mp3 players

How much cash you have to blow?

Stay away form Creative stuff..i know lots of people who bought, and something always goes wrong with them. We bought my daughter one, and the firmware is dodgy..have to reset it all the time.

iRiver is the way to go, i have one..and i love it, so does my better half. His is over 3 years old now and still working fine as well. Sturdy and nice feel to them.

I have had my Creative Zen Micro for over 1 year with no trouble at all. I love it.

I've had a creative zen for about 6 months now and have only need to reset it once. That was due to a strange audio codec used in one song (Powderfinger - waiting for the sun, excellent song). Once I recoded the song I haven't had a problem with it.

Creative MP3 players will try to play any audio file (wma, mp3, wav) it can recognise. every now and then it will come across a song encoded or DRMed in a way it cant understand.

At least that's my understanding. Audio stuff is not my strong point.

Then again my Zen is the somewhat larger Zen Neeon (that is spelt correctly). I dont like the smaller MP3 players, I know it will fall out of my pocket on the bus or at the gym and I wont even know it. :)

First and fore most is the fact that you need iTunes and cant just plug it into a computer and pull songs onto and off of it. Second, iPod audio hardware is inferior to many of their competitors such as creative, who use their audigy series in some of the Zen's.

iPods are limited in the types of audio codecs they can play. They can play lossless audio (so I am told) but by default iTunes will rencode your songs in the AAC codec (more compression but with lower sound quality).

Apple will not fix iPods preferring to simply replace them with a new one if still under warranty. If you're not under warranty forget about it, they weren't designed to be fixed (granted this can be said about most consumer electronics these days).

Also in AU and NZ we tend to pay through the nose for apple HW.

My advice is to avoid the iPod like the plague if for no other reason than too much vendor lock-in (and they don't work on Linux).

For the money you'll spend on an iPod, I say find something else. Anything else. They are overpriced, glitchy, power suckers.

My advice, get anything that has a decent size internal hd but also allows for SD cards. Easy-cheesy, and the cards are only getting bigger and cheaper to come by. I bought a new 1G SD card the other day for $15. I swap them out on my old Rio player that runs for hours on a single rechargable AA and I'm quite pleased.

Nice to know there's still a good anti-apple market place out there, I was going to crack and finally concede to the big white hype but I think you may have saved may. I'm more inclined to go with Creative or I-river but will wait until a larger drive is offered. If only everyone learnt design in the same respects that Apple does though then we wouldn't be so tempted!

iPod..and be tied to apple for your music..?

and just the thought of actually owning one and "being just like all the other cool people who have bought one" gives me the heeby-jeebies..

dare to be different Christian :)

i read a bunch of reviews that said that creative had wonderful sound and picture quality. i also like the fact that its physically big. i tend to lose things and if i can feel it in my pocket then i'll know when to freak out. the capacity is a good size for me too. after using creative and ipod controls and looking at the iriver controls, i think creative's are the best. ipod's controls confuse me, and the iriver looks like it needs to be held with your right hand (i'm a lefty, not even a righty in sports or anything)

I have purchased mine at http://www.mp4direct.org these this china mp4 link there they have a hugh range there that do what you require and more they have FM radio and a voice recorder they also have an SD card memory expantion slot on some of the models there. I'm impressed with my one its great they deliver to any where I got mine in 4 days and the prices are tops I think this is where you see the one selling on ebay come from