Looking for a new mp3 player (1 Viewer)

[Collin]

I've been using small flash-based drives for awhile but now I want to move onto something which is a bit bigger and better. I was looking at 2th Gen Ipod minis, but I've been getting lots of mixed reviews on them. It seems that people either love them or hate em'. The main two disadvantages I see with Ipods which are important to me is that it has:
a) no custom equilizer
b) no replaceable battery
Other than that, it seems the Ipod is an alright choice, which looks nice. I was wondering what are some alternatives to the 2th gen Ipod mini that people would recommend me. I want something preferably with these attributes:

- excellent sound quality
- user-friendly interface
- similar size to Ipod mini
- great battery life
- removable battery
- custom equilizer (big big deal for me)
- 4GB+ storage
- durable
- stylish
- I don't care about inbuilt FM radio, pic viewer or whatever.. I just want it purely as a high quality mp3 player.

I've heard about the Zen Micro and the iRiver ones.. but as usual I'm finding mixed reviews for them. Do they have custom equilizers?

My budget is $500.

If I cant find anything else with the criteria that I'm looking for I'll just end up settling for the Ipod.

Hopefully you people can give me some educated suggestions, thanks.

 

[MedNez]

No custom EQ is the only problem with the Ipod as I see it - the battery will probably last you until you buy a new mp3 player in a few years. I've had no problems with mine, but just a few things:

* The remote is good; but seems to not work properly after about 6 months. But that's ok because you can send it back to Apple courtesy of them, within your one year warranty, and you'll get a new one.

* You can buy warranty extension packs.

* Itunes is good to copy songs across with, no issues there.

* You can enable it for disk use (like another hard drive); very useful.

I've got a 20gb 4th Gen, by the way. Realistically, I've had no problems with it - and it does what I want it to do.

Plus I went thirds with ... and bubz for Ipod socks, which are pretty neat

 

[JimmyK]

i used 2 have a creative muvo2 1.5gb .. and had major problems with the hard drive in it. I've had my ipod mini since christmas and havent had any problems with read/write access like i did with the creative device. I don't think ill be buying a creative hard disk mp3 player any time in the near future as a gift or a disk drive.

 

[transcendent]

In iTune you can customise the individual songs for certain equilizer settings as well as enhance the sound volume. This means that if you have hip-hop which has naturally enhanced bass you can tune it down and the classical songs on the same iPod you can increase the volume and set it to classical or acoustic where you set the hip-hop songs to hip-hop equilizer settings.

 

[breaking]

Plus I went thirds with ... and bubz for Ipod socks, which are pretty neat

how cute

 

[thejosiekiller]

look at some creative products

 

[transcendent]

I have only one issue with copying songs from CD to iTunes as an mp3. They lag the start of the song by fading it in which pisses me off when I'm trying to copy my trance CD and I want it to play continuously. I only have an iPod Shuffle 512 Mb thinking that a better version will come out in a year or two by which I'll get a new computer that can actually hold all my songs.

BTW: iPod users... do you need to have the song on the computer for it to play on the iPod? cause every time I move a song on the hard drive I have to find it again and recalibrate it with my iPod, the only other thing that pisses me off about iTunes.

 

[Pharaohsam]

i would go for a zen or zen micro...double the battery of the ipods and looks cooler

 

[MedNez]

My green one;

My grey one (used for my phone).

\edit\ @ transcendent:

I store all my music in the one folder, to keep it synchronised with Itunes. Set the folder as the default, so it'll keep everything synchronised. There's also an option under preferences, to move all songs in your library to the one folder.

 

[transcendent]

That I know and that's what pisses me off cause I DON'T HAVE the memory to store songs on my computer. I have to keep transferring the ones I don't listen to as often to CD.

 

[Collin]

MadNez: You have a point about the battery thing. I usually do replace my mp3 players every 2 years or so, so I guess the dead battery issue isn't the biggest deal.

Lengy: So technically then you DO have custom equilizer options? (I.e you just have to preset them beforehand right?) If that's the case, then it's all good because I would actually prefer to have custom EQs for certain songs.

McHectic: Apparently the 2nd Gen Ipod Minis has twice the battery life of the 1st gen one, so now it's about 16 hours, theoretically.

Anyway, if what lengy said was true.. then right now I'm heavily leaning towards the Ipod mini.

 

[transcendent]

well you can customise individual songs in iTunes and all iPods use iTunes so I guess it's true. lemme check since I need to charge my shuffle anyways and i prefer to have my trance songs play louder then my normal songs.

 

[transcendent]

I was right. You can adjust:
Volume Enchancement
Equilizer Preset
and
Start/Stop time! ( I'm going to recalibrate it so it start immediately from the song )

Right-Click on chosen song and go to Get Info then choose the Options tab.

 

[Collin]

The volume thing is a big deal too, since obviously some songs are encoded louder than others.. and with my current mp3 player I have to manually reduce the volume of the culprit louder songs as they pop up.

So let me get this right.. you have the option to 're-encode' the mp3 in iTunes to a custom equilizer setting you choose? If this is the case, I'm getting an iPod tomorrow.

 

[transcendent]

The equilizer settings are all preset I think.

 

[transcendent]

I was once a man who wandered the Earth aimlessly in search of a mp3 player and for so long I had dispised the name of Apple. Now I am an advocate of this glorious creation. Behold... the iPod!

 

[Collin]

Ah ok, then it's not what I'm looking for. I need to be able choose the EQ values myself.. the pre-sets just don't do it for me. Damnations, I even have a custom EQ setting on my 256 Creative Nomad.. and they don't even do it for an iPod.

 

[transcendent]

I think you can create your own presets and save them so it's custom just I haven't made a preset yet but yeah you can make a custom preset on iTunes and save it.

 

[Collin]

Yeah, that's good. If you could check for me that there's that option in iTunes sometime, it would be great... cause ya know, this is the biggest deal for me, so I don't wanna fork out a few hundred bucks and find out I can't do it.

 

[Collin]

Also, could you make your own presets and save them on the iPod.. that's even better.