[pyro-manic]

My minidisc player died on me last week, after several years of service (including a trip to the bottom of a swimming pool in Rhodes), so I'm looking for a replacement in the form of a large-capacity MP3 player. I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations, or if anyone has first-hand experiences they'd like to share.

My list of contenders so far:

iPod, obviously. Either a 20Gb standard (£200), or maybe a 30Gb Photo (£250). I'd paint it black and get some proper headphones, so muggings are not an issue, and there will be no accusations of being a trendwhore.

iRiver H320 (£200)
20Gb media player, also has a radio, record function, will play MP3, OGG, WMA etc, displays photos, and can be patched to play movies as well. Reviews rate it very highly for quality of sound (better than iPod). Downside is that the interface is meant to be unintuitive.

Creative Zen (£180)
Again, 20Gb capacity. This player has no colour display or anything, but has excellent sound quality and is also up to £30 cheaper than the others.

Any other suggestions will be welcome, but which should I get?

[WMCoolmon]

Unless you already have around 20 GB worth of music, I'd vote the iRiver. Better sound quality and OGG support will make your music sound better, plus, it apparently does photos too.

http://www.iriver.com/html/product/prpa_product.asp?pidx=42 :

Plays MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, WMA, ASF, OGG, JPEG, BMP, TXT, FM radio

Of course I doubt any of them will survive a trip to the bottom of a swimming pool, unless it's covered with fluffy mattresses and all the water has been drained out.

[IceFire]

I vote Creative Zen.  The Zen is a very good player, I don't have one but I've seen/heard a few in action and its got excellent sound quality.

Personally I'm looking at the Zen Micro or the Zen Neeon/Muvo series.  I think the smaller ones are better.

I prefer not to be a part of the iPod hype.

[Nuke]

ipods have the best interface though, but your files need to be properly tagged and sorted for it to work right. i had an archos awhile back with a ****ty interface, but at least you could load mp3s through drag and drop. if you do go with an ipod, trash itunes and get the winamp ipod plugin. the ipod would look better if it was fully chromed instead of having that white plastic in the front.

[Janos]

Originally posted by IceFire
I vote Creative Zen.  The Zen is a very good player, I don't have one but I've seen/heard a few in action and its got excellent sound quality.

Personally I'm looking at the Zen Micro or the Zen Neeon/Muvo series.  I think the smaller ones are better.

I prefer not to be a part of the iPod hype.

I have a Zen Micro. Compact size is great. This player is small for it's caliber, fits in pockets and so on. The carry bag is good enough for protection.

5Gb of hard drive space is usually enough, although sometimes I crave for MORE. Even though I often just skip-skip-listen-skip-skip-skip-listen-skip-listen-listen, and so on. The battery life is directly dependant on how much music you have, how much you skip/shuffle and how often do you switch it on and off. If you have a ****load of music and want to listen to all of it all the time at high sound quality, pick up something with a bigger harddrive - at high quality/low compression you can only put 600-800 songs on this.

The quality of headphones is average at best, so I'd adwise you to invest some little money for isolating earplugs (these are above awesome, you don't have to listen to idiots and traffic noise, and you can keep a lower sound level with exactly the same quality), or big nice muffs. The built-in microphone is OK for recording speech, but has piss-poor higher frequency capacity.

FM radio is kicking rad. Uses very little battery by my experience. Games - who needs them? Cell phone games are good enough.

Other minuses include:
- no MPC/OGG support, this only plays mp3 and wma.
- the headphone jack can break. Mine broke once and several other people have complained about it as well. It seems they have repaired this by now.
- my carry clip broke, which is OK because I don't really see a reason to use it all. Maybe if you wear spandex or something.

Overall, I give this player 4/5 in it's own class. I am interested in the small iRiver as well and might pick up one some day.

[Admiral LSD]

Ogg support is next to worthless. Most of the digital music out there (legal, not-quite-legal and downright illegal) is still in MP3 format. Converting from MP3 to Ogg would result in a reduction in quality. Ogg is just another open source solution looking for a problem, that's all.

[kasperl]

I'd go for the iRiver, really. iPod has the major problem of not supporting drag&drop MP3 loading. Annoying as ****, especially if you want to hook the thing up to someones laptop or something ad-hoc and see if you can transfer songs.

Supporting multiple formats isn't a prime point, but still handy, because, well, it's just easier in case you have some files in that format.

If the Zen allows drag&drop, it might be a good choice, too.

Unintuitive interfaces rarely annoy me. Inuitive interfaces get on my tits in seconds, because I don't see what I need to do to get it to run properly. I'd advice you to ask a store to let you check it out before you buy, because what you find intuitive and what the reviewer thinks of as intuitive can differ.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Admiral LSD
Ogg support is next to worthless. Most of the digital music out there (legal, not-quite-legal and downright illegal) is still in MP3 format. Converting from MP3 to Ogg would result in a reduction in quality. Ogg is just another open source solution looking for a problem, that's all.

[color=66ff00]I use ogg all the time, any CD's I have are converted into ogg for PC play. Great sound and remarkably small.

It's only as useful as you make it.
[/color]

[karajorma]

I use .ogg all the time and actually so does Freespace!

[pyro-manic]

I'd tend towards .ogg as well, to be honest.

Admiral: But given that I don't download my music, that's not a problem. I don't pirate music, and the whole "digital" sale thing repulses me. I want to have a cd (or better yet some vinyl!), with cover art and liner notes, etc. I want something I can hold, not just a bunch of 0s and 1s on a hard drive...

And I didn't know that iPod wasn't drag-and-drop. I think I'll give it a miss if that's the case. I can't be having with any of that iTunes/Winamp stuff...

On balance, it looks like the H320 is the one for me. I'm off to find a shop so I can have a go before I buy one.

Thanks for your input, peeps - much obliged.

[karajorma]

Quite frankly if you're ripping music for your own use .ogg is better than .mp3 simply on filesizes alone.

[2Bladder]

Don't pay £180 for a Creative Zen, if you shop around, you can get them for £150. I've had mine for a while and its great. The touch pad thing works about as well as the Ipod wheel and the software is easy to use.

[pyro-manic]

I don't want software at all, though. That's why I'm going for the iRiver. I want drag-and-drop, so I can use it on any computer, and use it as a portable hard drive as well.

Also, The iRiver player can be patched to play videos as well, so I'll have a multimedia player for half the price.

[Unknown Target]

Ipod's are pretty good, although that's only based off the good experience I've had with mine. I've never used the others
But what's with the white headphones = mugging jokes?

[Sandwich]

I just got myself an H320 a week ago, and it's great overall. There's a few nitpicks I do have, though:

First, the videos have to be a specific resolution, 10fps, and Xvid. Not that all that is bad, mind you (Cvid rocks, and the resolution is what the player's screen is, AFAIK), but the framerate is a bit annoying at times. Go get a proggie called "iriverter", which will convert just about any video into the proper format, and check how it looks to you.

Second, the interface is fine, really. Most things make sense, although not the iPod-level, intuitive sense. But learning what does what isn't hard, and isn't completely illogical, either, so it's not something you're going to have to return to the manual for time and again.

However, my main nitpick is with the navigation. Scrolling down a list of folders with the buttons is just annoyingly slow. So annoying, in fact, that it made me reorganize my music; I now have folders for each letter of the alphabet, and one for numbers, so I have a max of 27 folders to look through before I find a certain artist. Kinda annoying, granted, but not that bad.

But now here's the thing. iRiver is about to come out with a 20Gb version of it's beautiful H10 player - the one that's the size of the iPod Mini? The one with the touch strip? If you have the software for it (it requires Windows XP / Media Player 10 AFAIK), then I'd definitely recommend holding off for a few weeks and going for that instead; the H3xx series is a bit on the bulky side of things.

[phreak]

i want a new mp3 player since mine only has 64MB of storage (expanded to 192) and is about 4 years old.  I don't really trust hard-drive players due to the horror stories i've heard here and at school; however, the hard drive players hold about 20x more stuff than a flash player.

[pyro-manic]

Sandy: Great comments, thanks. I'll be sure to consider that. Not keen on the idea of Media Player 10, though...

UT: Hadn't you heard that before? It's like painting "I have an expensive gadget, please take it off me" on your forehead...

[Unknown Target]

Nope, never heard of that

[aldo_14]

There are quite a few stories IIRC of people who fall asleep on the train/tube/bus with an iPod and wake up to find it missing.

[pyro-manic]

Not to mention that New York kid who got killed over his a few weeks ago. By a couple of 15-year-olds...

I've tried that iriverter prog out, and the results aren't too bad. The resolution is fine (though reading subtitles or on-screen text would be difficult), though I find the 10fps a bit jerky. I might look at one of those multimedia players if they're not too expensive. I've read up on the H10, and you only need MP10 if you want to download songs from the player itself. So That's ok. Strangely though, it won't play OGGs....