iPod or Zen?

Part of its the name, Lehah is right, part of it is the trend, but part of it is the "sleek" look. I mean the iPod does make the Vision:M look like a turd. The other thing is people like simple, which iTunes and iPod provide in spades.

I had a Creative Jukebox 3 for about 4 years. Replaced the hard drive on it once, but it died recently because of a cracked LCD screen ;(. What can you do. So I'm gonna be in the market shortly. I've been thinking iPod, but not too sure yet. I'm not a big fan of Creative these days. I just havent been pleased with their products as of late.

I really wish there was a good music portable like the jukebox that could record line in. That feature alone made that jukebox worth it.

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Oh forgot...

If you want to spring for it the Archos AV500 is supposedly the shit. It has 4.5+ hours of video playback. You can buy it on newegg for about $400 with a 100GB harddrive. It also records video or audio via line-in.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

Boy, it's a good thing all modern Creative players support drag and drop through Windows Explorer, which is the simplest method of putting music on to a device.

Strike for iTunes.

In before comments about Apple stealing Creative's Interface ideas.

Yeah and iTunes is hard to get stuff on your iPod, you connect it and it syncs. End of story.

I'm not an iPod pimp or anything, but the reason people love it is that they only have to mess with iTunes... The iPod works based off what is in iTunes. The average joe doesn't want to leave some songs on the iPod and some off, blah blah blah. He wants his music easy to play in his hand. And that is what iPod/iTunes is good at. And for Apple ripping you off for DRM crap, but thats another story.

I prefer more control, that is why I had a Jukebox 3 for as long as I did. I know when I get something, I'd prefer it to have line-in recording. Unfortunately, there aren't many of those. So I'll have to look at higher end stuff.

Course, I could get this!

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

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.

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.

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For multi-disc albums, I've always used ascending numbers for the tracks on second and third discs (eg. 14-28 on the second disc, 29-46 on the third, etc.) This always help keep things in order. Now doing this can't really be automated, so you'd have to work at it.

I prefer both Library, and file structure (yeah for Winamp 2.9!!). But if I had to choose, I'd choose library. File structure is fairly good for copying and editing files, but rarely so for listening. Too messy.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I seem to think that there is a bit of a double standard here. It seems every one thinks that iPods break or are poorly made compared to Creative players. This has not been my experience...

I have/had a creative jukebox 3 that had issues with the headphone plug (which i had to VERY carefully re-solder), the hard drive died and I had to replace it. My brothers Creative Zen Xtra that he just bought is already having problems with the headphone jack and that is less than 8 months old. I used my player alot, but I did take good care of it. My bro is so careful with his stuff it makes me sick how he babies it.

My point here is not to say that iPods break less, or that creative makes shit... My point is that these portables break. It's just what they do. Saying that "my **** busted so all ***** are poorly made" is quite frankly, ignorant. Build quality is pretty important to Apple as a company and usually they are highly praised for reliablity. The same is true of Creative, their products tend to have high quality because of good quality control.

I think discussions would be better suited to see which player is better in features and usability over build quality. These dilusions that "all *** break" are ridiculous. If you get a lemon, its a lemon. If you don't take care of it, you got what you deserve. If it only lasts a couple of years, well, you got your time out of it. IT'S A PORTABLE. THEY DONT LAST FOREVER.

How ya doing, buddy?