I got a heck of a shock tonight. I went to Amazon to get another Zen Mozaic 8Gb mp3 player. Nothing was for sale except outside vendors that wanted outrageous $150 prices. I just bought one of these a year ago for $60. :smack:
There’s almost nothing listed. A couple refurbished pieces of crap. A few Listings from Scumbag vultures that want to triple or even quadruple the price. :mad:
Thankfully I found a guy “claiming” to have 5 new Creative Zen Mozaic 8GB exactly like I already had. I bought one from him because he’s got a fantastic Ebay rating score. Fingers crossed he’s not lying and its refurbished garbage. $80 and that’s a lot better than the scumbag sharks on Amazon.
WTF is going on? There’s no way in hell I’m going near an IPod and their DRM crap. Creative Labs was the only one that made a quality player without DRM.
Well, Creative Labs still has the Zen Mozaic EZ300 on their product page. But its out of stock. I have a EZ100 and its on the product page but out of stock.
I see they have a new product line Zen Style. Also a Zen Touch with a touch screen. Yuck, they can keep that junk. Touch Screens are a PITA. Amazon isn’t selling any of these right now. So it doesn’t matter what Creative has on their products page. http://us.creative.com/products/welcomenew.asp?category=948
I don’t know if Creative Labs is going under or what.
Zdnet article on getting around Ipod’s DRM. It sure sounds like DRM is an issue to me. Isn’t all that music on ITunes DRM protected?
I like a mp3 player that requires no software at all. You plug it in and it looks like a standard Flash drive. Copy the music files over and unplug. Simple and Easy. That’s how the Creative Mozaic and Stones work. Creative has a software manager that I’ve never bothered installing or used because its unnecessary.
Dude, that article is from 2008. Apple dropped the DRM on music from iTunes in 2009 (I actually though that it was even longer ago, but whatever). Link to the wonderful, and more than three year old, news.
That is good news. I hadn’t heard about them dropping DRM. I’ve been boycotting ITunes all these years because I refused to buy DRM protected music. I didn’t want the hassle of transferring it from one computer to another. Or losing my music library because of a PC virus or hard drive failure. DRM is a PITA. I’m glad they dropped it.
I’ll have to look into ITunes then. Thanks for the info.
Fair enough. Even though I could never understand the burning passion some people hate iTunes with, I see that it is annoying to be forced to use a program that you don’t want, especially if you have a unique and personal way of organising your music. However, once you get used to it, it’s really not so bad, and for most problems that people have with it, there is a very easy solution. Also, there is something to be said for syncing and the lack of thinking about what to put on your player, although to be fair I don’t have any recent non-Apple experience.
Another point: there is absolutely zero need to even use the iTunes Store at all. Any MP3 bought from Amazon or ripped from one of your CDs will work in iTunes and every iPod just fine. The program itself is the only thing that’s a little hard to get around.
I’m curious if other people get over whelmed with a Mp3 Player that is too large? Even with 8GB I find that there’s just too much music. The Artists menu gets so long to scroll. Forget about scrolling through the Album titles. Even under Genre there’s a lot of titles to scroll, but its the easiest category to navigate. Too much of a good thing.
Thats why I bought another player tonight. The plan is to put my Easy Listening and Jazz on one player. Then my Rock & Country on another. Just so that I don’t have a thousand titles to scroll through.
I can’t imagine how anyone with a 32GB player stays sane. That’s just too much space just for music.
aceplace57, what music player do you use on your computer at the moment? I didn’t like iTunes at first, but it grew on me, and even though I still don’t think that it’s perfect, it’s now what I use to organize and play all the music (as well as podcasts and stuff) on my computer. And yeah, it also syncs to my iPod, but that’s just a bonus, and completely seamless.
I’m not an Apple fanboy or anything, but really, they stuff can be pretty decent sometimes.
That’s where all that (forced) organisation comes in handy. On an iPod, it’s very easy to browse by Artist, Album, Genre or Composer, and to organise your music in playlists. On an iOS device you can even use the keyboard to search for titles and make playlists on the device. Even very long lists are no problem - on clickwheel iPods, the scrolling speed increases after a second, so you are actually scrolling the beginning letters (it’s very intuitive once you’ve seen it), on the iPod touch there’s a little alphabet on the side of each list, so you can just go straight to Y without any scrolling through lists whatsoever.
Sure, it’s a lot of music to carry around with you, but if it’s tagged properly, finding and playing it is a breeze.
A lot of people have taken the next step and subscribe to music services like Pandora or Rhapsody. I’ve had a (first Napster, now Rhapsody) subscription service since 2007, across three phones. Whatever I do on my account through my computer gets transferred to my phone, so playlists and favorite artists are organized the way I want. Or, what I do more often, is just pick my artist of the day and have Rhapsody make a playlist based on that. I can download that playlist to my phone to play offline or just stream it. I don’t have to worry about managing anything. Such a time-suck! Plus, I hear lots of new music this way, and can save it on the fly.
I think iTunes is getting there, with the cloud service, but I don’t know if they’ve rolled out the subscription portion yet. I think you still have to buy the MP3’s in order to sync them across all your devices. If I had to do that, I would have to have spent thousands for the library I’ve got on Rhapsody.
But that aside, if you were to move to iTunes, it’s much better at managing your music, and rather than using totally separate players, you can have iTunes swap out chunks of music using Genius or you can just put entire genres into playlists and just transfer the playlists in and out of your player. Still more time than I prefer to spend, but it’s probably a better solution than dragging and dropping without something helping you sort it all out.
I believe the “DRM” issue he is speaking of is the fact you MUST install and use itunes to transfer mp3s to an Apple brand player, you cannot simply mount the player in explorer and copy and paste files to it. Also you cannot add files one at a time, you must sync your player with itunes, and this wipes all your previous files each time you sync. So you go to another computer that has a few mp3s you want to add, no dice if you sync you loose everything currently there. (At least this is how it worked when I played around with an ipod touch).
Now you can jailbreak your device to remove these limitations, or get used to it basically.
For me personally I don’t want to be told how to use anything, If I want to add mp3s with no organization thats my damn business. It is very annoying.
You can set up your player in iTunes to drag and drop files manually (from within iTunes) instead of having it sync. Syncing is much less of a hassle, though.
Yeah, it’s almost as though if you make a terrible first impression with your DRM and file managers, people tend to remember it rather than searching every day to see if you’re wonderful yet. Damn stupid customers, it’s all their fault!
You might like a Sansa Clip. They run around $40. You can use memory cards with them, which means you can greatly expand storage. Or in your case, you could have different cards for different selections of music.
I haven’t played with mine much yet, but I understand it does take a while for the player to sort through everything when you put in a new card.
Check out http://anythingbutipod.com/
By the looks of it creative has been losing market share steadily. There is plenty of other options available. A lot of companies started making alternative but still are shadowed by the mighty Ipod. The site I link is not a bash on apple rather providing information on the “other” players around. There is even a little section that lets you compare and sort through the player you want based on function. http://compare.anythingbutipod.com/
Well, it sort of is your fault if you let annoyances cloud your judgement that haven’t existed for four year. Ten years ago, Apple was the only company with a decent music download store, things were different back then. The market changed, they reacted and got rid of DRM. That should be the end of that story.
Look, I’m not saying everyone has to buy an iPod, but sometimes it’s frustrating when people use outdated arguments to bash them. It’s their loss, because IMHO they’re very fine machines, but if you’d rather not deal with iTunes, you need something the iPod doesn’t do, or you just plain dislike Apple, by all means, go another route. Just don’t claim it’s for reasons that are simply not true.
IPods havent had DRM for absolute yonks (at least not on the music files).