod and not much else.

That's the iTunes store (which

taimatsu said she didn't use), not the iTunes software.

Yeah, it's horribly confusing when trying to research this stuff on Google.

Ah. If much of your music is itunes, I think you'll have to go for an ipod. I don't believe they'll transfer to another type of player.

Otherwise, I'd recommned one of the Creative types, as they do similar playlist styles, but for less money than the ipods.

I know AAC DRM protected files won't play on other things but I think the other stuff ought to. I'm not certain, though.

Sadly, whilst there's nothing stopping other players playing AAC files (or more accurately, m4a files) there aren't any that I can think of other than the iPod which do.

Luckily, if you want to convert them to mp3 files, you just select your music library from inside iTunes and right click; convert to mp3. (First you have to set your iTunes to import music as mp3 files rather than aac files though)

FYI the iTunes issue is that tracks/videos brought from the online "iTunes Music Store" service come with a DRM ("FairPlay" a.k.a Protected AAC) that as-is restricts them to playing only on;
a) iPods
b) iPhones
c) Motorola mobiles with built-in iTunes
d) iTunes (the program), or any other media player software that has QuickTime

Oh yeah, as an iPod owner/user with a few protected tracks I'm familiar with the closed nature of the iTunes DRM. However the DRM isn't an issue in this case since Lucy doesn't buy from iTunes.

Are you aware that you can remove the DRM from all your iTunes files (for free)? Have a look at JHymn.

I am. I just never bothered because I'm using an iPod with no change in mp3 player likely in the immediate future.

Fair enough :) My deep dislike of DRM made me mention it.

I don't think JHymn (or anything else AFAIK) can remove DRM from anything produced by (i.e. purchased using) iTunes 6 or later.

You can burn a CD and re-rip it to get round it, but it just feels wrong somehow. Not to mention time consuming and a waste of CDs unless you use a CDRW. :-)

I didn't know that JHymn etc are not current with iTunes, so thanks for the info (not of much use to me since I don't have it, but someone may find it so :). I bet it won't be long before they catch up though, it's happened before.

You can get iTunes to burn to a virtual CD device, and then rip from that - ie, to a CD sized file and back again. Saves on CDs, but same loss of quality problem in either case.

We are meandering quite a bit however, as taimatsu doesn't use iTMS :)

They have indeed caught up, but with a different program. qtfairuse (http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553) works just fine with iTunes 6 and 7.

If you can find somewhere that will sell you one in the UK, you could go for the Sansa e200R. The cheapest of this series is £70 (in US dollars...), has about 32 hours (2 GB) of music storage, FM radio and voice recorder, plays video and AAC (and mp3, wma etc). It has some kind of software for transferring stuff but I believe also works like a plug in usb drive (as all players damn well should do in my opinion). I don't know about smart playlists on it.

iPods are expensive and don't have many features ;) The things they do they do well though.

Capcity
What sort of bitrates (compression) is most of your music in? If it isn't already, you could shrink it down the space required by lowering the bitrate to 192 kbps, or even 128 kbps (the old de facto "good enough" standard). The loss is quality is normally only appreciable on decent speakers/stereos.

File Support
"iTunes 7 can currently read, write, and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC[inc. Protected AAC], and Apple Lossless. It can also play anything QuickTime can play..." (See WikiP on iTunes file formats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itunes#File_format_support) for more.)

The actual file formats that your songs are in is all dependant on where you sourced the song. Downloading; unless it was from a big name pay-for service they are almost all definately going to be mp3. Importing from CD; that all depends on the setting of your copy of iTunes, the default is AAC (it can be changed in the Preferences window). To find out the format of a song go to the 'Get Info' window [Mac:⌘+i, PC: right mouse click].

I have a suggestion!

Buy a 30gb ipod from the refreshed/refurbished section of the apple site. (go to the store section of the apple site, scroll down, in the righthand column there's a "save!" link with a red icon. click it.)
They are only $180 there and still have the standard apple warranty. Not sure how much they are/if you can order them from the UK, but they're pretty cheap. I've ordered several items from it and had good luck. I also just ordered myself a 60gb ipod for $230 this morning. If there aren't any currently on there, they are constantly updating the availability. Usually they have more stock earlier in the day. If you can't order and get it delivered to the UK at those prices, and if you could figure out all the details, i'd be happy to let you ship it to me if you don't know anyone else living in the states and then i'd ship it along to you, though I'm pretty sure my friend Heather managed to order from London with no problems.

Personally, I rather enjoy apple products, and i am willing to pay a little extra if necessary for the easily integrated functionality between all of the apple hardware/software that I choose to use.

There's a separate refurb section on the apple UK store -- it's where I got mine from. what it has tends to vary from day to day, though, and currently the ipod section doesn't seem to be very well stocked.

I never spend a lot of money on anything. If I want some luxery I always get it from ebay. You can try Amazon as well. I saw on ebay MP3 players. I almost bought one because I bid on music but the seller understood that I made a mistake and gave me the money back.

I'd go for something like an iBead - it presents itself to any operating system as a USB datastick type thing, you drag and drop your music to it. IIRC a 512Mb one is about 30 quid and will play about 7 hours of music in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats.

I like my nano a lot, and being flash based storage rather than hard disk based, it tends not to be so upset about being dropped.

My 4 gig takes around 1000 songs which itunes informs me is 2.3 days worth.

The 8 gig one on the apple store is £169 (the 4 gig is £129).

I'd agree with the comment about the refurb store, its definitely worth keeping an eye on it, just to see if something comes up in your price range.

The drawback with the little 4gig ipods is that you are going to want to switch the music on them every so often, but I tend to do this every time I recharge it so it never seems like a chore.

I love my iAudio device (X5, M3 was good too), but it does indeed seem not to play AAC files, and the playlist support is a bit of a faff.

Wikipedia has a list of players that do though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#Products_that_support_AAC

And this site has lots of players and lots of info about them all:

http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/

How big *is* your audio collection? I thought I had quite a lot, but I'm still a long way off filling a 60 GB device.

(BTW I seem to have dropped off your friends list some time ago, I'm not sure why, and won't mind if you want to leave me off, but miss being able to see your locked stuff).

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