YAMP3PT - Yet Another MP3 Player Thread.

[GagHalfrunt]

My 3 year old 15GB HDD player has been dropped off one too many chairlift and onto one too many parking lots. It's spent too much time in 150* car interiors in the summer and 10* car interiors in the winter and far too much time in the bottom of a pond once. It's not pinin'! Its passed on! This MP3 player is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-MP3 PLAYER!!

So I need a new one.

Demands:

1) I'd like a hard drive based player that will handle 15-20GB. If flash based I can probably pare things down to 8GB, no smaller
2) Under $200
3) Must play EVERYTHING. I'm not messing with I-Tunes or any such crap. It needs to handle old MP3s I've ripped myself and some .wma.
4) Battery life of 8 hours or better is mandatory. More is nice, but not necessary.
5) Durable.
6) Easy to use interface.
7) Mediocre sound quality is fine. I'm no audiophile and this is an MP3 player, not a home stereo
8) Real tactile buttons, no touch screens.
9) User replaceable battery with spares purchasable

I don't care about:
1) FM tuning
2) Video and photos
3) Color screen
4) Brand as long as it's not Apple.
5) Recording
6) Headphone quality as I already have a pair I like.
7) Gee-whiz factor. I'm not trying to impress my friends, I just want it to play music.

What I'm looking at:

Creative Zen Sleek or Sleek Photo. They're about the same price and can be bought delivered in the $180-$190 range.

Creative Zen Microphoto. One of the few (or only) flash based players available with 8GB storage. I can get one for about $150 after rebate.

Any pros or cons to those 2 models or anything else I should be looking at given those requirements?

 

[canadageek]

why the Apple hate?

 

[Ika]

Zen Sleek is okay, but it doesn't meet a few of your requirements. The internal interface is fine, and fairly easy to use. However, it DOES have a touchstrip - you use this to select stuff and move up and down through menus, and can occasionally be a PITA. It's fairly easy to get used to, though. It also doesn't play everything - I'm not sure how well it handles .wma, but I've heard some stories of .wma's simply not playing. I haven't tried it myself, though. All MP3s work fine, including variable bitrate ones.

Dust does get under the screen, so after a while it gets hard to look at in sunlight (I've had mine for about... holy crap, 10 months?) and the screen is rather dusty.

The battery is not replacable, but battery life is good. It still runs 15+ hours for me.

Zen Microphoto is a great player, but a few things - it's not flash based (HDD-based, rather) and there are NO tactile buttons - the entire face is touch-sensitive, so you HAVE to put it on hold if you put it in your pocket.

I'm not too knowledgeable about older MP3 players, but an older iRiver might hit the spot for you. I think the model I'm thinking of is the H120 or H320.

 

[Molondo]

Tagged for later

 

[canadageek]

i'm totally out of touch with the MP3 player market....a year ago i coulda told yu pretty much every pro and con of any mp3 player. today, all i know is that my iPod is still alive (one year and counting) i mean, i know that everyone is constantly going on about iPod and how brilliant it is. most of these people don't know dick. iPods are great, but all you need is a click-wheel 20gig. its an MP3 player, people. it doesn't need to play videos or show off jpegs or crap like that. more space is always nice, especially for people like me (35gig gigs of music) but most people are fine with a fvcking sandisk flash thing.

/rant.

sorry i wasted your time.

 

[Ika]

Originally posted by: canadageek
i'm totally out of touch with the MP3 player market....a year ago i coulda told yu pretty much every pro and con of any mp3 player. today, all i know is that my iPod is still alive (one year and counting) i mean, i know that everyone is constantly going on about iPod and how brilliant it is. most of these people don't know dick. iPods are great, but all you need is a click-wheel 20gig. its an MP3 player, people. it doesn't need to play videos or show off jpegs or crap like that. more space is always nice, especially for people like me (35gig gigs of music) but most people are fine with a fvcking sandisk flash thing.

/rant.

sorry i wasted your time.

that post meanders. I'm not sure I follow it all the way through.

Anyway... an iPod for OP wouldn't be too bad of an idea. The user interface is fine, just like Creatives. They play all MP3s you rip, you just have to go through iTunes to transfer them (which is the same as Creative players, except Creative has its own proprietary software). They don't play .wma but if you really need to, you can convert them to mp3 (even though converting from lossy codec to another lossy codec loses a lot of quality).

Now that I think about it, though... the Zen Sleek is exactly the same as a 4G iPod, except it has a few more features, has a different physical interface, and is made by Creative instead of Apple. Depending on the price, the Sleek is better.

 

[lokiju]

So many choices out there now days, but I'm not up to par with whats the latest and greatest.

I'd probably just go to a store if I were you and play around with some until I found one I liked then order it online.

 

[Alienwho]

Well the beautiful thing about the ipod is that it's so popular that there are so many hacks and work-around you don't ever have to touch Itunes, I know I don't.

 

[iamme]

YGPM!

 

[skyking]

I just got an oregon scientific MP3/Fm tuner/timer/pedometer for my wife. It does all that, poorly IMO.
One of the redeeming features is drag and drop in windows. The music is on a mass storage device without installing any crap software.
Any other nice 1~2 gb flash units with drag and drop, and with AAA battery?

 

[Ika]

Originally posted by: skyking
I just got an oregon scientific MP3/Fm tuner/timer/pedometer for my wife. It does all that, poorly IMO.
One of the redeeming features is drag and drop in windows. The music is on a mass storage device without installing any crap software.
Any other nice 1~2 gb flash units with drag and drop, and with AAA battery?

You probably should've started a new thread, since you're asking for something entirely different. To recommend something now, though, that Mobiblu B153 player looks to be good for your needs. Small, 153 hour battery life shocked, and should be UMS drag & drop. There are tons of alternatives, though, like the iRiver Clix.