I want to buy an mp3 player, but this is my dillema.
I want a Harddrive based player(need capacity) with the ability to record(not too sure of this usefulness, but helps me justify the cost of said device to myself =), being a college student and all). Usb 2.0/firewire would be nice, but usb 1.1 shouldn’t be too maddenly slow(advice on this requested as well)
I’ve looked at then Nomad Zen, the archos jukebox and the treo 10/15.
the Zen and the archos series record. the Treo does not but, but is significantly cheaper then the others.
The zen is a bit to expensive for my tastes as well as creative not letting windows recognize it as a drive on plugin(anyone know is creative is going to change this via firmware?) but it’s supposed to have the best sound quality, and well… damn it looks good.
Thus I’m mainly looking at the archos series.
From specs I’ve noticed the entire archos series(except the multimedia version) has a paltry 2 mb buffer! I would think that would only offer about 2 minutes of skip protection. not that big of a deal when I consider I don’t think i’ll be taking this thing on workouts(but I might). How well does this 2 mb buffer do? Walking? running? jogging?
I like sound quality, but I doubt i’ll ever be able to buy extremely good headphones. I prefer earbuds and behind the ear style headphones. Those ones that clip onto your ear are comfortable enough too I guess.(An audiophile’s advice please?) How is the archo’s sound quality output on the archos recorder and archos FM?
Weight: the archos Recorder requires 4 nimhs while the fm has a built in lithium battery. how heavy is the recorder with those 4 batteries?
size: pretty much no difference in size, but do they fit in a pocket?
firmware: I’ve heard good things about Rockbox, the open source firmware. how much better is it then the lastest archos firmware?(this is a concern for me because their Faq says the archos FM is not supported)
I guess thats it. Any advice would be appreciated. Also if anyone knows of groundbreaking new products that are worth waiting for let me know.
- thanks in advance.