MP3 player question

When it comes to thinks like this the old saying "you get what you pay for" rings true.
However, I recently bought a $200 4 GB Ipod Nano and not 3 weeks after I bought it it told me it was "corrupt" and I had to reformat it..lost ALL my music on it I had already, but the nice folks at Apple refunded me one of the albums I bought on Itunes, although I did lose 2 other albums...It's worked fine since then.
Itunes is way too addicting..it's too easy to blow 50 dollars on music in a matter of 5 seconds...

 

My brother gave me his old Rio mp3 player, and for free, it works wonderful, and holds 300 songs. The battery has to be charged every night, but that's a small price to pay. I probably will never buy a high-priced mp3 player...

When I got the Rio, it was then that I realized all the CDs I had ripped into iTunes had come in as mp4s...so I had to convert all the songs I wanted to move to the player.

 

I haven't, but Sony generally builds pretty good stuff. It's probably a pretty decent low-end player.

Beware of one thing, though - Sony's being incredibly dishonest in claiming you'll get 685 songs on it. Technically you could, but at such a low quality it will sound like an old AM transistor radio. To have anything close to CD quality sound you'll want 128 kb or higher. I rip everything at 192 kb. Even at 128 you're looking at closer to 250 songs, not 685.

Not to shill for Apple, but the bottom end iPod is a 1 gb Shuffle for $79 -- it has a better warranty and it would work seamlessly with iTunes, which is a definite plus in my book.

 

That's one thing that confuses me about MP3 players. Do you have to have certain music programs to get those songs to work with the MP3 player? Only Itunes goes with Ipods right? That's my understanding.

 

Yeah, you'll probably need some kind of program to get the music onto the player. I'm sure the Sony has something.

iTunes will only work with the iPod, and songs you buy from the iTunes store will only play on an iPod. I really like the way iTunes organizes my music library and integrates with the iPod. I can use iTunes to play music on the computer, and all I have to do is connect the iPod to the USB cable and it will automatically put any new songs onto the iPod. That might be a bigger issue for me; I've got close to 8500 songs in iTunes right now, so organizing them is a pretty big issue.

One other thing to remember -- pretty much every player will play mp3s but they may not play other files, so if you have other formats you use that might help guide the decision. iPods will play AAC files but not WMA files; other players will play WMA files but not AAC files.

 

And if you put a song on your MP3 player you can take it off too right? And what if you want to seperate music, like hip hop or rock, can you do that?

 

Yeah, you can put them on and take them off all you want.

I can only answer the second question for iTunes -- you can create separate playlists, so you could do a rock playlist and a hip hop playlist so you could just listen to one or the other. I'm not sure how that would work on the Shuffle, though. You can switch between playlists on a regular iPod, but I don't know that the Shuffle would let you do it. That's the tricky part about the smaller players like the Shuffle and Walkman -- there's no screen to show what's playing so it's harder to control what's playing. I know on the Shuffle you could load just the rock playlist on it, then take it off later and just load the hip hop one. It's a simple process once you're comfortable with iTunes.

 

Here's an iPod battery question: I used to have a Shuffle and upgraded to an 8GB iPod recently.

The battery doesn't last as long as I thought it would but that's not my issue: after charging the battery is there a way for you to pick up where you left off with your music rather than having it reset to 1 (I listen on shuffle mode)?

 

I have about 5 MP3 players in my house. They were purchased at various times for various purposes. None of them are iPods. I HATE iTunes.

The Creative Labs and SanDisk units function as flash drives. Plug it in and drag and drop. The songs can then be played. It works out real well.

 

Yeah I think I'm going to get a SanDisk. It's 1GB and has the option to make playlists and also has a digital tuner. It's only $50. That looks like the winner and I've heard good things about it.

 

I'll concur with Pastor here. Mrs. tbf has enjoyed her SanDisk.

 

What do you hate about iTunes? I've used it for years and not had any problems (aside from them not having The Beatles or Led Zeppelin).