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

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?

Re: iPod advocate

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The cats would wreak havoc with the cable...

I think the price is going to be the main thing that sets me against iPod, cheapskate that I am.