Is an iPod just a brand name for an MP3 player, or is it different technology? Just curious-- I don’t really want either. Sounds like 'way too much time and trouble to download and transfer stuff.
Yep. They are very well designed and work well, whether the are the worth the extra money you pay for the apple design is up to you.
iTunes, the software the comes with them, makes it trivial to import CDs. There are other programs out that that do the same, some free some not.
iRiver</a](http://www.iriver.com/">iRiver</a)> is another popular brand, as is Sony and Creative. There are a ton out there.
Edit: the latest iPods also play video. My wife bought me one for my birthday and I used it on the flight to DC over thanksgiving to watch the last episode of Inspector Morse. It works surprisingly well, however they want to you to pay $2 to buy tv shows so they don’t make it easy to put your own videos on it. It’s possible, just not trivially easy.
I can’t answer the first question, but as for it sounding like too much trouble…I think that has to do with how much you mind fiddling around with the things.
I don’t think my kid who has one finds it to be much bother–she likes loading her songs and having them all available in any order she chooses.
Many people would spend as much time cataloguing cds and still be limited to a certain group of songs at a time.
I have an MP3 player which I use on a daily basis.
It will hold about one hundred tracks which I then set to play randomly.Every few days I’ll delete and replace the tracks - I have thousands - so I never really know what’s coming next..makes for some lovely surprises weaving and bobbing through the traffic every day 
Slan,
D.
You know, there’s this thing called a “radio” that comes free in most cars! 
http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=213&subcategory=214&product=10795
I have one of these, and I absolutely love it!!!
The radio’s free, too bad about the quality. 
A few years ago the last of the few radio shows I followed was finally driven off the air. While I chuckled when satellite radio first came out, I understand now why folks are moving towards it.
Yeah, but then you have to put up with commercials or pledge drives, and you have no control over the music selection.
I deal with commercials and pledge drives on the radio the same as on TV - change channels or shut it off. 
I suppose we’ll get an iPod or something similar someday. A digital camera is higher on my list of wants though. But there’s no sense buying more toys until after we pay down some of the credit card bills that we’ve run up.
I’ve got an iRiver. The reason I got one was to record lessons. I recently took a trip, and flew coast to coast on planes with no audio. I listened to the iRiver the whole way.
And, as for the bother, as someone pointed out, it’s trivial to import CD’s to the Mac, then transfer them to the MP3 player. I did about a dozen albums while I was packing for the trip.
Oh, and BTW, Chris Norman’s “Man with the wooden flute” doesn’t work on planes – too dynamic, and too much background noise on the plane.
I should have mentioned that I cycle to work.
The problem with a radio, as others have suggested, is the quality of music available, not to mention adverts and other interruptions.Using an MP3 player gives me total control over content so I never have to suffer any boy bands or whatever the flavour of the day might be.
Slan,
D.
The iPod is essentially an MP3 player. But MP3 players have been around for
years. What made the iPod special was that it contained a harddrive which
could hold many, many hours worth of music. Most previous MP3 players
used something called Flash memory instead of a hard drive, which limited
the amount of information they could contain, and therefore limited the
amount of music you could listen to before having to erase some songs to
make room for more. With the iPod, people could load their entire CD
collection at one time, and still have room for songs they bought off of
iTunes.
Recently, Flash memory has become sufficiently advanced that Apple could
cheaply replace the hard drive, and still have a huge capacity for songs,
which is how we now can buy the incredibly thin iPod nano, which will hold
1000 songs. Of course, other MP3 player manufacturers will also start using
this new Flash memory, and will be able to match start matching the
iPod’s song-holding capability, but now Apple has name recognition under
its belt, so the iPod will probably lead the pack for a while yet.
The moral: I wish I had a fifth of Steve Job’s business savvy.
After I posted I did think that maybe you rode a bike, which of course makes my comment really really stupid.
Yeah, the thing that keeps me away from the iPod is the lack of recording. When I’m abroad in Maynooth, Ireland and go to sessions in Dublin I need to record =). The thing is the iRiver records, but it puts music in alphabetical order I hear including albums making it anoying. I am yet to find my perfect player.
I’ve got the Creative Labs Muvo N200, a 1GB flash player, and love it. I have their Zen Micro on order, the one the above link goes to. The N200 is about the size of a a couple packs of gum and holds about 15 CD’s. To put music on it–it’s as easy as loading a CD in your computer, plugging the mp3 player into the computer, opening the software that comes with the player, and clicking and dragging tracks from the CD to the player. Naming and organizing the music takes a few seconds.
The sound quality for the Creative products is great, a little better than the Ipods. Most of the Creative Labs players also have microphones that can record live music, and a line-in that can record music played from another device, features lacking in Ipods and some other players. I love these things and find them very easy to use, and I’m not a youngster raised on computers. I use my N200 flash player for jogging and dancing, the larger players have a mini-hard disc that some people recommend not be used for exercise that may jar it. For hard core music fans I’d highly recommend mp3 players, and I think most people who use computers much won’t have a problem loading the music.
there is a way to port a linux os into the iPod and record directly from there-gets rid of the low res recoding issue; haven’t done it myself, but I do know some that have-and it seems to work.
I prefer purpose built stuff so an iPod as recorder works as stop gap measure.
If you rip an CD using WMA, it gives the tracks numbers, so the album remains in track order. If you’re creating the tracks yourself from some other source, you can again number them in any way you like.
I’ve been using a iHP-140 40GB iRiver for a couple of years now for all my listening and recording needs. The iPod’s lack of live recording (plus Azalin’s advice) steered nme to the iRiver, and I’ve been delighted with it. I just wish the controls were more intuitive, and it didn’t have a “Billy Big Button” on the front.
I’ve always understood that the iPod doesn’t actually play MP3s, but converts them into its own format when you upload tunes.
Bingo.
I use a player that plays WMA files from my WMP-10.1 program, which seem to have better resolution and are smaller than mp3 and iTune formats of comparable size and will also record in WMA or mp3. I also have a cd player in my jeep that plays MP3s and WMAs recorded to cd or DVD (you can hold about a bazillion tracks of WMAs on a DVD! I usually devide my disks up by genre, and I have yet to fill one. I use Nero to run them all up on my DVDs and to do other sound converting before recording.)
By default, iTunes is set to rip mp3’s as .aac files. You can change this in settings to anything you’d like.
Now, if you buy from the iTunes store, that’s another story…
I read online that it didn’t really work that way, that it couldn’t sort numbers. People said you have to go like ‘a1. Blah Blah b2. Sound of Music c3. Rainbow Connection’ and so on so it would put them according to alphabetical order…they were speaking of the H10 though so maybe there are firmware differences or something?