I’m thinking of getting an ipod for some travelling, but I don’t really want to spend hours and hours copying cds onto computer and then onto ipod (I hate computers!) if it turns out to suck. but… even if I don’t (Get an ipod), I have to copy some cds anyway just to make mix cds and then buy a Discman. I don’t know what to do
someone please help sway my mind towards a direction… are ipods worth it? they don’t run on standard batteries do they, so is their one reliable? is sound quality good?
Personally, I love love love my iPod. It does take some time to rip all your CDs, but it’s totally worth it. The sound quality is good, and the (rechargeable) battery seems perfectly reliable. They’re kind of expensive, but again, worth it in my opinion. I’d say get the biggest one (in terms of storage space) that you can afford. I’ve got a 40GB model, and it’s not even half full yet. Plus, they make cool accessories for it: a speaker system, a radio transmitter, and a wireless remote. Other things too, but these three are the coolest, I think. If you can afford it, you should definitely get one. They rule.
I just got an iPod mini. It stores “1,000 songs” instead of “10,000 songs” (I think “10,000 songs” is what the standard iPod claims to hold) Now that I keep writing the word “songs” it looks weird. Songs songs songs. Anyway, I LOVE my iPod mini. I LOVE IT. I guess this is the point of mp3 players, but I love that I will never have to carry CDs with me ever again, and it’s smaller than any Discman type CD player. The sound quality is good – then again, I’m not really picky, but it sounds great to me. I have my whole music collection just sitting there at my fingertips, automatically arranged by song, artist, album, & composer. The important thing for traveling would be the adaptor so you can play your iPod songs through your car radio. There is also an accessory to play your iPod songs through a home stereo. Upon looking at the iPod on the web, it looks like right now there’s no way for me to use my iPod mini with a car stereo unless the capability is already wired into the car (BMWs and some other higher-end cars). So I would get the real deal. There appear to be endless additional accessories you can get, transforming it into a voice recorder, transferring pictures to it (don’t know if I can do this with my mini)
As for time, it will take some time to transfer your music collection to your computer, but do you sit at the computer for any other reason for any length of time? I just copy CDs at work - it only takes seconds to put one in, take it out, and put the next one in. Then the iPod automatically syncs when you plug it into the computer. It’s a lot easier and faster than ripping and burning your CDs to make mix CDs. I say get it.
I like my Neuros better. For one thing, it plays Ogg Vorbis in addition to mp3s. Also, it has a built-in FM transmitter, so I can just take it to my car and listen over the radio. Finally, it has a microphone and a line-in jack, which I used to rip a bunch of the casettes I wound up buying at truck stops during some of my longer road trips.
Downsides? It’s quite a bit larger than an iPod. But I’ll take feature-rich over cute any day of the week.
For playing in the car, if your car has a tape deck you can use the tape adapaters. Otherwise you can try the FM transmitter stuff, but I didn’t have much luck with that. The sound quality was terrible, and it was really difficult to find an empty station that I could use to broadcast to. I ended up returning it about a week after I got it.
It sounds like you want simple, and honestly, I think that the iPod is going to be your best bet. It has the features you need and they’re easy to access. The learning curve is only just above using a standard CD player; if you know enough to rip CDs and burn a new one, you know enough to use the iPod.
The battery they use is rechargeable and built in, and it lasts around 8-12 hours I think. Probably closer to 8. Like any battery, it doensn’t last indefinitely, and depending on how often you’re recharging, how much you use it, will probably need to be replaced in 2-3 years. They have kits you can do yourself that are cheaper, or you can pay Apple a lot of money to take your old iPod and send you another one (not necessarily the one you sent them).
I love my iPod because all I needed was something to hold music and/or data. The iPod does this perfectly. If you want one that can do voice recordings for memos and such, you’ll want to look into something else, like the iRiver or the Rios. The Neuros that Tentacle Monster talks of is definitely scoring high on my geeky side, but it might be a bit more than it sounds like you want.
I love my ipod. I have the 20 gig version, and it holds my entire music collection. The batteries last long enough, its easy to recharge, and very handy for travel and snowboarding and etc.
The one downside is that I can’t just “see” my entire collection. So I end up listening to some stuff lots more than others. To remedy this, I’ve been scrolling to random places in my list and choosing from there.
But the random play feature is great! It’s like listening to a no-talk, no-commercials radio station that only plays my favorite music. That rocks.
Note that iTunes (Apple’s jukebox program) has an option to automatically rip, tag, and eject your CDs for you – just stick them in, let the computer do the work, then swap 'em when it gets ejected. Even if you don’t want to get an iPod, iTunes is free, so you can let it rip all your music to MP3s and use those with whatever player you eventually get.
My brother has an iPod, I have an iRiver. Both are 20 GB, and were about the same price. I absolutely love mine over his:
Mine is color, with a beautiful 2 inch display.
Multi-codec - can play pretty much everything outside of iTunes - mp3s, wma, ogg.
Does photos. (The iPod Photo costs a heck of a lot more).
Much better sound quality, IMHO. Very flexible equalizer options - SRS Wow! enhancements, absolutely gorgeous sound.
Battery life. Specced out at 16 hours, which is fabulous, but I generally tend to get about 10-12 hours of battery life out of it (probably because I use the buttons a lot.)
After I’d bought it, I waffled a little on whether I should have gotten an iPod instead (this was before my brother had bought his).
The advantages iPod has, IMHO:
Smaller, sleeker, more aesthetically pleasing.
Simply put, the iPod is “cooler”. Luckily I couldn’t care less about cool
The navigation system of iPod, with its nifty scrolly thingy will probably never be matched. I happen to really like the Windows-style navigation of my iRiver, but with a music collection the size of mine, it can get a little bit tedious. If there were a compromise between Windows-style nav WITH the scrolly thingy (technical term) I’d be all over it.
iPod is the thing, so there is no shortage of accessories, and stores that will sell them.
I was going to buy myself a cd changer for my car until I bought the iRiver. Then, I initially bought an FM transmitter - 50 bucks - but returned it very soon afterwards. The sound quality was horrendous - AM station horrendous - and while there are very few that I would listen to, my area is just chock full of radio stations. Drove across the state (a 2 hour drive) and had to fumble with the thing a dozen times to switch stations. I ended up buying a cassette adapter - 20 bucks - that I love. Great sound quality, especially with the equalizer options on the player, and absolutely no thought required. Plug it in and push play and you’re done.
I’ve got a 40gb (3rd gen) iPod that I’m happy with for the most part. I’ve had one major oops (where I deleted all of the songs, the firmware, and had to disassemble it and reassemble it to get it to work again). It did take a long time to rip the CDs back on to it (my iPod just got back up to full status where it was back in October). And the battery doesn’t hold as much charge as it used to. (I use the iPod about 4 to 8 hours a day, so that’s probably to be expected).
I just started a thread about Napster-to-go a couple days ago, check it out. You’d have to buy a compatible Napster MP3 player, but download time to your computer could be so much quicker than ripping CDs (about 8-10 minutes ripping as opposed to 1-2 minutes downloading with Cable internet). Check the thread for the pluses and minuses.
The rumor mill says Apple will release new iPods and iPod minis next week, complete with color cases (for the iPods) and color screens (for the minis).
Songs coded in iTunes don’t copy onto non-iPod players.
I have a 30gb Nomad Zen mp3 player from Creative Labs and I really like it. It’s larger than the iPod but has a longer battery life (twelve hours vs. eight hours) and is around $200 cheaper. It doesn’t run on standard batteries, but the lithium battery it comes with only needs to be replaced once a year or so. For traveling you can buy a cassette adapter or a radio transmitter, as well as a charger that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter. I totally think the player is worth the two hundred dollars it costs.
Nonsense – you can set iTunes to rip into MP3s, which work with everyone else’s players just fine (well, except for Sony’s, who’s only starting to get on the MP3 bandwagon now).
And if you want to rip to unprotected AAC, there are third-party programs to play those as well. I’d just stick to MP3, myself.
My thoughts are that given the size limits these things have, many people must have insanely large MP3 collections. Every MP3 on my computer only amounts to a little over 5GB, and I don’t think I’d much more than double it if I ripped every track from every single cd I own and put them all on my hard drive too.
As much as I like music, I don’t have much use for an MP3 player. I can’t listen to music at work, but I can play MP3s in my car cd player or on my computer, so I’m not sure where I’d use it.
I’m also hinking quite seriously about getting an iPod, I have some questions about it though;
Will it hold .wma audio?
How is the music organised on the actual iPod? How does the music on the comp transfer to it, from a specific file? The music on my computer is…chaotically organised at best, I’d hate to think how it would look on a tiny screen.
I have a 40gb 4th gen iPod and I love it. As RumMunkey said, You’d have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers to take it away from me.
No but itunes will convert them over to mp3 (or aac, I’m not sure which) then copy them over.
You can set itunes to automagicly orginize your music for you. The only catch here is the files have to have correct ID tags or it can be messy. I’m fighting with this now but I don’t really mind. I’ve been meaning to correctly tag all my files for a while now.
I love my iPod to death. It’s small, easy to use, holds all my music, and is just overall damn nifty. I listen to it on shuffle all the time- I’ve rediscovered music I’ve owned for years and rarely listened to for various reasons. Compared to other mp3 players that my friends have owned, its much easier to navigate. It only takes a few minutes to rip cds and load them onto my iPod. There are some nice accessories if you’re planning on using it for travel: there’s a converter that charges your iPod and plays music through your car radio. Besides, it’s so cute.
iTunes can import unprotected WMA and convert it to unprotected AAC (Advanced audio Codec) for you.
Technically, the music on the iPod is in a hidden directory; this is handy because you can use the iPod as a portable computer disk drive as well.
In terms of listening to music, you can browse by artist, album, or specific playlists you set up on the computer. The music files are copied from your computer to the iPod as-is.
And a big thumbs up to iTunes auto-organize ability.
