Is iPod the only - or the best - game in town for MP3 players? Tell me your experiences with alternatives.
I stuck a 512mb SD card in my Palm Pilot for music; works fine for the bus commute but has a battery life of about 90 minutes. :mad: Since that’s the only time I use the music player, it’s adequate for me.
I received a Creative Zen Neeon for Christmas. 6GB capacity. Battery life is pretty damned good, I only have to charge after about 12-15 hours of listening. FM Tuner, microphone, plays MP3 and WMA. I carry it with me everywhere.
I just bought a Cowan iAudio x5L. 20 gigs, plays video, and has a 34 hour battery (if you just use it for music). It also includes an FM tuner, a photo viewier, a text reader, and recording capabilities. The controls are a bit counterintuitive, but once you get over the learning curve, it’s great. Amazon had it for about $270.
I’m going to buy a new Sony Ericsson W800i cellphone. It’s a cellphone, radio, and Walkman-branded MP3 player that can take a 2-gig Memory Stick. Excellent solution all round, IMO, though 2 gigs is only enough for about 15 albums.
I bought a Rio Forge for Rhiannon8404
It’s flash based, so no hard drive to wear out.
It runs on AAA batteries, so no costly rechargeable to wear out. (It gets many, many hours off a single AAA.)
It only has 512 MB internal storage, so that might be an issue, but it has a slot for an SD memory card. I bought a 1 GB card to go with it, and it stores more music than she can listen to.
I got a Nano for Xmas and it’s great, but it’s so great I find myself wishing I could put all my music on it. I can’t afford to buy a big Ipod now, so I might get one of those new cheap CD/mp3 players so that I can carry my whole collection around in a somewhat compact form. Of course my actual Itunes can’t be converted to mp3, but that’s what the Ipod is for.
If you want to reduce a CD collection to manageable size for little money that might be an option to look at. Doesn’t fit in a pocket though.
I have the X5 as well and like it a lot.
I forgot to mention one of my favorite features - the fact that it doesn’t require ANY external or propriatery software to make it work. You plug it into your USB drive, and it shows up as a new hard drive, so you can just copy and paste like you would to any internal hard drives.
This is one of the major reasons I didn’t want an iPod. iTunes may be a lovely, fantastic piece of software, but I HATE it when I’m forced to install software I don’t need to make something work. I also hate all the controls and limitations that come with it, limiting how you can use some types of files. It’s just a pet peeve of mine. I’ll take drag and drop every time.
I have a Sandisk m250 that I like. It’s got 2 gigabytes of flash memory. I put almost 500 songs (in WMA format) plus several audio books on it before it was full. It uses 1 AAA battery, and it has a pretty good playing time. I haven’t timed it, but it lasts for many hours before I need to change the battery. It has an FM tuner (which admittedly I’ve never used) and a voice recorder which I’ve used a couple of times. I use Windows Media Player to put songs onto it. In Windows XP, you can right-click on an audio file and it gives you the option to add it to the sync list. I like my little player. The only downside is that I can’t stand the idiotic DJs on the radio any more 
I have a Creative Labs Zen 60GB.
Advantages over iPod:
100 bucks or so less,
supports formats like protected wmv and subscription services
Disadvantages
significantly bigger physically
doesn’t support video or iTunes
I like my Creative Zen Micro. I had considered an Ipod, but the 4gb Ipod was going for $250, where as the 6gb Micro was going for $200. It’s a bit chunkier than the Ipod, but that was part of the appeal to me. I didn’t want something that I worried about breaking just by touching it. The Micro has some heft to it, and fits nicely in my jeans pocket, with the earphone cord strung up under my shirt so it doesn’t catch on anything. It’s nice. 
I should specify: The Ipod Nano, not just an Ipod, was what I was referring to.
We got an Iriver for christmas, runs off a aaa battery (about 17 hours per battery), has the easy usb connection for easy downloads, and retails for like 99 bucks. I give it a B+.
My Rio Forge gave up after a year (look online for horror stories, plus, Rio is out of the business) so I got Sandisk Sansa M250.
So far, I love it. 2GB, I get about 30 hours on a AAA battery and I like the controls.
I’m a big fan of the MP3 CD players, although I understand the appeal of the iPods. I bought a Sony MP3 CD player (D-NF400) a year and a half ago that I’m still thrilled with (if you look it up on Amazon you can read my whole review, although that particular model is no longer made). It’s very convenient to be able to keep an entire genre of music on a single CD, and swapping out a CD on a whim is a lot simpler than trying to reload music from your computer every few days.
I can still see where having a 20GB+ iPod would be more convenient, but I think that if you’re considering just a 512K or 1GB flash drive type of unit, you should also look into MP3 CD players.
I just got the 4GB iPod Nano about 3 weeks ago. I love it!
I used to listen to MP3’s with an older Palm Pilot, but the battery life sucked and the interface was ass.
I traveled with my Nano a week ago and I got about 12 hours out of the battery. At the airport I was at, I could buy a disposable battery charger for $10CAN that would charge the battery up.
Cool side benefits of my iPod are the abbility to synch with my Outlook calander and Contacts. Very cool!
The size is pretty freaking cool, it fits in the little pocket inside your front pocket on your jeans!
My only complaint so far is the iTunes interface, it seems pretty kludgy. But I threw just under 4GB of music and photo’s on it, so I don’t need go back and remove/add songs that often.
I know it’s not an alternative to an iPod (as stated in the OP), but I’d thought I’d let you know what I thought of my iPod.
MtM
Good point. To elaborate: My goal would be to put 80 to 100 CDs on. I don’t mind spending a little for the extra gigs.
If you want all your music, yeah, but the CD player has moving parts, like a big Ipod, and you can’t update Podcasts and things so easily. The CD player is more of a cheap alternative to the big Ipods for people who have a big library of music.