iPod vs MP3 player?!?

[jaggers]

Ok, I admit, I cannot be classed as a very 'technological' kind of person so I wonder if any of you could advise me on the above battle? Don't be too afraid to use technical terms...I know what you'll mean by memory! :P

 

Thanks very much xxx

[Mattk]

ipods are the most iconic player available and you pay for this priviledge.personally,size was more important to meso i went for a small 'solid state' player ie one that consists of sticks of memory rather than a hard disc.these do not hold as many songs as an ipod but are far more convenient imo.also if you buy a sony player,it uses their own atrac format which has superior compression ie squeezes songs/files even smaller than mp3/wma. 

[Headtime]

But Atrac isn't a good choice of format if you want to change to a non-Sony player in the future.

Personally, I think a hard-disk player is much better as you can carry all your tunes with you at once to listen to at your lesiure, and you don't have to keep transferring the tunes you want on and off your player.

I love my i-pod, but battery life is an issue, although I believe they have now sorted it in present models.

[secretsquiz]

just to clarify jaggers, an iPod is an mp3 player - it's just the name of apple's mp3 player.

to put it in context, your question is the modern equivalent of "hoover vs vaccuum cleaner?"

ok... opinion time...

while an iPod looks good, i truly believe there are much better products on the market - iPods are only the market leader because of the huge amount of money they spend on marketing and advertising.

personally i went for a hard disk mp3 player made by iRiver - while it's not as sexy looking as an iPod, i think it's a better player, it has all the features i need and it's extremely easy to use.

i've used a friend's iPod, and to be honest i wasn't that impressed.

have a look at www.mp3players.co.uk - they've got loads of players to suit most people's needs. the main factors when buying one are... how much music do you want to store? and how much do you want to spend?

[fo3nix]

apart from the device itself, there are two important things also: file type supported, and ease of use of software.

for everything (imho), the iPod wins. if you have a lot of CDs (200+), go for the iPod. If you only want to have your fave 80 or so CDs then get an iPod mini. and if you just want something really small to throw 200 or so songs on, get the shuffle.

that said, other solid state mp3 players are good, and just as cheap if not cheaper than the shuffle. but nothing like as cool.

personally i'd never ever go for a sony as 1) the software used is terrible, and 2) it uses atrac (even though it says it supports mp3; it does, but you must convert to atrac first).

[secretsquiz]

btw, iPods don't support .wma (windows media audio) format - this is becoming quite common nowadays as an alternative to mp3.

i tried copying some .wma files to a friend's iPod and it took forever because it had to convert each track first.

and unless someone is willing to correct me, i think iPod forces you to use their software, iTunes, as opposed to my player which can just be plugged straight in and used through windows explorer - for me this was a big factor when i bought it.

[fo3nix]

you can get an iPod plugin for other software like winamp. but I find that iTunes does what I want, and very well.

[PlainJane]

Obviously it all comes down to a matter of personal preference. I love my iPod. It is a 20g model and is 3 years old. The battery life is still good, but no batteries last for ever, and you can buy a replacement battery for about �20.00. I have over 4000 song on my iPod, and still have room for about another 500. I use it every day, and find it, and iTunes absolutely easy to use.

[Stevee]

Ipod doesn't support WMA files. These are the files that are created by the Windows media player.

As such if you have a computer with windows, which a Mac obviously doesn't you have to convert to MP3.

Also there are players with larger memories, better storage and more accesabledisplay systems available.

Not to memtion cheaper.

Ipod for looks many others for effective value