What MP3 Player to Buy?

[duffer]

:smack: never even thought of that. I tend to make stuff more difficult than it has to be.

[Ike_Witt]

@Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

Low bitrate, less albums, more singles, and a seasonal shuffle are more her style. I might venture to guess that 1 GB is a bit excessive.

What is a seasonal shuffle? I don’t assume that you only want to listen to 4 songs a year.

[Improbability]

@DoctorJ

I have a Dell DJ 20, and I love it.
I’m an album completist. Even on my little 64MB flash player, I would upload one full album (or part of one) instead of several different songs. I’m weird that way, but I’m not alone.

Me too. Full albums all the time, which makes the 60GB something of a neccessity.

[Dag_Otto]

@Improbability

Me too. Full albums all the time, which makes the 60GB something of a neccessity.

I like full albums also, but I’m happy with 85 to 100 on my 5 Gb player (128 kbps mp3). It’s easy enough to remove and add albums as I want, but I can also see that it would be nice to have every CD I owned on the player. It was a trade off between physical size, memory size, and file quality.

Anyone have a preference on file type? I tried 64 kbps WMA, but then went to 128 kbps mp3. If I used the same bitrate is there much difference between WMA and mp3?

[D_Odds]

@Diceman

How do you like the Rio Carbon? I don’t have an MP3 player yet, but I’m seriously looking at the Rios. The Carbon would be plenty big enough for me, but the Rio Sport (the 512 MB flash player) might be big enough if I add a 1 gig SD memory card. I like the fact that the Sport has an FM receiver in it, plus the fact that I could use it while working out. I’m hoping that if I wait a bit, they might release a 1 GB player that I could expand up to 2 GB.

BTW, I don’t understand why anyone would need a player with 40 or 60 GB. When I buy a CD, there’s typically only 2 or 3 songs that I like, and 9 or 10 crappy filler songs that I’ll listen to once or twice, before I start to habitually skip them. I guess I’m one of those people who want to upload a lot of music, but not my entire collection.

I love my Rio Carbon. Ms. D_Odds has the Creative Zen Micro, so I’ve had a chance to play with both.

I went with the Rio Carbon because I had a lot of .wma stuff from friends that I didn’t want to lose (I know, there are probably ways of converting .wma into .mp3 that don’t involve recompressing a lossy format - I don’t know them). Both tested very highly compared to the iPod Mini (which was disqualified due to lack of support for .wma). Both have a better battery life than the iPod; Creative’s battery is removable and they give you two; Rio’s is just efficient. IMO, the Rio looks much nicer than the Micros, which are very plasticy. I like the Rio’s controls and software better. The Micro does have a FM tuner, plus has better headphones in the box.

The biggest con for me is the inability to create a playlist on the fly on the Carbon (not sure about the Micro). I’d also like to see it better integrated with Windows Media Player and/or MusicMatch so that I don’t have to open Rio’s Media Player to create playlist.

[Diceman]

@D_Odds

I love my Rio Carbon. Ms. D_Odds has the Creative Zen Micro, so I’ve had a chance to play with both.

I went with the Rio Carbon because I had a lot of .wma stuff from friends that I didn’t want to lose (I know, there are probably ways of converting .wma into .mp3 that don’t involve recompressing a lossy format - I don’t know them). Both tested very highly compared to the iPod Mini (which was disqualified due to lack of support for .wma). Both have a better battery life than the iPod; Creative’s battery is removable and they give you two; Rio’s is just efficient. IMO, the Rio looks much nicer than the Micros, which are very plasticy. I like the Rio’s controls and software better. The Micro does have a FM tuner, plus has better headphones in the box.

The biggest con for me is the inability to create a playlist on the fly on the Carbon (not sure about the Micro). I’d also like to see it better integrated with Windows Media Player and/or MusicMatch so that I don’t have to open Rio’s Media Player to create playlist.

Good, good. Ease-of-use an important factor for me. I’ve tried some players that have horrible controls. I also like the look of the Rio players; the Creative players are too big and chunky for my liking.

I’m not much into playlists, so whether or not I can create them on the fly isn’t a very important factor for me. I would like an FM tuner, however. That’s one reason I’m leaning towards their Forge Sport line of players.