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I am in the market for a mp3 player. I know little on the subject and I am looking for advice and knowledge.

like what is the diference between a flash player and a hard drive player?



I have found a couple of interesting choices that are about the right size and have a variety of neat features.

SanDisk Sansa m240 1GB* MP3 Player - Silver - Model: SDMX3-1024-A18

iRiver 1GB* MP3 Player with Color Display - Blue - Model: T10-1GB

the SanDisk runs around $120 at bestbuy and the iRiver is $200

I am looking for something that will be small enough for me to carry when I run, but large enough for me to use easily with my thick fingers. I kinda like the FM tuner on the two I listed.

any thoughts, ideas or suggestions?

Flash players use a solid state memory technology. Basically that means their storage medium doesn't use any moving parts, unlike a hard disk or floppy, etc. The upside to this is that they're guaranteed to have almost zero skipping problems, and their size tends to be much smaller. The downside is that they typically have less capacity, and cost more per gigabyte/megabyte than hard drive based players.

Where as hard drive based players, well, use hard drives. Just really really small ones. Between the choices you listed, I'd recommend going for the SanDisk, largely due to the iRivers costing much more per megabyte.

I have the SanDisk m240. I highly recommend it.

I have an Iriver Chromex MP3/WMA CD player. It cost me $70 3 years ago, holds 700MB (I currently have 426 64kbps songs on it), has an in-line remote, playlist support, nibbles (the game), and can go a long time on 2 AA's. It is also, well a CD player, so it is kind of big. However, it is dirt cheap and I don't anticipate replacing it any time soon.

For $200 you could get a 2GB nano, but then again it doesn't have FM radio. Depends on how much you need FM - if you haven't used it before, you're unlikely to start now.

It also depends on what sort of music you have. If you have a significant number of WMAs or are using or ever plant to use a music store other than iTunes, then you do not want an iPod of any kind since your music will not work. Pretty much any other music player on the market will work, however. I can't buy an iPod because pretty much my entire music collection is in WMA format, and I would prefer not to be limited to iPod and iTunes for the rest of my life, anyway.

thanks for the info. keep it coming.

and now I understand the difference in flash player and hard drive player

I'd avoid Ipods. I mostly get music from allofmp3.com. The legality is a little dubious, but it is legal.

SanDisk Sansa m240 1GB* MP3 Player - Silver - Model: SDMX3-1024-A18

I got this exact player for $69 on Black Friday.
It's pretty decent and the playlist options are more than I expected.
My only dislikes are the color (I wish it was blue like the 512k version) and the earbuds.
I hate earbuds in general and wish it came with regular headphones.

Another diff. between Flash and HD is that HD players will consume more power, and thus they either have bigger batteries or shorter endurances.

So, a quick summary would be
Flash:
- Physically smaller
- Last longer between re-charges
- Cheaper
HD
- Larger capacity
- Lower price per MB

Although there is some overlap in terms of capacity and price with high-end flash vs. low-end HD.

Flash tends to be a little more reliable. The earlier IPods practically had to be handled like laptops.

I would reccommend the Creative Zen Micro. It's a 5 (or 6GB) player for right around $200.

Why I reccommend it:

1) Capacity vs. price
2) Reliability (My player survived being used at work for two months without issue till I quit. It was a yard construction job and the player was always being dropped, sometimes kicked when it got dropped, and even had some large 1-2 man rocks dropped/rolled over it and it survived like nothing happened with just a few scrapes in the case. Try that with an Ipod.)
3) Battery, the battery is removable, and costs $14-25 for a brand new replacement ($39.99 from Creative.com). Again, beat that Ipod...
4) Lack of things to break. The Zen Micro uses a touchpad instead of buttons, it is very responsive, and makes it so the player has less stuff to break or get sticky if you spill things in it.
5) Repairable. I already had to repair the headphone jack on my player due to abnormal wear and tear breaking it off the board. Took 5 minutes to disassemble it completely without any damage, just two screws and a slide plate. Very nice if you're somewhat handy with tools and repairs. On a 1-10 scale I'd rate disassembly of it a 2-3 at most.
6) Battery life. The specs show 12 hours (at the time I got mine) using crappy quality MP3's. My actual time using 192kbps MP3's has been from 8 hours (lots of skipping around) up to 20 hours at full volume in my car (turned it on, left it on, didn't play around with the tracks.)

Overall I consider it the best player on the market for the price. It also includes some really cool features, like an FM radio for when your playlist gets really stale, a voice recorder function, removable HDD function, and a lot of other cool features. And it's a tough little machine.

TheBlackCat wrote:It also depends on what sort of music you have. If you have a significant number of WMAs or are using or ever plant to use a music store other than iTunes, then you do not want an iPod of any kind since your music will not work. Pretty much any other music player on the market will work, however. I can't buy an iPod because pretty much my entire music collection is in WMA format, and I would prefer not to be limited to iPod and iTunes for the rest of my life, anyway.

People still use WMAs? And here I'd thought nearly everyone was using either MP3 or Apple's proprietary format.

I bought a Creative MuVo 1 GB for listening to while I'm bike riding. Ran me around $120, came with an arm band and headphones.

Built-in FM tuner (which I don't use) and voice recording ability (don't use either, but hey). It's easy to work without looking, runs off a single triple-A (which I like, but some don't) that lasts around 3-5 hours of constant play. The stick removes from the battery housing and plugs into any USB port.

The only thing I am disappointed in is that battery "catch" has started to become weak after replacing the battery a few times. They should have designed it better, but it's not really a problem.

Spyder wrote:I'd avoid Ipods. I mostly get music from allofmp3.com. The legality is a little dubious, but it is legal.

Is that the Russian site I've heard about? Could you PM me or post some more information about the place? I want to start paying for MP3s, but 99 cents a pop is a bit steep.

Joe wrote:

Spyder wrote:I'd avoid Ipods. I mostly get music from allofmp3.com. The legality is a little dubious, but it is legal.

Is that the Russian site I've heard about? Could you PM me or post some more information about the place? I want to start paying for MP3s, but 99 cents a pop is a bit steep.

Tech News World has an article about them. Apparently there's been no legal action taken against them, despite their legality being questioned in the past.

General Zod wrote:People still use WMAs? And here I'd thought nearly everyone was using either MP3 or Apple's proprietary format.

The only proprietary format Apple uses (not counting their lossless codec) is FairPlay-protected AAC. Otherwise, Apple is pushing AAC, which is an open format. iTunes does not rip music with any DRM attached. It's not even an option.

General Zod wrote:

Joe wrote:

Spyder wrote:I'd avoid Ipods. I mostly get music from allofmp3.com. The legality is a little dubious, but it is legal.

Is that the Russian site I've heard about? Could you PM me or post some more information about the place? I want to start paying for MP3s, but 99 cents a pop is a bit steep.

Tech News World has an article about them. Apparently there's been no legal action taken against them, despite their legality being questioned in the past.

So their MP3s would be perfectly compatible with an iPod?

Joe wrote:

General Zod wrote:

Joe wrote: Is that the Russian site I've heard about? Could you PM me or post some more information about the place? I want to start paying for MP3s, but 99 cents a pop is a bit steep.

Tech News World has an article about them. Apparently there's been no legal action taken against them, despite their legality being questioned in the past.

So their MP3s would be perfectly compatible with an iPod?

Any MP3 should be compatible with an iPod unless it has some funky DRM embedded in it.

Durandal wrote:

General Zod wrote:People still use WMAs? And here I'd thought nearly everyone was using either MP3 or Apple's proprietary format.

The only proprietary format Apple uses (not counting their lossless codec) is FairPlay-protected AAC. Otherwise, Apple is pushing AAC, which is an open format. .

Then why is apple/ipod the only player/company to support it?
I thought that it's supposed to make smaller and better sounding files than most mp3 codecs, byte for byte.

So their MP3s would be perfectly compatible with an iPod?

Any normal mp3 should be.
The only reason that there might be trouble is if they have an unusual DRM scheme attached such as Microsofts/Napsters/Yahoo's rental scheme that uses Janus

DEATH wrote:Then why is apple/ipod the only player/company to support it?

Uh, they're not. There are plenty of players out there which support AAC. Apple doesn't license out AAC. MPEG does.

I thought that it's supposed to make smaller and better sounding files than most mp3 codecs, byte for byte.

A song encoded with different encoders at the same datarate will be the same size regardless. And encoding quality varies from encoder to encoder. LAME will produce excellent-quality MP3's, for example. Apple's AAC encoder is supposed to be a pretty good one as well. But overall, AAC is better at lower bitrates. As bitrates get higher and higher, it gets more difficult to distinguish between the original and the encoded version, regardless of whether it's MP3, AAC, Ogg or WMA.

The best format they've got going now is M4A. I ripped some of my CDs with iTunes the other day and I was absolutely astonished at how small the files were despite having CD quality. Compatability is sort of an issue, but hopefully things will change.

Durandal wrote:Uh, they're not. There are plenty of players out there which support AAC. Apple doesn't license out AAC. MPEG does.

There are plenty of PC media players that do (even windows media player will with the right codecs), but besides the iPod what portable media players support AAC?

TheBlackCat wrote:

Durandal wrote:Uh, they're not. There are plenty of players out there which support AAC. Apple doesn't license out AAC. MPEG does.

There are plenty of PC media players that do (even windows media player will with the right codecs), but besides the iPod what portable media players support AAC?

At least one. But besides that I'm not sure of any else that do. However that's likely got more to do with popularity than licensing issues.