Need info on ipod like devices

Poststructural Pub
1

Okay, so this week both my CD player AND headphone radio at work have died on me. Now I can’t work 10 hours a day without tunes, not to mention the fact that NO ONE can listen to people playing recorders all day, 6 days a week, 300 and some odd days a year :astonished: :puppyeyes: :waah: :boggle: so I need a new tune machine (if only to drown out all the recorders, right Amar :smiley: ), and I’m tired of lugging CD’s around everywhere I go, plus finding a good CD store these days is surprising difficult, so I’m thinking it may be time to start downloading instead (someone where I work is planning to get itunes on the shop mac, but we have a pc as well, so platform isn’t a deal breaker for me.)

Now normally I’m Obsessive Compulsive to the extreme when it comes to researching stuff like this, but I’m going to try to break the cycle here by asking for some help: Can someone give me the short story on what’s hot, what’s not, and why, when it comes to ipod like devices? And why are ipods in particular so frickin’ popular? Are they truely superior in certain ways, or is it mostly marketing?

Much thanks in advance :slight_smile:

Loren

2

Hi Loren. I’m exhausted right now but will try to recall some of the research I did. The one with the best (longest) track record is definitely Apple I-pod. I just got for my daughter (sweet sixteen) the special edition U2 20GB model - an extra fifty bucks for the beautiful and unique red and black color and $50 U2 gift certificate.

Anyway I checked all the models at an Apple store - 4GB Mini, 8hr battery life (probably close to that in reality), holds about 1,000 songs, comes in cutesy colors and costs $249.

The regular (non U2) 20GB, up to 12 hours, 5,000 songs, $299.

40GB, 12 hours, 10,000 songs, $399.

Supports MP3, WAV and AAC (MAC only). The convenient wheel selector is now available on all the models. Reviews indicate that it’s still the best overall and easiest to use. Comes with USB cable, AC adaptor plug and charger, and ear buds (reputed to be “adequate.”)

Downsides are - the battery is changeable only by Apple, has a 2-year life, a 1-year warranty, and costs $100 to replace after that. Also, a case is recommended as the back scratches easily and it’s not tremendously durable; i.e., it will break if you drop it hard. However, it is solid state with no moving parts and movement (running, etc.)does not affect it.

I handled all 3 models and unless you’re some kind of miniature freak, they all seem nice and small and manageable to me (e.g., probably about a dime’s width difference only between the 20 and 40).

There’s a new one out that shows digital photos you’ve stored on the screen - but that’s gimmicky, duplicates what you get from other things and is costly - I’d avoid that for the time being until it becomes really useful.

Main competitors seem to be Creative Zen Touch, 20 GB, holds 5,000 MP3 or 10,000 WMA songs, and has twice the battery life. Also has support for the widest selection of music download services on the net. For $259 it comes with earphones, adaptor, USB cable AND case. The Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra comes in 30, 40, or 60GB. I didn’t get far enough to get to the battery policies for replacement.

I have some Creative Soundblaster top of the line sound card on my computer which works great for recording music (SHure mic into pre amp right into the sound card), so Creative is a good name for me.

iRiver is yet another viable competitor. Dell makes one as well that has an integrated remote. The Zen Touch also has option for FM radio and voice recording via wired remote.

I got the iPod because my daughter (who’s generally not acquisitive and does research) really wanted that one because of reputed ease of use and lasting reputation. If I were buying for myself, I’d want to play around a bit with the Zen Touch before deciding.

Good luck old buddy.

Philo

3

quite a few people (myself included) have the iRiver.

I wanted something with decent recording ability. This is about it! (iHP-20 , -40) Built-in that is… Jack (MurphyStout) has a creative jukebox or something like that and he uses it to record… The Archos Gmini is something I looked at, but since it isn’t in any retail stores in Canada… I couldn’t really look at it. However, I belive it was the first hard drive music player…

I may not know as much as I think I do about the iPods, but I believe the 20 and 40 gig ones are hard drive not solid state… nothing over 1 gig that I know of is hard drive (with the possible exception of the iPod minis)

4

The ipods have a memory cache buffer in addition to the hard drive. The memory pre-loads up to 25 minutes of music to the cache at a time and the ipod plays the music from the cache instead of the hard drive. Sorry, I was imprecise.

Philo

5

Loren, do a search on this board for Azalin’s post about the iRiver, there was quite a discussion about similiar devices.

MarkB

6

Food for thought…

-A walkman-type CD player that plays MP3 burned CDs can be had for $50-$60. A CD-R holds more tunes than you could listen to in an 8hr day.

-Re: downloading MP3s, I would guess that there is an abundance of trad music that will not be available because it is not mainstream enough. At least that is what I found in perusing a friend’s Rhapsody subscription.

-Re: hard drive size in iPods and the like, I have most of my CD collection MP3’ed (200+ CDs) and it takes up about 13GB on my hard drive. Does anyone really need much more than a 20 or 30GB device???

Last year I worked at the tech bench of a retail chain that sold iPods. Most of those sold were returned within a few days for one problem or another. Usually something we could not really take the time to test for. “Software doesn’t do X, Y, and Z properly”. “Once in awhile blah-blah happens”. We would just pack 'em up and send 'em back to the distributor for them to test out. My gut feeling is that the majority of issues were 1-D-10-T problems, :wink:

Cheers,
David

7

I have an iPod (20 gig) and love it, but feadan’s point about getting a Walkman-type portable CD player that’s capable of playing MP3 CDs is very good advice. The player and the CDs are likely to last quite a bit longer than an iPod, and if you lose or drop the player you’re only out $50 or so.

I have 10 gigs of music on the iPod and I have little doubt I’ll be able to fill it up with another 10, but I’m starting to question whether it was worth several hundred bucks to have all my CDs (and old cassettes that I’ve burned to CD) in my pocket. Sure it’s nice to be able to call up anything when the mood hits for a particular track, but I could easily create one or two MP3 CDs of all the music that I listen to 90% of the time.

8

Hey Brad (or anyone else who’d care to answer), an iPod related question for ya, but not related to the topic at hand in this thread. I just got an iMac G5 to replace my circa-1997 PC, which was sadly eaten alive by spyware. (Literally. From the outside it looked fine, but it got to where it would take 10 minutes just to boot up, and as the last straw, I couldn’t even dial in to my ISP any more. Which, ironically, did cut off the spyware incursions…)

Anyway, so now I’m exploring all this fine new capability I have on hand. One of my first chores will be to dump all my minidisc recordings onto the iMac so that I can burn them onto CDs. Looks like the only way I’ll be able to do this is analog, via playing them real-time and recording them into GarageBand. (If there’s a better way, by all means someone please let me know!) But here’s where the iPod question comes up. My Sony minidisc player seems to be slowly dying, so a replacement may be in order. I’ve been using it quite successfully to record stuff at summer camps and classes, and pick up tunes at sessions. With a good mic, I can get CD quality sound on minidisc. But I’m thinking that if I got an iPod, I could use it for all the tasks I’ve been doing with minidisc, and being that it’s an Apple product, transfers to the iMac would be a snap, i.e. I could dump the files digitally rather than analog. Is that true? And here’s the big question: can I get the same high-quality sound on an iPod if I use the good mic I’ve been using with the minidisc?

Any and all help is much appreciated!

9

I agree with all of David’s comments.

I wanted to be able to listen to regular cd’s but liked the idea of having the option of loads of mp3’s to listen to as well.

So I bought an mp3 playing sony cd walkman. Because it ‘remembers’ a bunch of mp3’s at a time the disc stops spinning so the battery lasts for something like 50 hours.

I was told an ipod battery lasts 18 months approx and can’t be replaced/is unavailable as a replacement part - you have to buy a new one! Might be urban myth?

I believe there isn’t a whole lot of ITM on the likes of WinMX - some Chieftains but not a lot else. No Flook!

Hope that helps
j.i.

10

Hi John

(and it was good to see you, albeit too briefly, at the Catskills…wish we’d set aside some time for tunes but we’ll just have to do that next time!)

Short answer is no, the iPod isn’t going to be a good alternative to a minidisc recorder for recording music. You can record sound with it, but the quality’s not good, it’s best suited for voice recording (as in dicatation), could be used to capture tunes in a pinch but the sound quality won’t be anything like what you get with your minidisc.

You could look into the iRiver as a decent alternative (there are some threads about that here on Chiff and Fipple), or you could get the new Edirol R-1 flash-based recorder which I think makes more sense. The Edirol site is down right now, but you can see this unit here:

http://cdrecordingsoftware.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=cdre&Product_Code=edir1

With a 1-gigabyte Flash card (less than $100 these days) you can record many hours of music if you record directly to MP3. I like the idea of this recorder (haven’t tried one yet myself, though) because it stores your music on Flash memory cards instead of a hard disk. Drop your iRiver or spill a pint of Guiness on it and you lose everything…but with the R-1 at least the card should still work. It can record direct to MP3 as well as other formats (WAV, etc.) and you can transfer those files directly onto your Mac and import them into iTunes.

As for transferring your old recordings from minidisc to your Mac, you’re right you’ll have to do it analog, through the line-in port on your Mac into GarageBand. I personally find GarageBand a bit awkward to use for this kind of thing…if you get frustrated I would suggest getting yourself a copy of Audio Hijack Pro ($32 from http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/), which has a much easier interface and is really designed for exactly this kind of purpose. Plus it makes recording those streaming RTE radio shows a lot simpler :wink:

Cheers,

Brad

11

Thanks much for all the answers to date :slight_smile: , much to consider, will continue to mull it over…

Loren

12

Thanks for the info, Brad. Also good to see you up in East Durham. I would wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, but since you’re in Canada now, I guess you already did that…

13

Same with the iPod!! And there are things you can buy to get an iPod to record, but an iRiver is way better at it, and has everything built in!

(have any old record you want to listen to in the car/at work/etc?? iRivers can take the audio-out and record it while it’s playing… not as fast as downloading, but you get to actually listen to all that old music)

14

My daughter had (had) an iPod and it broke yesterday and it just went out of warranty and they have a standard repair cost of $250.00!!! A new mini cost $249.

To clarify an earlier post, they DO replace the battery for $99.00.

15

Four words.
Creative
Zen Xtra
40GB :laughing:

http://www.nomadworld.com/products/Jukebox_Zen/
In the car
Or
http://www.nomadworld.com/products/muvo_txfm/

512 Mb will give you 8 hrs and is very small
I take mine everywhere, use rechargable batterys though!

16

i was checking the net for the various ipod, iriver and all those kind of devices, searched in google.ch for the best swiss prices for those gadgets, this is what i found:
http://www.toppreise.ch/index.php?k3=155&manu=&o=ba&SID=a76022551e7a234a7ba9e89929425c35

holy cow…which should i get…if at all..?? :astonished:

17

i’ve heard that the ipods or any mac players are a good bit louder then the other makes.

18

Hmmm, I think that’s really open to debate, and it depends what are the dynamics you’re going to end up in. I think that device is very big, much bigger than an iPod or iRiver, and it makes it a little harder to try to be “subtle” in a session and record quitly without looking like someone who has a recording studio in it’s bag :slight_smile: Also, while it is true that 1GIG memory cards are relatively cheap, we’re talking about 1GIG here. With the iRiver, you can have your whole collection of tunes AND have a few GIGs left to make recordings (for 300$US). Having the equivalent with the flash device would cost a fortune. So one way or the other that flash device ends up being more expensive and bigger than let’s say the iRiver. As for spilling a pint of beer on a hard drive device, who would do that beside me? Hehe! My hard drive is still working by the way, I just blew up the battery power relay circuit or something like that. Darn!

I’m waiting for the day where we’ll have a super mini flash device that records in MP3, for me size matters: the smaller the better :laughing:

19

Bought an 1-river HP120 last spring. great device. not as cool looking as i-pod but works fine. The deciding factor for me is that I wanted a single device to listen to fm radio and store and play cds. After 3-4 months of daily use, it suddenly would no longer recognize it’s internal hard drive, freestanding or when connected to my laptop. After several cordial e-mail exchanges with i-river, they replaced the device. The whole transaction, my first e-mail to arrival of new device took about a week. I couldn’t be happier. I do recall reading that they plan to discontinue the HP 120 line soon.