Storm Petrel doesn't have any friends does he?

Anyway my family and I have been using Apple products for the past 17 years now and the only issues we've ever had was a power supply that died in an old SE after 8 years and dead pixel on Dad's old Titanium Powerbook G3. I swear all these alledged iPod problems are some kind of slander campaign.


News: Apple have awesome customer support. If in the unlikely event of your iPod being faulty, they will fix or replace it.

How would Apple dominate the mp3 market by so much for being crap?

[quote]I bestow Merv with the blue ribbon for winning the race noone was running in. Three cheers for the champion!

Reminds me of a song.

"Everything Zen
Everything Zen
I don't think so"

I still don't understand, is a couple more millimeters of thickness going to kill you? And not only does the Zen have a much longer battery life, remember the audio quality, it's always going to superior to that of the iPods.

News: Apple will replace your IPod with a refurbished IPod that is not yours and will not have your music on it.

News: Apple has come under fire for the life of the batteries used in IPods. Yes, people don't know how to properly charge anything - an IPod, a cellphone, whatever - but this means that Apple should either...

A.) Support a more customer friendly stance where the customer can replace the battery without sending the unit in

B.) Make a battery that supports stupid customers

News: IPods are a single answer to a larger problem - portable MP3 music. Odds are that there are better products - and worse - out there.

Synching is very retarded if you have a music collection larger than what your player can hold.

"HEY YOU'VE GOT ALL THIS COOL NEW MUSIC. OH IT DOESN'T FIT :("

Highly unlikely in this case, but it's possible in many other cases.

Drag and drop gives a lot more control over what actually goes on your player, while syching is for convenience.

Personally, I'd rather have more control over convenience.

Get a life.

My sister has a Zen... and we have had a few problems with charging it and a few problems with the headphones port. Btw... are you the r1ch from bnet/dcloneirc?

It's twice as thick, or a little bit more. This will cause problems when sticking it into the pockets of my pants.

That's why I prefer control as well (which I said in the post you quoted). I have music collection that is about 30+GB so I could have this problem too. That's the biggest reason I might not get a iPod. Right now I have a work Mac, and a HTPC thats runs off custom software, no MCE Windows. I prefer the customizeability of the PC, but I love the ease of use of the Mac world too. Just need to figure out which one I like best before I buy a MP3 player.

Interestingly enough, I have an iPod, I use iTunes, and I have both syncing convenience AND control over what goes on my player. It's called "sync from playlist." Because my library's too big to fit on my 20GB iPod, I have a playlist which contains all the songs I want on it. If I want to remove some, I take them off the playlist. If I want to add others, I put them on. I plug in the iPod, it takes care of the rest. It's the perfect compromise: I get to control exactly what goes on my iPod, but I keep the ID3 navigation (far superior, in my opinion) and metadata syncing (playcounts, ratings, etc.).

To the OP: basically it boils down to what you want. If you want easy, simple music playback and loads of accessory options, go with the iPod. If you want more format support and don't care about sleekness/style, go with something else.

As to the iPod's reliability, I think the main reason you hear so many more complaints on the Internet about the iPod than you did three years ago when I bought mine is that there are simply a fuckton more of them out there. When I bought mine, Apple was moving 250,000 a quarter. Now they're selling 8 million in regular quarters and 14 million in the holiday quarter. That's a lot more players that can break if mistreated or manufactured badly. Out of all the friends I have who have bought iPods, I only know two who've had consistent trouble. So I wouldn't worry about the iPod from a quality front, and besides, if something's wrong with yours within warranty, Apple will replace it.

Care to back that up with proof? Seperating player's nowadays based on audio quality i ridiculous. They all perform equally good in that department.
If it was a couple of years ago, you could have gotten away with that statement, nowadays, no way.

Anyway, I have a 5G Ipod with Rockbox installed and it has worked wonders for me. Very satisfied. I mainly use it to listen to my audio format which is flac. Furthermore, hooking it up with a nice pair of UE super fi 5 pro's and a Emmeline SR-71 like i have and you've got yourself a killer combo.

What Merv is saying is true. It's a bitch when you have more music than can possibly fit on your iPod.

I have a Zen and the only problems I've had is I bought a sony USB/AC charger and it's a piece of shit but that's Best Buy's fault. And when I tried to charge it on my new notebook I forgot to install in the software... my fault. I've dropped it numerous times and it's ok. My friend has an iPod Shuffle... no problems. I'd go with Zen for one reason- price. iPod is popular for the name... and (like anything with Disney on it) it's expensive because it's iPod. I got my 5gb Zen for 120$ I regret not getting a bigger one for 160. Sure you can fine iPod accessories everywhere, but they are expensive and you can get Zen stuff off their site. (which I shoulda done with my AC adapter)

For me, iTunes is actually the biggest reason to stay away from iPods. As others have already mentioned, if you're used to transfer files on your computer via drag & drop or copy & paste and organize them in folders, the restrictive database management of iTunes will prove very bulky.

I know there are solutions to bypass iTunes and make an iPod "mass storage"-compatible, but these tools have to be installed on every computer you intend to use your iPod and music collection with. However, I'd prefer to just plug my MP3 player into the USB port of a computer and have it detect the thing automatically (all modern operating systems, including Linux and MaxOS support USB mass storage). That way, you can use the thing to store all sorts of files easily. From my knowledge, this is just not possible with an iPod by default.

YoMan, my proof is that Creative players have SNR of at least 96dB SNR or higher, for iPods, looks like Apple is too ashamed to list the SNR, if it's equally good, why don't they list it? Also, I don't remember an iPod as a equalizer built in, most Zen players have an built-in equalizer.

How can Bose have a reputation for high quality audio when it is almost unaminously agreed among Hi-Fi enthusiets that Bose is one of the worst speaker/headphone manufacturer out there? The answer is advertising, and shinies.

According to CNET the iPod is 0.4 inches and the Vision:M is 0.7 inches thick (even CNET wouldn't lie about that right?). And the Zen is shorter then the iPod. Unless you have some REALLY small pockets, I doubt you would have problems fitting that in your pocket.

Well, I've personally never listened to an iPod or used iTunes, but according to wikipedia (so it must be right), the iPod has problems with its bass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Bass_response

Thank you ORLY, glad to see someone who isn't an iPod zealot.

It's really not. I have about 85 GB of music and a 30 GB iPod Video. I have no problems choosing what I want to listen to and adding it to the iPod. If you have trouble deciding what to put on it, then you're going to have the same problems with other players.

I would just like to comment on the thickness of the Vision:M.

Yes, when compared to the 30GB 5th generation iPod, the Vision:M looks hideous. However, the look and thickness is really no different than previous versions of the iPod. Besides the negative aspect of not fitting in your pocket, I prefer the thickness. It handles much easier in your hand.

Don't let the thickness be a huge deterrent.

Not only that, but I never liked the looks of iPods, I think Creative players look way more interesting than the iPod, it just looks like a boring piece of brick.

It's in the way they chose to make it, not my inability to choose certain music over others. With a drag-and-drop interface it would be easy, but with the little checkmark boxes, it's damn annoying.

Also, ORLY, double the thickness would be a considerable difference, dontcha think?

That was a problem that was most present at the time of the 3G Ipod and which has since been improved in the 4G and now in the 5G. It's only applied to the headphone jack ouput, so if you were to use a true line out with pocketdock for instance this problem would be solved. Although using this method would mean no more sound control internaly inside the ipods firmware. Meaning that you would have to get an amp.

Quote from ipodlounge:

Saying that one is more superior than the other in terms of audio quality is just not right. If your buying a player today you tend to focus on other things like how many GB, price, how are you gonna use it etc etc. Cause you know that your essentially getting the same audio quality.

The bigger question is why you're limited to only Zens or iPods? In my opinion, iRivers are far superior (At least the HDD Models). You don't have to deal with annoying software for your music collection, and they support more formats than your iPods do.

personally, i have a 30 gig iPod video, and i love the thing. its my best friend, lol, not really but you know. the sound quality is awesome, the video quality is good, and theres a lot of stuff you can do with the right programs;)

Uh, like I said—sync with playlist. No checkboxes required.

If you want something on the iPod, you drag and drop it onto the playlist. If you want something off, you delete it from the playlist.

Or hell, just put it in manual mode. Drag stuff on the iPod, or just delete it off. Easy. Both methods are "drag-and-drop."

You never have to use checkboxes to determine what goes on the iPod and what stays off.

I do drag and drop with my iPod. I simply use the menu limiters at the top to limit the songs displayed by the artist, genre, album, or any combination of the three. Then it's a simple CTRL+A, a drag and a drop.