recommend me an mp3 player?

http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/22/philips-gogear-sa178-digital-audio-player/

It's tiny, it's light, it has a radio, and it records voice (if you need to, say, interview someone).

Okay, so my nano's given up the ghost and I'm in the market for something shiny. I was thinking of the Archos 604? Seems to do everything I want ti to do, and more, for less than an ipod. Anyone know about these things? Feedback?

http://reviews.cnet.com/portable-video-players-pvps/archos-604-30gb/4505-6499_7-32027903.html?tag=return

I've got an older Archos (Gmini 402) and I wouldn't want anything else ever again - although I don't watch movies on it (screen of that model was a little small and the battery wouldn't last too long).

Luckily, it's also a lot smaller than this one I just found online:

http://i15.tinypic.com/8acnm1k.jpg

what is this Archos? can i sync that up with a Mac?

i need an mp3 player and i have no idea about this stuff, tell me what to do now!

i think i'm just gonig to this Nano situation. i mean how many songs could i possibly need to bring down the street to wokr everyday? i'm used to lugging around jewel cases and a discman so eh

Decent mid-range players right now??

I'm thinking about the Sony NWZ-A818. Drag and drop, compact, interface design looks nice. Seems like a good pick, but am I missing anything here? It's only 8Gb, so it ain't massive. I couldn't give a shit about video/photos etc. I just feel like I'm avoiding buying an Ipod. The larger ones look kinda clunky, and the idea of having to use iTunes puts me off, mostly cause my first and only previous mp3 player was a Sony, which used the godawful Sonic Stage software and has put me off anything similar.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/cmsdata/products/10472/Sony%20small.jpg

get a zen. works well with most software (i use windows).

sony software is hideous to use, even if their players look great.

the sony software originally used was something called Connect which, true, was utterly horrific. But they upgraded it to the Sonic software which I use now and I have no problems with.

I have the older model NW1000 or something, only 6 gig but suits me fine, and is a lurrvly purple colour.

dude, just buy an iPod. seriously :)

-- grimly fiendish (grimlord), Tuesday, January 10, 2006 8:12 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

still otm.

Yep, that was good advice. Thanks, Grimley!

WHICH ONE WILL PLAY MY .OGGs

^ seriously?

i just want to be able to plug it into computers that are not mine

Can't you do that with iPod if you set it to "manually manage"? It's not great but it works.

i have been told ipods can't do this but maybe i've been told wrong - i haven't looked into it
i still use my iriver 256kb from 4 yrs ago lol

also i want something i can put a decent mic in and record interviews with (so, preamp, right)

xpost
hm i don't know

what rrrobyn said. i want a hard drive that happens to play music. i will not buy another shitty stupid ipod.

older irivers are really good. and play multiple formats and are not stupid pains in the asses. i don't know about the new ones though?

archos be loved by the anti-ipod crowd

Yea, Archos sounds up your alley. The thing with the iPod is that you need a 3rd party tool to get music back OFF it, which is a PITA.

i still use an old iriver flash player too!
it is constant ridicule central but i love that it takes a reg AA battery. plus is small and rox. dunno abt newer ones..

I think I have my first gen 64 megabyte rio somewhere.... god that was turd

It had usb actually....

WHICH ONE WILL PLAY MY .OGGs

-- bell_labs, Wednesday, 6 February 2008 15:52 (59 minutes ago) Link

I used an old iriver until about 4 months ago and got this:

http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/7/

it's great. plays oggs, simple usb storage device, audiophile approved.

i endorse the cowon iaudio 7. i bought one for my bf.

i'm quite happy with my ipod though :(

i basically want this but small

http://media.zzounds.com/media/feed/large/MARPMD660.jpg

my only complaint about the i7 is that the touch controls are a little too sensitive. but it has awesome options like being able to adjust volume balance for the left and right channels. any musicians that may have slight deafness in one ear would appreciate this feature.

actually this is my favourite pic of the maranzt b/c srsly that guy's hand is either huuuge or shopped
http://www.synthtopia.com/news/05_06/images/PMD660_Hand.JPG

i7 also has an audio in for recording, but i haven't used it yet so can't vouch for it.

oh wait also has built in mic. (just looked)

that sounds awesome. it works ok with macs?

I like Zoom H2 for recording. I should get my own.

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/images/zoom-h2-accessories.jpg

4 channels dog

yeah i assume it works with macs. i use it with linux and it acts just like a usb thumbdrive so there's no special driver software you need for anything. just copy files to and from it like a regular drive no problem.

Is there any Mac-connective MP3 player that isn't an iPod? I have never had an iPod that didn't fuck up all over the goddamn place EVERY TIME I pressed 'play.'

ha i was just going over the product features and totally missed another crazy thing i've never used. you can schedule it to record radio at a specific time.

http://www.cowonglobal.com/product/product_i7_feature.php

from the i7 page:
OS
- Microsoft Windows 98/98se/ME/2000/XP (NT not supported)
- MAC OS 10.X (data transfer only)
- Linux kernel v2.2 or higher (data transfer only)

i don't know exactly what they mean by "data transfer only" but i assume if you're using it with linux it will work fine for mac.

I'm guessing that the iPod probably doesn't actually have worse failure rates than any other mp3 player. Abbott, some of the ones that you can "just drag files onto" should work.

The i7 has programs that let you encode video files for it's small screen and do things like make animated wallpaper, so I assume that's what the data transfer only means.

hm see, as long as it has a good preamp, i'm fine with buying an ext mic
xposts lala

i7 also has way better battery life than the ipod

im getting one, you guys convinced me!

and the idea of having to use iTunes puts me off

lots of media sw supports ipod, drag and drop even, i just have itunes.exe in case i need to do the 'restore' thing to my wife's ipod (i have a little zen). less features + more expensive does the ipod in. i7 seems cool.

Flash based mp3 players are for housewives and little girls

...this ended up not mattering because the playlist functionality is so sluggish that it ends up not being worth it to even use. (also, even if it wasn't sluggish, it doesn't let you make playlists that include both SD card and regular storage tracks, which would have been an irritant down the line.)

I have never been able to figure out how to do playlists on the A45 at all.

you have to:

1. download and install Music Maker (I tried doing this in other programs and it didn't work at all)
2. create an empty playlist in Music Maker and "transfer it" to the A45
3. in the A45, you can add tracks to the playlist individually my hitting the ellipses icon next to a track and selecting "add to playlist." this takes about 10-15 seconds of loading per track.

there's probably a way to do this in Music Maker but it loads the SD card contents so sluggishly it hardly seems worth the effort.

that FiiO M3k I bought is such a glitchy piece of shit it was putting me off listening to music. Winning an e-bay auction for a 2nd hand a-45 with some slight superficial damage to case was a very good move. just having physical control buttons and a reasonable sound quality with adjustable graphic eq is worth the extra cost for starters. I'd say anyone looking for cheap options don't touch that FiiO that at 60 quid is absolute overpriced shit. ffs the scroll bar is stuff of nightmares.

If the new midrange Google Pixel phone has a headphone jack, that.

If not, probably an A45 and find a snazzy hard case that fits it + my IEMs. (I drove over my IEMs with a car once but the metal case they were in didn't flinch. It wouldn't fit the A45 though.)

thx for the review calzino - good to know!

enjoying my A45 despite the lamentable playlisting issues. the battery life really is impressive

just now having my first real issue with the A45, which is that the shitty, flimsy proprietary cable that came with it has, to my total lack of surprise, ceased to work after only a couple months of use. so that's fun

Shanling M0 was mentioned a while back on another thread and is definitely worth a mention here. Standard cable! Nothing too fancy, very tiny.

Had a bit of fun getting back into looking at headphones and things (Tin T2's and other cheapish stuff Reddit and head-fi freak out over). All prompted by discovering my phone doesn't play well with SD cards. Oh well, now its battery lasts a bit longer.

i like the very basic look of it and the titanium case looks very sturdy. When my A45 dies a death i'll keep the MO in mind.

annnd I ended up breaking my a45 in a very stupid way so I'ma probably try the shanling m0 next cause it seems to have the best balance of features (supports 512gb storage!) and a lovely price point which I need cause apparently I can't be trusted not to break stuff

....and I am v much enjoying my Shanling in almost all respects, but: is there some kind of hack to just add a few tracks/files at a time, or do I need to perform a full rescan every time? cause with the volume of stuff I already have on there this takes about an hour or so and can't be interrupted, which is a pain in the ass.

no getting around that, I've checked!

booooo

too bad cause other than that and the ennh battery life, it's basically a perfect little machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykWxk2UgAA

almost bumped the youtuber thread cuz i find this guy "dankpods", i noticed this week, generally hilarious. This thread especially should appreciate.

I'd picked up a Fiio M3K earlier this year and I agree with other posters that although it sounds good and has a very solid build, the UI isn't great. Sort by genre is useless as it doesn't subsort by artist, only by song. WTF?

I also had to drop a 32GB card in it to update the firmware (it wouldn't update with my 64GB card) but was able to swap the cards after.

the UI was awful, sometimes even the wind seemed to have a surer control over it than my finger.

I did have one small victory when I realized that I could trigger play/pause by tapping the middle of the scroll bar, which alleviates much of the need to use the awkward side button.

Also noticed how the ordering of artists has suddenly become alphabetical after I loaded the last batch of albums. Up until now, it's always been kind-of-alphabetical. So erratic.

Anyone using a high end DAP? If so, what's your motivation for doing so?

I'm drawn to the idea but the convenience and my phone and Bluetooth earbuds (Senn MTW2) makes it hard to justify. I do have a nice pair of Thinksound On2's which sound very nice but, wires, you know...

What's good nowadays? I had a Shanling Mofi that I loved, but it stopped working a little after a year.

Now I have a Hidizs ap80 which has stopped working after a few months.

I'd like something small with a lot of storage. The two devices above used a microcard thingy with a 500gb card.

Amazon have about 1000 no-name mp3 players, it seems. don't have any recommendations though. my clip zip is approaching end of life and the new models drop ogg support so I'm curious too. (the mofi does look nice, but i saw your comment)

I've got a 10 year old sansa clip that still works, they don't make cheap mp3 players like they used to.

I still really like my FiiO X1 - has lasted well - though I'm certain there were people up thread who didn't.

Strangely, having just looked at what they sell these days, their latest player makes a virtue of using a chip that isn't made any more.

I wished I'd bought a score of sansa clip+ mp3 players 10 years ago and put them in storage. They sell for a few hundred now if they are still boxed.

the Cowon Plenue D3 looks a very nice small one, but not at all cheap unfortunately.

jesus, looking at some reviews and some people are rich enough to spend 2 grand on a Astell & Kern Kann Alpha high res mp3 player... that's madness.

I'm on my second Zune 1st gen 30GB player. This one I've had for almost 7 years. I bought it used, but its still going strong.

Still very happy with my cowon plenue D - plays hires flacs, great equalizer options, 180 Gb SD card as well, ridiculous battery life (have gone weeks of day long listening without having to charge). Newer generations have even better (twin?) DACs but shorter battery life.

180 = 128, sorry

i've been lusting after a standalone portable audio player for years but never bit the bullet on a cowon or w/e. i would really like something that is water- and sweat-resistant for runs but also sounds great w/ hi-res audio. i tried the $39 sandisk sportclip or whatever it's called and quickly lost it, lol. it was also a little too flimsy and lightweight. you wouldn't think so but a bit of counterweight at the end of a headphone cord is really useful. ipod touch? cowon? under $200 would be nice. don't care about more than 64gb. playlists and interfacing with itunes is a must. flac would be nice though i'm in the habit of transcoding to aiff for my iphone 6 that has somehow survived for 3 years.

Some discussion in the last couple of days over on the digital music thread.

I like the look of the Sony NW-A105 but I'm having a hard time getting my head round why I would need a separate device for playing music rather than using my phone as I do at the moment. What's the point of having two devices rather than one?

two batteries

phone/bluetooth pods for when I'm on the move or at work, player/better earphones for when it's quiet/late and I want to really focus on the music

If I had an android phone instead of an iPhone there’s a chance I’d just use my phone because you can stick a micro sd card in those. I need my activities to be based on a 1TB or 500gb micro sd which I can stick in whatever player I want.

I was one of the Walkman boosters on the other thread. Also the cheap fiio M3K because you can rockbox it now, and it’s got good battery life.

I have I think 6 of the sansa clip+ and 1 clip zip, god I loved them, but the battery life is pretty shot on all of them now.

Phone vs dedicated music device: I like to have a player that I can hook up to a speaker and leave the room with the speaker still playing and I still have my phone (I work in huge museum/warehouse spaces). I don't want to hear a phone ringing or messaging through the music that I'm playing, but I need to hear my phone if it rings. I have a work iphone that is my only phone and I have no interest in bluetooth stuff and all dongles I have tried have been glitchy. I don't like the incessant intrusion of the Phone Computer Thing into all aspects of my life. I dream of being able to have all my digital music on one device, and eventually 1 tb microcard things will be affordable.

I've got a 10 year old sansa clip that still works

i still use one of these regularly after 10+ years.

I paid less than 200 for my 1TB micro sd
Xpost

it blows my mind that 1tb can fit on something so small

at this point I'm mostly using my android phone (a Samgung Galaxy something) with a 400gb SD card. audio quality is finally comparable to my beloved 10-year-old old Cowon iAudio device with the now-badly-cracked screen. if I were richer I'd buy one of the higher-end Plenue models but this is a good solution for now.

but do these things handle 10s of thousands of files? my clip zip takes 5 minutes to rescan a few thousand files if i change anything. and i had another player that said it'd handle sd cards up to 16GB but there was a limit somewhere else so only 500ish tracks were ever available.

(even my pi jukebox takes a few minutes every time i turn it on. can't work out why it's reindexing, no reason it should)

I have 30k tracks (about 280gb or so, not lossless) on my android and it works perfectly well so far

These mammoth micro sd cards are really only feasible for folder based browsing rather than tag database browsing IME. I haven’t had any players that could index that volume of material. But it doesn’t matter for me because I’m all about navigate to album folder and play it

That's been my experience. Does the Walkman allow you to navigate via folder?

I was hoping that Hidizs ap80 would be covered by warranty since I've only had it two months. Technically it is, but that involves me paying to ship the player to China, lying about the value on customs paperwork and hoping that it doesn't get hung up in Chinese customs, hoping that Hidiz doesn't decide that the unit is malfunctioning because of my fault, then them fixing it and sending it back. I'm guessing it will cost around $30 to send something to China and it just seems like throwing good money after bad.

I'm on the fence about it, I hate being without my music for any length of time and I am compelled to say fuck it and get a walkman.

My Walkman experience was v v good, until I dropped it in a lake. I recommend you try to avoid doing that.

I use mediamonkey on my android and it detects + indexes the music on my SD card just fine, no need to browse by folder.

But yes Walkman can do folder navigation

my mother's had a Samsung mp3 player since the dawn of time, one of these with a slide out speaker. it's as chunky as all hell (sliding the speaker out is quite satisfying though)

https://cdn.pocket-lint.com/r/s/970x/assets/images/68981-gadgets-review-samsung-yp-k5-mp3-player-image1-iqbfmtno2l.jpg

and she was asking me to refresh the song collection on it recently, but I'm 100 miles away which makes that difficult. so i bought a new one, with more than 2gb of memory in it but it has interesting quirks:

off button just turns the screen off, keeps playing the songs. you have to pause it first.

it switches between artist, album and track name whilst playing, only it uses the filename for track name rather than the tag. and if that filename is too long it Scrolls slowly and doesn't display the other two bits of info.

you can list by artist or album but it truncates the name seemingly at random - Altered Imag, Augustus Pab (other names are much longer and display in full)

folder view displays directory names in full, which would be nicer but they aren't sorted.

(it's an agptec h9, nice purple colour, and was chosen mostly for the memory and the fact it plays oggs, which saves me having to transcode everything for her)

this thing is annoying.

i have seen *one* image show up when playing a track. the directory has a file in it called 'folder.jpg' so i copy all the 'cover.jpg' files that i've already added to 'folder.jpg' and... nothing. still only that one album showing an image.

and i wonder if it's expecting something other than a TITLE tag for the song name? ARTIST and ALBUM both seem ok.

renamed the working 'folder.jpg' and it stopped showing. renamed it back and it stopped working 8(

some others are now showing though. but the separate 'image viewer' fails to display about 50% of the covers - 'unsupported file format' - despite them all being seemingly identical (the image viewer helpfully doesn't show the directory name whilst viewing, only the filename which is always cover.jpg or folder.jpg)

a bit of investigating using two bowie covers, one of which showed and one whihc didn't suggested that the non-working version was interlaced and the working one wasn't. converting the image to bmp and back to jpg got rid of that so that's something to do today... (i've been collecting images for the raspberry pi jukebox so this won't be too much work)

oo chonky. i can smell the pixels