Attention MP3 player weenies!

[MARK]

The Mark is interested in joining your ranks. Please advice me on recommended memory, upgrade ability, screen info., blah, blah, that I should be loooking for. Overstock.com has re-conditioned models from several different brands for what seemes like decent prices starting as low as $39.99 for a 64mb.

Transmission out.

[Coldcat]

Well.. I only recently converted to the MP3-dom so I can't tell you much yet. I have a 256 mb MP3 player, a simple brandless one that looks like a memory stick, holds 64 songs at the moment and is almost crammed full with that. (can't tell you how many minutes that is)
It plays music.

Thats about it, though. Screen (and software) info is minimum (I guess that's with every memory stick-style apparatus) and it litteraly guzzles batteries. Most importantly: the equalizer sucks, in any of it's four settings.
I did have the luck to enjoy the other end of the spectrum: My brothers' Ipod (10Gig) Damn, that sound was just as good as my stereo. Lots of info, options, settings, possibilities of making different tracklists, music stored by name, uploaddate and genre, and the thing holds regular data too. But the Ipod is waaaaaaaay above my budget. I have the feeling that you pay for soundquality. Storage room is easy to get, but if you want anything that resembles real music sound, you'll have to cough up.

I 'm very interested to hear reports about the medium prized mp3 players out there: the 4gig players and such.

[Reverend SC]

IMHO, it doesn't friggin matter. Unless you blast your ears, the sound of boarding pretty much cancells out any loss of quality as a result of your budget. Double that on ice (cough, east coast, cough). On the lift, you're talking to your friends and stuff so you'll probably drop the volume amyway.

Most important thing is accessability. Get a headset with a volume control slider. This goes outside your shell at the chest. If you have to fumble with the player for volume, you'll end up not eben turning it on after a while. Your friend waves you over, you stop, slide the volume down. If you have to unglove, unzip the access pocket, take the thing out, turn it down to hear, you'll end up not even bringing it.

As far as memory, again it depends on what kind of loss you can/can't tolerate. WMA files at 64k are tiny compared to a "standard" MP3 file at 128 or higher. There's no way some one could tell me that they could tell the diff between filetypes when they're snowboarding. Maybe on the lift, but again, you are probably going to turn it down. And smaller file size means more tunes on less memory.

I did have a problem with a "cheap" MP3 player a few years ago, it didn't seem to like the cold. I would literally and figuratively "freeze" up. A heat pack in the pocket cured it, lol.

My next one was just as cheap and worked fine.

As far as memory card types, it doesn't really matter. What matters is ease of transfer. I'm a fan of card readers, they simply make the card appear as a drive on your computer and you copy/paste/delete files just as you would to any other drive. They're cheap now, USB external, or you can sometimes find a 7 -type reader floppy or CD combo drive. Kinda neat.

Connecting via USB just means you'll have to use Windows Media Player or other software to transfer. I guess there's nothing wrong with that now, but sometimes I remember my program not recognizing the specific player, so direct card transfer seems better to me.

If money was no object, I'd get that Burton iPod compatable shell and an iPod. It's pre-wired and has a pocket for the iPod and big control buttons on the sleeve:

http://www.burton.com/Burton/gear/products.asp?productID=729

Dude.....

[NoKnees]

Three key factors for me on these are: Sound Quality, Storage Capacity, and Durability. Oh, and yah, price too I suppose.. :)

In the big dog area for storage and sound quality it's Apple's iPod, Dell's DJ(Creative Labs versions too), and a few others. They cost more, store a ton of music, and are easy to use. Features you'll want to check for a removable battery packs, as even with the l-ion and nmhd batteries heavy use will shorten the life. Older used iPods are not a great deal on eBay as they mostly have toasted batteries that are not cheap to replace.. On the other hand, refurbs bought directly from Apple are not a bad deal at all. Apple refurbs have a very good rep when you buy directly from them.

Dell's DJ line of iPod wannabe style players are good bang for the buck. The DJ's are probably the most durable of this line of players as they put a lot of extra effort into padded mounts for the internal harddisk... Creative Labs also make this player, but their version doesn't have the dampening for the hd...

The software is better with iPods, yet still quite serviceable with Dell and Creative's units... You pay for what you get.. Apple and Dell have better headphones than creative's as well. Most folks are quite happy with the stock ones.. Fit might be an issue though, as not all ears are created equal. Apple usually wins here on the comfort factor for long term usage.

If durability is more of a concern than storage, go with the cheaper oldschool players that allow sd/compactflash/etc cards. No moving parts, better battery life, cheaper, etc... I don't have much info on the good's and bads in this bracket. My thoughts are if you own a digital camera, try to match memory card types with your MP3 player... Most of the time you are using one or the other, so swapping cards back and forth can be handy... Sound quality usually depends more on the headphones for these units. Most come with pretty bad excuses for headphones and try to make up for it with bass-boost options... Expect to buy your own here if you care about sound quality at all.

Anyway, just my thoughts..

[canuck]

I'm pretty happy sticking with the MD for now, although I did bid on an IPOD at a silent auction recently....hmmmmm