You’re right, and that’s the fuller-size iPod are good for. My new shuffle only holds a gig of music, and we have 35 gigs of music and books. So, yeah, you only put on it the playlist you want, and listen to it shuffled (or not shuffled for books – it knows the difference and won’t mix books in with music).
I know you’re not asking, but I’m adamant about this.
There are other brands of (http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_subtype.jsp?eUser=&prod_path=%2FAudio+and+Video%2FMP3+Player%2FMP3+Players) players!
I own a Nomad Zen, and love it. A lot of people that have gone with the iRiver hard drive players can’t stop raving about them (and I think that when replacement time comes for me, I’ll be among them).
If your daughter has a respectably large CD or mp3 collection already, it really does not matter which brand you own. They’ll all accept CDs ripped into mp3 or other various formats, and practically all will accept (un-DRM’d) mp3s that she already has on a computer.
The best reasons to go ipod over competitors:
-Easy integration with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS): It’s the biggie of the online music stores right now, and it’s meant to seamlessly integrate with the ipod and nothing else. I personally can’t bring myself to buy music where I possess no factory-made physical copy, but YMMV. I also won’t tell you about the effectiveness of already-mentioned burn-and-rip workarounds that will allow any other player to be used with the service.
-User Interface: As much as I hate to say it, ipods are the most simple to use, user-friendly players around. Not that the learning curve for any others are any great challenge, especially if your daughter is the least tech-savvy. I could do everything I needed with my Zen within an hour or two of flipping through the manual and messing around.
The worst:
-It’s trendy: Not to sell your daughter short, but there are people who want the ipod simply because it’s the COOL mp3 player. It’s the one that the brand name is becoming as synonymous with the product as Kleenex or Xerox. You can shop around and do better if she genuinely wants an mp3 player to play music. You’re stuck if she desperately needs an ipod, only an ipod, and nothing else will do but an ipod.
(I posted much the same thing earlier this morning in a pit thread about ipod advertising.)
For $50 more than a 1gb shuffle you can get a 4gb mini, with a choice of colors and a display. Plus there are more doo-dads to accessorize with. I like having a display. Then again the shuffle may be more cool and the mini and photo might be seen as some clunky relic.
Since it’s a pretty penny you’re spending you ought to devise a way to find out what she would prefer. I doubt you could go wrong with a mini, though.
How much music does a 12 year old have? I have a Mini, and I only have 200 some songs on it so far, which includes pretty much all my CD’s that I listen to and a bunch of songs I got off of iTunes. I know that when I was 12, I didn’t listen to a lot of music. I wouldn’t spend $200 on a Mini iPod if she’s only going to put 100 songs on it.
Fair use is about more than just being able to listen to your music on 4 computers. If you want to do anything with the songs you buy from iTMS other than listening to them with Apple products–e.g. play them on your car MP3 player, use snippets in a presentation, or play them backwards and listen for Satanic messages–you have to burn them to CD first, which is just one step above recording your line-out, which you can do (digitally, AFAIK) with any music store.
And come on. “Most liberal” DRM scheme? The world’s tallest midget might be taller than a lot of other people, but I still wouldn’t want him on my basketball team. 
As Far as I know all songs are $0.99
They come in several formats MP3 and a couple others
you will want to copy them to cd, just to keep from losing them if your HD crashes
do not subscribe to napster, you basicly rent the music till cancel your subscription
I use Itunes (I don’t own an ipod
I just bought my soon to be 11yr old a
SanDisk SDMX1-256-A18 MP3 for $58 holds 4hours has an FM radio and a voice recorder. and its got a screen!! Take that Apple!
Yes, but if you want something that’s trivially easy to use, is small as sin, and supports languages other than English, they don’t work so well.
Not true. I’ve puchased music from the iTunes Music Store and dropped them into my home movies without a hiccup. And I know you can incorporate purchased music into presentations with the same ease. Of course, it all depends on what software tools you use…
Uh huh. Like I said, files from iTMS work with Apple products, but if you want to use them anywhere else, you’re no better off than you would be with any other service. Say what you like about Windows Media’s DRM; at least it isn’t designed to lock you into a single manufacturer.
Wrong on 2 out of 3, and only marginally right on the third.
Just quickly firing up my Zen, and going to language settings: English, English (large), English Int’l, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese (okay, I don’t know which Chinese language it’d give me), Netherlands (they have their own language? I thought German was official over there), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish. And I just downloaded the user manual for the iRiver H300 series. They don’t have a full list in the manual, but they do have a picture next to the instructions on changing setting. It’s clearly a small part of a bigger list and reads “Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faeroese.”
For small as sin: the iRiver H320 is virtually identical to the standard ipod, except .4 inches thicker. Same width and height, though. Other small hard drive players (like Creative’s Zen Micro) are similar in size to the ipod mini (FTR the Micro is actually smaller than the mini at 2" x 3.3" x .7" compared to ipod mini’s 2" x 3.6" x .6").
For trivially easy to use: I concede that to pick up out of the box, ipods win hands-down. They’re incredibly user-friendly devices. But woe to the states of society and science when one hour of learning the functions of your new cool device is too much to ask, especially when it would bring you to the same competency level as the ipod out of the box. Amusingly enough for me, I get lost on ipods easier than any other mp3 players now that I’ve owned a different one for as long as I have. I can pick up the iRiver after my Zen and have no real problems. But I glaze over for a minute when I grab an ipod.
Yes, I have been hanging out in the Pit a bit lately. I don’t mean to be exceedingly confrontational, but just want to cut through the misconceptions.
For what it’s worth, I found it far easier to learn how to operate my Rio Karma than an iPod (I still can’t figure it out after toying around with my friends’). No manuals used in either case.