I'm getting an MP3 player

[fuzzymillipede]

I'm looking to buy an MP3 player. Can anyone offer me some suggestions? This is what I'm looking for:

-Around $100 cost, preferably new
-At least 16GB flash memory (HDD can have issues, I've heard)
-The ability to put whatever media I want onto it (i.e. none of this iTunes, DRM, etc bullshit)

This is the closest match I have found so far, at $117: Nationite OS-43

[Andrew_Fireborn]

That looks to be about your best option.

Myself, I have a Sansa e260r, which works well enough for me. Aside from the fact that the only video format it can play is Quicktime. (It also tries to get me to use Rhapsody, but it takes any format music.)

[Mr Bean]

A Creative Zen or Zen X-FI is a good choice but fails to meet your price point requirement. I'm looking an Sansa but I'm still getting close to the same price point as a Creative with a few less features. So, I don't think you have a better one at that size for that price-point. Zunes, Creatives, IRivers, Sans are all around 130$ for 8 gigs not 16 gigs....

Eh at 100$ your not getting 16 gigs outside of El-Cheapo supreme models.

[Stark]

Your requirements are hilarious and limit you to pretty much the ass-end of the market. As Bean says, adding a few hamburgers worth of money will get you a significantly better device.

Saying 'HDD models have issues' is just mindboggling, but you obviously have almost no idea what you're talking about given your final critera.

[fuzzymillipede]

Indeed, I know next to nothing about music players. Feel free to inform me of things that you think are important. I know someone whose player's HDD broke, that's why I don't like the idea. Flash memory has no moving parts, so I figure it will be more resilient, because I tend to drop things. Sure, it goes bad after years of use, but I am not worried about that.

As for the cost, that is all I am willing to spend. I need the rest of my money for tuition and books.

[General Zod]

Indeed, I know next to nothing about music players. Feel free to inform me of things that you think are important. I know someone whose player's HDD broke, that's why I don't like the idea. Flash memory has no moving parts, so I figure it will be more resilient, because I tend to drop things. Sure, it goes bad after years of use, but I am not worried about that.

As for the cost, that is all I am willing to spend. I need the rest of my money for tuition and books.

If their hard drive broke, then they either got a cheapo piece of shit or they wound up being stupid with it. The best you're going to get for under $100 will be something like an 8gb Sandisk or an iRiver. The cheapest 16gb player I can find is a $160 Creative Zen. Good luck finding something for less.

[fuzzymillipede]

It looks like I can get a 16gb Sansa View for $106. This appears to be a far better deal than the OS-43. What are your thoughts on the View?

[General Zod]

It looks like I can get a 16gb Sansa View for $106. This appears to be a far better deal than the OS-43. What are your thoughts on the View?

I suggest being wary of eBay resellers when buying electronics. Especially sellers with less than a 100% feedback rating.

[fuzzymillipede]

He has a 99.8% feedback rating. That's close enough to 100% for me.

[Stark]

It's not the percentage that counts, it's the total number and nature of negatives.

Ironically while flash-based players are more resistant to shock, they age, are generally slower to copy stuff too, and far more expensive per capacity. It's just a tradeoff, but I doubt anyone REALLY needs 160GB or whatever the biggest HDD players are these days.

[fuzzymillipede]

In the past month, the seller has had 1600 positive feedbacks, 2 negative feedbacks, and one neutral feedback. In the first negative feedback, the buyer did not get the item for whatever reason and was refused compensation. In the other, the buyer had the device shipped to Iraq and it arrived broken. In the neutral feedback, the device did not work properly and had to be repaired. Only the first complaint was about a Sansa. Considering that the seller has sold hundreds of them, I think my odds are quite good.

Also, some people at the RockBox forums are trying to get their software to work on the Sansa View. Apparently, they have their code running on the device, but it cannot interact with the screen or controls. I hope they get it to work, because I want to be able to listen to .ogg files.

[General Zod]

In the past month, the seller has had 1600 positive feedbacks, 2 negative feedbacks, and one neutral feedback. In the first negative feedback, the buyer did not get the item for whatever reason and was refused compensation. In the other, the buyer had the device shipped to Iraq and it arrived broken. In the neutral feedback, the device did not work properly and had to be repaired. Only the first complaint was about a Sansa. Considering that the seller has sold hundreds of them, I think my odds are quite good.

Also, some people at the RockBox forums are trying to get their software to work on the Sansa View. Apparently, they have their code running on the device, but it cannot interact with the screen or controls. I hope they get it to work, because I want to be able to listen to .ogg files.

If someone never got their item I'd consider that a huge black mark. Especially if the seller's only dealings are to a shitload of people with less than 100 feedback apiece. Cause it's not totally impossible to fake that in order to get huge ratings.

[Faqa]

It looks like I can get a 16gb Sansa View for $106. This appears to be a far better deal than the OS-43. What are your thoughts on the View?

It depends. I have an 8GB model, and it's a nice player for the most part, though I've noticed a problem or two with the video on occasion(sound and picture not lining up). However, apparently the sound quality is NOT as good as the cheaper "Clip" and "Fuze" models in the same line(neither of which has a 16GB model, however), though I've listened to both and not heard much of a difference.

Keep in mind - do you need 16 gigs NOW? Flash memory models are expandable using memory cards(which run up to 16GB in and of themselves, if Sansa's site is to be believed).

[fuzzymillipede]

Well, my Sansa arrived in the mail this morning. I got exactly what I ordered, though I still need to test the Sansa to make sure it works properly.

[Nephtys]

Buy a new 40GB Creative Zen jukebox Nomad off Ebay for about 40 bucks.

I've had mine for about four years, and it's still ticking.

[Phantasee]

Buy a new 40GB Creative Zen jukebox Nomad off Ebay for about 40 bucks.

I've had mine for about four years, and it's still ticking.

How would a person buy one 'new'? Aren't those things dinosaurs, as far as MP3 players go?

[Nephtys]

Buy a new 40GB Creative Zen jukebox Nomad off Ebay for about 40 bucks.

I've had mine for about four years, and it's still ticking.

How would a person buy one 'new'? Aren't those things dinosaurs, as far as MP3 players go?

They pretty much are, on-par with 3rd Gen iPods. But often, you'd see surplus players on ebay. They do the job just fine, really, provided you're not buying an MP3 Player for looks or Video playback.

[fuzzymillipede]

Well, my Sansa is working. I didn't have a very good experience with its file system or Windows Media Player, though. The Sansa does not support organization by folders, which is how my music is currently organized. Rather, it uses playlists. The problem is that the playlists can only seem to be created by Windows Media Player. However, when I tried to get the damn thing to create a playlist and upload it to the Sansa, it attempted to "convert" some of my music files (which the Sansa was able to play, I had tested), and failed. I gave up on the piece of shit and had to implement a quick and dirty fix.

The good thing is that my music files are organized solely by name and folder. I used a program called MediaMonkey to rename the "album" field of every music file to the name of the folder they were in. The Sansa organizes music by album, so I can view my "albums" as if they were folders. The downside is that I lose the real album data, but I never cared about that.

[Stark]

Wow I wish I could do that instead of spending slightly more on a quality player! What a bargain.

[fuzzymillipede]

As I understand it, the problem stems from the way my music is organized, not the player. It seems that most, if not all MP3 players organize their music by tags, rather than a file-folder system like Windows. The majority of my music files lack proper tags, which forces me to either tediously fix them, or implement some sort of quick fix to emulate a file-folder system.

As for Windows Media Player, I don't know why it wouldn't work, but it has nothing to do with my device. I suspect it was due to the improper tags.

[Stark]

Oh yah, I'm not saying the device is objectively bad; just that it's shit like that in 2002 that made me buy an iPod. Turns out my time is worth too much to fuck around with primitive devices with poor UIs and idiosyncratic behaviours and I'd rather it 'just work'.

I'm not sure why the WMP playlists didn't work, though - even with totally borked tags (assuming not corrupt at least) it should have just given you a messy playlist, not a non-working playlist. However, there are many many free apps for auto-tagging your songs, so it doesn't have to be a manual thing or annoying, and properly tagged songs make players far more useful.

[fuzzymillipede]

This is exactly what happened:

I put the Sansa in MTC mode, and started WMP. I selected a playlist I had created in WMP, just a grouping of songs by the same artist, nothing complicated. I told WMP to "sync" the playlist with the Sansa, which essentially uploads the playlist and song files.

It started to upload the music files to the Sansa, but about halfway through it got to a file that it didn't like for some reason (as I said before, the Sansa didn't have a problem playing any of the files, which are all MP3). At that point, WMP decided that it must "convert" the files that it had singled out for god-knows-why, and then displayed an error message saying that the file could not be "converted", which terminated the entire process. All I was left with on the Sansa were the first few files that had been successfully uploaded before WMP crapped out. If WMP was able to upload them correctly, I probably would have had a working playlist.

[Stark]

Oh yeah you mentioned that; I didn't realise it was a 'sync' thing rather than a manual copy. WMP is really, really anal about filetypes (just like Media Centre etc) and you can probably work around this by poking the internet until you find out where the list of 'acceptable' filetypes is and hack in the one in question - I had to do this to Media Centre or it refused to 'add' files of a type that played fine because it didn't 'like' them.