i want one that holds at least 30GB btw.

You lot are useless!

Someone told me the Creative Zen is the one to go for. Is this true?

I just got a Creative Zen Microphoto(8 GB) for myself in the post-holiday sales, very happy with it. More features, more space for less money than some of those other ones. Bought the wife the apple version of the creative zen (30 gb video, a whopping $18 off on the biggest sales day of the year, go apple) for Christmas too so we’ll be able to go head to head...

i’m really loyal to my 40 GB Creative Zen i got 2 years ago. it has worked very well for me. i don’t know anything about the newer ones.

i’m also getting a 30 GB Ipod soon, but only because my zen is full!

don’t believe the hype about ipods! i got the 60 gb and i hardly use it. it way too heavy and thick.

Apple does gapless now but still not Ogg Vorbis

I ADORE my Rio Karma but it’s now obsolete; it seems that a Rockbox’d iRiver is the audio lover’s player of choice. But it’s only like 20 gigs. But I think you can replace the HD. But come on, now...

I’ll take FLAC/Ogg Vorbis support over an extra 10 gigs any day of the ever

so you’re the one who uses those.

FLAC is kinda nice, yes. However, the quality over shitty headphones is so low that you can’t really benefit from it. I have a Karma that they gave me at work, but I never use it. The iPod works better with my Mac: End of story.

I’ve got a Creative Zen.. It’s pretty good, but my only complaint about it is that it’s very cumbersome to upload music onto it.

You can’t just synch it from itunes, but instead you have to drag the songs into the folder on the player instead.

for creative pkayers get the notmad explorer software instead—much better and far easier to use than the bundled software

players

why have software in the first fucking place? can’t i just drag and drop from explorer?

why have ebay in the first place? can’t i just have people email me bids?

xpost yeah that would be nice, some players have that capability but not Zen if I understand correctly. The bundled software is ok except for sucky tagging capability, I do that in musicmatch then upload everything. Gave notmad explorer(trial version) a try and it couldn’t even find my player; I’ll probably try it again when I get more comfortable with the player itself. I understand anapod explorer for ipod(made by the same people) is much better, less buggy.

and I will be using that with the ipod, I hate itunes.

anapod is great—my use of it has been limited but i like it more than notmad. the only issues i’ve had with notmad have been around streaming from the player to winamp, which is a silly thing to do anyway

Drag-n-drop from Explorer is a good argument, WizardJon.

Drag and Drop from explorer is overrated. and explorer is crap fwiw.

If you have mistagged mp3s and you retag them, how will it know how to synchonize

Explorer may be crap, but only the nerdiest of nerds is gonna suggest that the average PC user try something else. Explorer is the least of the evils here, dude.

Furthermore, only the truly thick-skulled use auto-sync, and no auto-sync == no auto re-tag, at least in iTunes. In other words, if you MusicBrainz a buncha MP3s, just reimport, whether it be via Explorer or whatever. Anything more is meddling.

“i’m really loyal to my 40 GB Creative Zen i got 2 years ago. it has worked very well for me. i don’t know anything about the newer ones.

i’m also getting a 30 GB Ipod soon, but only because my zen is full!”

— latebloomer (posercore24...), December 2nd, 2006.

Why not another Creative Zen (asks someone who does not yet have any type of portable mp3 player but wants to get one)?

“Furthermore, only the truly thick-skulled use auto-sync”

:(

I definitely prefer treating the mp3s like physical media to syncing things — there’s a level on which I really enjoy the process of getting up in the morning and throwing a few albums onto the player, just like throwing some new CDs in my bag. But my player’s small enough — the Creative Zen Microphoto 8-gig — that you’d inevitably be sorting/adding/discarding manually, even if you could sync.

It adds through Explorer, too, which I’m all in favor of. It’s not drag-and-drop — there’s a built-in Windows media-device thing that pops up. But this is essentially just a dialog box, and not really much flashier or more complicated than, say, the “Open Office Document” dialog. And it does let you use Explorer to actually sort through the media on the device, so you can reorganize and clean up folders and such pretty easily.

Jon OTM. If your player’s as big as or bigger than your library, autosync is a no-brainer.

Does explorer even let you organise by anything other than filename, path and created date?

Nabisco, if you have that much free time, I could use a copy editing intern. Email me.

explorer is crap but finder is so evil apple had to invent a different way around it in every single app.

xxpost explorer lets you organize by any metadata

also nabisco otm, right down to the choice of player!

xxpost explorer lets you organize by any metadata

oh in that case fandago utterly otm.

I’m the same as Nabisco—I like the “effort” of dragging albums over to my player (which is a Samsung 2GB flash thing), which I do in Explorer, iTunes having already organised everything into artist folders (often quite badly thanks to Gracenote errors—in what world is Autechre’s Confield a compilation?).

In fact, I’m doing this right now...and it’s finished, so I’m off to work. Bye.

Do not buy the Sony NWA-3000 (I also think Noodles/Rufus has one iirc from mine own thread on the matter). The sound is great but it’s the most user unfriendly, slow (both to load and menus) and the memory is for shit. Also you have to use that Connect-Player which is beyond redemption.

haha 2 gig flash players....

You people.... lol

I have collections by single BANDS that can’t fit in 2 gigs

hey kids, how big is your iPenis????

When Jon rips, he rips it up LOSSLESS, yo

I have a CLOSET full of SHIRTS, but I only wear ONE of them PER DAY.

lossless farts

there’s a level on which I really enjoy the process of getting up in the morning and throwing a few albums onto the player, just like throwing some new CDs in my bag

I hated throwing CDs in my bag to bring to work, because invariably I’d get to work and want to listen to something besides what I brought. I want as many gigs as possible on my portable mp3 player, so I can listen to whatever moves me at the time. Auto-sync, yay.

My phone’s my MP3 player. It’s feature rich—I can play and pause. Got a 1 GB flash card and I’m all set.

I have 0.5 TB of music stored on DVDs, so until they come out with the 1TB iPod I’m not biting.

I have a Karma that they gave me at work, but I never use it

Can I uh buy that from you? Mine’s semi-broken... And the battery’s dying

i have like 150 GBs of music in my library and stuff gets added in no sensible way, so I’ve never used auto synch (40gb player).

You can Rockbox and iPod and run FLAC off it. Get what you like the interface of best. They’ve all got shitty internal amplifiers. get some Portapros. MP3 players are for fun, not for superduperfi.

I have collections by single BANDS that can’t fit in 2 gigs

Yes, and I’d probably need half a terabyte or so if I wanted to digitise everything I own, but why bother? I don’t particularly want a music library in my pocket, just a handful of favourites/new things.

favorites = your balls?

i have one of those sony things as mentioned above. and love it. honest. i have no issues at all with the s/w everyone hates so much (could be cos i support software thats an arse to use and so Connect is a breeze in comparison). its a mere 512M, but as i cycle the stuff on a daily basis depending on the to review pile i find that amount perfect, but as the thing sounds fantastic i cannot help but love it.

Here’s how I do it: once my library became larger than my iPod, I started unchecking boxes on songs/albums that I liked less and then told iTunes to auto-sync to iPod only songs with checked boxes.

jaymc otm, and i was just about to say that. Auto synching does not mean you have to have your entire iTunes library on your iPod. You tell iTunes to only synch tunes with the cute little check box by them, and then checking and unchecking boxes becomes the same thing as — nay, EASIER THAN — dragging and dropping from Explorer and back, or the like.

Srsly, I think PC people who refuse to use iTunes with their iPod are just being cranky.

— latebloomer (posercore24...), December 2nd, 2006.

Why not another Creative Zen (asks someone who does not yet have any type of portable mp3 player but wants to get one)?

— cornyrocker (cornyrocke...), December 4th, 2006.

because i’m getting one super cheap from a neighbor, still in the box.

favorites = your balls?

One’s balls aren’t actually in one’s pocket, Jon. This is something that will become apparent to you once yours drop.

If you can have it delivered to a friend in America who’ll post it to you as a ‘Christmas present’, I recommend UK ilxors to be buying their iPods over the Atlantic just now because the exchange rate is making them as cheap as chippety chips.

Amazon, 80GB black—$332.49 = £168.86

omg kenan and jaymc are POWER USERS!!!

oh hush.

Just got a 60GB iPod from apple.com refurb. $229.00

Of couuse that comes with the sucky old ear buds but I will mostly be using it in the gym, where I don’t care that much, or when travelling, when I’ll use proper headphones.

Nice tip on the iTunes synching. My G4 is in the shop and I didn’t want to clog up the g-friend’s iTunes with a bunch of my stuff so I jacked my firewire drive into her laptop and just dragged 400 tracks from the drive directly to the iPod. It took hours, but it worked.

Of course I did NOT pass go, and did not collect $200... but what do you want (and that’s a rhetorical question)?

My question is... and just ’cause I haven’t had time to f*ck with it.

Can I use it on my Mac @ home, and my PC at work? 2 people here say no, but I’m not confident in the level of their expertise

I think if you PC format the iPod you can.

I’m not confident in the level of their expertise

Seriously!

Yeah, just remember to check “manually manage music,” and you can put music on it and listen to it from the iPod on either computer.