MP3 players -- geek wisdom sought

[undyingking]

I'm thinking about getting an MP3 player, but rather than go into the tiresome business of researching the market myself, I thought I'd see if any of you guys are reasonably up to speed and could make recommendations!

Required features:

• lots of storage (10s of GB);
• decent sound quality;
• easy to hook up to PC;
• most important, easy to hook up to hifi aux in, ie. to act as a de facto hifi component;
• can run off mains;
• decent battery etc performance
• decent headphones (or, ability to replace headphones with decent ones).

Not-required features:

• considerations of portability / durability etc (unlikely to take it anywhere more exotic than the garden);
• support for dozens of obscure / proprietary file formats;
• wonderfully intuitive / one-button interface (it's likely to live on shuffle);
• coolour screen etc;
• stunning looks.

And a price of somewhere around the £150-200 mark I guess. Any thoughts?

(Do these things come with digital radios at all these days? That would be cool.)

Comments

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I have a Creative Zen Touch (20GB) and it has pretty much what you're looking for. You need to install the transfer software (which sorts things nicely to artist, track, album and genre) but then it works like an external drive.
The included headphones are a bit crap but it's a standard 3.5mm connector so you can easily use a different one. I have it connected via a 3.5mm/RCA cable to my mini-stereo and it works fine. An AC brick is included as well. I haven't tested the battery on constant use but about 5-8 hours should be possible.
Looks like it's in your price bracket, too (the 40GB is 190).
It doesn't have a digital radio, though.

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

cuthbertcross's iPod does most of those things. We've hooked it up to a hifi system. iTunes is PC compatible, but is (I suspect) requred for uploading songs.

I do know someone who got through 4 iPods in search of one that would take alternative headphones: they kept auto-pausing (due to not sensing the non-iPod headphones.) So he got a Sony HD5H (30 GB) for £205-£230. And says it does all thte things you want. But File format support is "pretty poor". Battery life is worse with MP3 files, but still better than iPod.

And I fear that portable (ie pocketable) digital radios (ie DAB) are still very expensive, and are only just on the market. Also on my wish list for the future.

A sore point

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

No, they don't come with DAB these days: believe me, I would know!
However, there are related considerations for those who have, or who are thinking of getting, a DAB radio which can record to a card (e.g. the Bug records to SD cards). Because: they generally record in MP2 format. Now, in general, this is not supported by most digital audio players, not like, say, MP3 (which everyone plays).

I have an iRiver H140 (it also comes in a 20 gig version, the H120, for those trying to shave a few squid off the price). It is ugly and (like all other players) its interface is not as intuitive as the iPod's. But: there is an alternative opensource firmware for it, Rockbox, and I (*) put Rockbox on my H140 and now it plays back MP2 files. It used to take me hours to re-encode shows to mp3 and now I just copy the buggers over via the PC, hurrah!

The H140/H120 just shows up as a removable hard drive on just about everything. No Creative-style drivers needed, no iTunes, just copy your music files over and off you go.

It has a line-out socket (indeed it has an optical line-out too: same socket but you change the settings). It comes with a mains adaptor (for charging) and has good battery life (no problem playing it all day at work). (It also comes with a jack-to-jack lead, an LCD remote, a small lapel mike, and a sturdy but fugly case, all as standard).

It also has a line-in socket and will record to mp3 or wav, which I have found useful for digitising vinyl (in fact right now I'm listening to an old Billie Holliday LP that I hoovered up this way).

So I would certainly recommend the iRiver H1xx series as one of the models you should consider. But in the end it's very much a personal thing.

(*)Note: I am a fairly timid person in some respects and did not do this until other people had been using Rockbox on their H1xx's for several months with no ill effects and had posted clear and detailed instructions on how to change over (not that it is that complicated actually!).

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You say "decent battery performance". Is that a requirement?

There's a Dension on ebay for 80 quid.

It has no batteries. But it's got more hard disk storage than anything on the market. Not least, because you can just take out the drive, and swap in another: mine's on 160 Gig.

It's designed for in-car use, and comes a bay for such purposes (so it runs directly of the cars wiring, with no need to plug into the lighter socket, or so forth).

It might fail on the "easy to hook up to PC" issue: it comes as a removable hard-drive, which means installing a caddy in the PC, and rebooting whenever you want to insert or remove it. The USB adaptor for mine was another 50 quid.

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

To join the Creative force, but up the ante a little further, I have their big mother, the 60Gb Zen Xtra. Other than having to send the first one back when the USB port broke (due, admittedly, to my dropping it, though only a short way), it's done me remarkably well. My only gripe with it it that it sticks a miniscule pause in between tracks, which is irritating on live albums and the like, but otherwise it's pretty good, and the battery life is exemplary for a player of its size (about 14 hours, if I remeber)

iPod advocate

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

Pros of the iPod:

- reasonable software with nice playlisting thing
- pretty good encoding with jitter correction
- works with mp3 no problem
- line-out via dock or connect directly to the unit
- can be made to work with linux (gtkPod) or win98 (ephpod)

Cons:

- official way of transferring songs needs itunes, winXP or MacOS
- expensive
- not for people who are scared of white objects
- non-removable battery (but battery life is improving with each generation)

I like my iPod mini very much, although in the past I might have gone for an iRiver had I known about them.

On the other hand, if you're just going into the garden why don't you get some headphones with a 100m cable?