Posted by George Graves on 04/11/06 19:32

In article <1144772988.151662.53730@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
"J. Nelson" <spam_box@ev1.net> wrote:

> I'm finally about to buy an MP3 player, and would appreciate some
> input on which of these two products is preferable. This player would
> be used at the gym for working out, and occasionally jacked in to my
> car sereo.
>
> >From what I can tell, they are both at the same price point, but the
> Creative has twice as much storage, a display screen, the ability to
> record via microphone, and an FM receiver... in other words, a pretty
> one-sided contest in favor of the Creative.
>
> Is there anything I'm overlooking which would argue in favor of the
> ipod?

The Shuffle is a low-end player designed to just allow one to turn it on
and play what's there. Without any display, navigation is all but
impossible. The Nano, OTOH, has the standard iPod navigation interface.
It is my considered opinion that it comes down to the navigation
interface that's the difference between the iPods and the rest and the
main reason why the iPod players are so much more popular than the other
brands. Try to navigate to a specific 'cut' through a large number of
albums/songs on both before making up your mind as to which to buy
because ultimately, that will be the feature that makes the most
difference in the ultimate usability of the player for day-to-day usage.

I don't know how sophisticated your "ear" is but to me, the most
important feature of the iPod/iTunes is the ability to use Apple's
Lossless Encoding (ALE) scheme rather than MP3 which I abhor. The ALE
makes files that are a bit larger than the highest quality MP3 but one
can certainly hear the difference. I don't use ITMs (or any other music
download service) because: 1) the types of music I like aren't very well
represented, 2) I have several thousand CDs so I just RIP what I have.
3) the aforementioned dislike of MP3.

Make sure that whatever player you buy comes with ripping software that
allows you to use a lossless compression scheme such as ALE or FLAC if
you wish in case you find MP3 as distorted and as noise modulated as I
find MP3. OTOH, if you find MP3 to be adequate, then, more power to you
and ignore the second part of my post.

--
George Graves
The health of our society is a direct result of the men
and women we choose to admire.

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