mp3 player? pda? which? what? help!

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK, I’m totally confused. I’ve got a few hundred dollars to blow on - I figured an mp3 player - but now I’m not sure. I’m hoping some people here have suggestions - in fact I’ll take any input I can get. You will find very shortly that though I’ve tried to edumacate myself on the options, I’m basically completely clueless:

What I like to do on the internet is listen to streaming lectures, interviews, etc. NPR type stuff as well as just random lectures and audio and video files I find on line. I’d like, if possible, to listen to some of that portably. Needless to say these are in all sorts of formats - Realplayer, mpg, Windows Media (audio and video), avi, quicktime etc. Mostly not in mp3 format - though there’s more and more of that lately with the growth in podcasting. I also have Napster which I used for listening to music, which I’d probably like to do about 25% of the time.

I know that most of the mp3 players play - well only mp3s. I know that there’s also software that can convert other formats to mp3 but I don’t know how successful that is or if it would be reasonable to buy an mp3 player expecting to do that. I know there are pdas that can play some audio and video files too. So maybe I should go with them. Although I don’t know how reasonable that is to do. I also don’t know if Napster is more or less compatible with any of the mp3 players.

I’d sort of like to get a pda if I could listen to my audio reasonably on it because I’d like to be able to have wireless internet access with it. Currently I have a clie which I use for addresses and e-books primarily, but it doesn’t have any wireless capability. I’m not a big cell phone user, so I’m not interested in any cell/pda or cell/mp3 combo.

I know I’m throwing out a lot, and asking a lot and that there’s no right (or probably even good) answer for me. But I would be *extremely * grateful for literally any relevant info anyone can give me at all.

2

If you can wait just a couple of months, Samsung will be releasing the NeXus, an MP3 player with integrated XM Satellite Radio. It’s Napster-compatible (in fact, you’ll be able to buy songs you hear on XM through Napster) and comes with the complete setup you’ll need to use the XM feature. It won’t do live reception outside of its cradles, but you can record radio programming for later.

http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/samsung-nexus-xm-satellite-radio/mp3-players-unveiled.html

3

I think it depends on if you buy the songs outright or use the subscription service.

Most players support more formats than mp3, but I don’t know if there are any players out there that support all formats. So knowing what you will be using the player for and what formats you want to play will help you figure out what player works.

I don’t buy music per track but use a subscription service (not Napster, but Yahoo) so I’ll tell you what I know about that. I think that Napster, Yahoo, and Rhapsody subcription service use the same Microsoft Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Windows WMA format to manage the licensing, and only a few mp3 players currently support this DRM system. I use a Creative Zen Micro, and I think some Rio and Dell players work as well.

Using the subscription service should be easy, but in practice it’s a pain, at least initially. The problem is that you are dealing with three different entities: The player manufacturer, the music service, and the DRM. I’ll list the problems I’ve had:

The player: Out of the box, the Zen Micro worked fine. In fact, it still does. However, it firmware it ships with doesn’t support subscruiption music. There is a firmware upgrade that you can download online, but a) it’s a one way upgrade, once you load the new firmware you can’t install the old firmware, and b) the upgraded firmware is beta. In the end, I had zero problems and the new firmware installed perfectly, but it totally sucks that you have to do this.

The music service: I initially wanted to use Rhapsody To Go since I was using Rhapsody (version 2.01), but the subscription service required an upgrade to Rhapsody (version 3). The problem with this is that version 3 is beta (see a trend here?) and would not load on my machine*. Yahoo Music Unlimited did load on my machine, and it works**.

The DRM: You need to have Windows Media Player 10 installed in order to use the DRM. Oh, and did I mention that you have to have Windows XP? Forget it if you have 98. Fortunately, as far as I know WMP 10 isn’t beta, and it seems to work very well. BTW, the Zen came with software to transfer the tracks to the player, Yahoo has software that is supposed to transfer tracks to the player (but it sucks), and WMP 10 can transfer tracks to the player. WMP 10 seems to be the easiest way for me.

Contrast that with the iPod and iTunes, which are all managed by one company. I don’t use iPods or iTunes, but it has to work better. Has to. I’d be shocked if it didn’t.

Now, getting slightly off topic, I’ll explain why I use the subscription service. Right now I have 827 songs on my player, and I pay $7 per month to listen to them. If I bought them for 79 cents each (Yahoo’s price), it would cost me over $650. I’d have to want them for 93 months to make paying for them make sense. But I actually have about 2,500 songs from Yahoo on my PC (only about 800 or so fit on my 5 GB players, Yahoo files are 192 kbps). Once you pay $7 per month, you can download as much as you want. Makes it nice to listen to new artists. Also, I don’t have to worry about the files themselves. If I accidentally erase them, or lose a hard drive, I just download them again.

  • my old machine was an old 500MHz P3 with Win 98 upgraded to XP Home, and Rhapsody 3.0 never loaded. My new machine is a 1.8 GHz Athlon 64 with a clean installation of XP Home and it loaded the new version of Rhapsody 3.0 just fine. These programs seem to be intended for modern PC’s.
    ** Caution: Yahoo’s technical support is rumored to be pretty much non-existant. If you do try them, don’t pay for an entire year, pay month to month. It costs a bit more, but you don’t want to to pay $50+ for something that might not work for you.