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I just advised a friend not to watch VDO and drive... Seems fair. Any mp3 player that you have in your pocket seems 'adequate' if your car audio has a standard jack.

Does that player support gap-less playback?

This is something I don't get: people wanting 8 GB of music but not caring how good the player is at managing it! I find iTunes' Smart Playlists indispensable for handling large libraries. Using manual playlists, folder-based navigation or even "genre" feels far too limited when you have 3000+ songs on a device.

Edited 2009-04-02 13:14 UTC

I have 12GB on my MP3 player all sorted under an artist/album folder sturucture, and quite frankly can't imagine a better way of sorting my music. In fact I went out of my way to find an MP3 player that acted like a USB mass storage device so that I wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of annoying apps trying to tell me how I should be sorting and listening to my music.

Death Metal, 80's Glam Rock, British Metal, SF Bay Metal, Nashville Women, etc.

I dunno... for me, iTunes is pretty horrible at managing my music. I hate, hate, HATE apps that try to organize by album/artist, since I usually only purchase 2-3 tracks off an album. It is really counterproductive for me.

I'd rather just have a folder for different genres, with all of my mp3 files in those folders without any sub-folders. The problem is that players like the Zune and the iPod don't give you the option of organizing music by folders like the iAudio player do.

If I were going to use some kind media player/organizer, I'd probably use Media Monkey, which is like 10x better than iTunes, and uses a lot less system resources too (on Windows).

I dunno... for me, iTunes is pretty horrible at managing my music. I hate, hate, HATE apps that try to organize by album/artist, since I usually only purchase 2-3 tracks off an album. It is really counterproductive for me.

I'd rather just have a folder for different genres, with all of my mp3 files in those folders without any sub-folders. The problem is that players like the Zune and the iPod don't give you the option of organizing music by folders like the iAudio player do. "

I like to organise my music in a similar fashion, but separating by Artist, as I also don't purchase entire CDs, and don't rip entire CDs for the ones I have. Just the songs I like.

But too many media managers and media players (software or hardware) are stuck on the whole Artist -> Album -> Song format.

AAC is not crap. AAC is an industry standard used in the iPod, iPhone, DSi PS3, PSP, Walkman and other devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding>Wikipedia:

How is the sound quality? Reliability? integration with software on the computer?

Not trying to defend Apple here, but anyone knows you can go out and buy a cheap, no-name MP3 player.

That's not the point of the article. I've owned 4 iPods, none of which have failed. The current, an iPod Touch is more a pocket computer than just a music player.

All of them offer conveniences cheap players don't: a well designed interface to the computer, and integration with my car, allowing me to control everything from the steering wheel.

They may be overpriced, but Apple iPods do the job well, enough to warrant the premium.

That's actually one of the weakest points of the iPod. You are forced to use crappy iTunes (what a horrible piece of engineering, esp. the Windows version), and you can't even just drag and drop your songs onto it or use a different program - you are FORCED to use iTunes.

So, when it comes to integration with my computer, iPods are horrible.

Yeah, and even though apps like Rhythmbox, as well as other iTunes replacements, eventually work with the iPod there's always features that don't work with those apps. An example, the nano 4th gen has speaking menus (a very useful feature in my case), but only iTunes can generate them; in typical Apple fashion, the details of how the speaking menus work aren't revealed and haven't been completely reverse engineered yet. So, even though I can put music on it from my Linux box, its usefulness is considerably degraded for me without iTunes. This, coupled with the horrible problems I've had with iTunes 8.1, is why I sold My Nano a short time ago. I've got a UMS-compliant player now based on a file/folder structure, and I'm not going back to iTunes any time soon.

Uh, speaking menus are just audio files rendered using the OSes’ text-to-speech abilities and then copied to the device. The iPod is not synthesising the speech itself!

There’s nothing special about this feature at all, it’s been possible to do for all players since ~2001, but nobody seems to have thought of it until now.

I'm aware of what they are and the principle behind them. What is not revealed at the moment is exactly what files get generated for which audio files. It is not the same each time you synch, and the files appear to be given random names, and their associated entries in the database haven't yet been completely isolated. And actually, Rockbox had this feature long before Apple decided to overcomplicate it.

And I remember before iTunes I had to either manually drag and drop all the files I wanted to the device, or use natty sync software that never did the job properly. I used my MP3 player 1/100th of the time I ended up using the iPod.

For the very vast majority of people who want to set-it-and-forget-it, iTunes is the anchor which has got iPod where it is now. There were more feature-laden players than iPod when it came out, and still there are players with more features, but that is irrelevant when getting content on there is over complicated for most people.

The Shuffle is the single prime example of this. iTunes *made* the Shuffle the success it is. A million cheap flash based players existed before it, but the software experience was simple too impractical. The Shuffle took a simple idea everybody else had been fumbling about with, and made it simple.

What was it that the Creative CEO said? "I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people--it’s worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don’t have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it’s a non-starter to begin with.”

How utterly wrong he was.

Wow, drag and drop. That's, um, so complicated.

Difficulty of drag and drop is irrelevant. It’s not a step you should have to take. Imagine if every time you wanted to change channel on your TV you had to manually tune the channel in? That’s what drag-and-drop is like. It hampered me using the device massively.

Well, depending on the iPod you use and how much music you have, you'd most likely end up dragging and dropping anyway. i've over 50gb of Music and had a 16gb nano, and had a playlist set to synch with the Nano. But, that still required some user interaction (either dragging and dropping, or right-click and selecting add to playlist). Given my music is organized in Artist/Album/File structures anyway, it didn't end up being all that different. Drag to a playlist, or drag to a device. Not much difference there.

What's really sad, is that for a lot of people, it is too complicated. There are people who don't understand the concept of folder, and directory hierarchies, and proper filenames. To them, a file manager, even one as brain-dead as "My Computer" windows, is alien. I know people who use the "File -> Open" dialog in Word as their file manager. If the file isn't there "it's gone". These are also the same people who use the Deleted Items folder in Outlook/Express and the Recycle Bin as "an easy-to-use filing system", since just hitting Del will move things there and keep them there.

However, being forced to use something like iTunes is overkill.

Especially when it takes your 100+ GB music store, that's all nicely laid out in "/Artist/Album/artist-songname.mp3" format with everything in the file's name/path and reformats everything into Unknown/Unknown/unknown-1.mp3 since it feels that the ID3 tag overrides the filename *even when the ID3 is blank*.

That's actually one of the weakest points of the iPod. You are forced to use crappy iTunes (what a horrible piece of engineering, esp. the Windows version), and you can't even just drag and drop your songs onto it or use a different program - you are FORCED to use iTunes.

So, when it comes to integration with my computer, iPods are horrible. "

I've never had issues with iTunes on Mac or PC. To each their own, I guess.

That's actually one of the weakest points of the iPod. You are forced to use crappy iTunes (what a horrible piece of engineering, esp. the Windows version), and you can't even just drag and drop your songs onto it or use a different program - you are FORCED to use iTunes.

So, when it comes to integration with my computer, iPods are horrible. "

Care to explain why iTunes is a horrible piece of engineering?

BTW: You do not have to use iTunes: http://www.cnet.com.au/best-ipod-compatible-itunes-alternatives-339...

Well... The Windows version of iTunes (and Quicktime too for that matter) is slow, bloated, unstable, and an all-around annoyance, placing system startup tasks when you don't need them, and the like. I must say that the Mac version, by contrast, is actually quite nice for both iTunes and Quicktime (except for the latest version, 8.1, which has been a massive headache for me due to its constant crashing). I guess that's no surprise, but the Windows version needs some serious attention at this point.
As for the iTunes alternatives, they're fine... up until a new iPod generation comes out, usually. Sometimes, even a new firmware version will break them. Either way, Apple typically makes changes, not only to increase functionality, but sometimes it seems like they do it merely to try and lock out anything but iTunes from synching with the device. They're always unsuccessful, eventually, but it's still an annoyance if you get hit by it and your iTunes alternatives don't work for a while.

Actually the question was aimed at Thom, who as usual made the unsubstantiated remark.

Thanks for the response though. I use iTunes on both platforms and find it to be much the same for the most part. I do however feel your pain when it comes to the invisible startup dameons it installs on Windows. A number of times (with older versions of iTunes, I must admit) they have turned out to be responsible for hogging the CPU and hanging up my system.

The deal breaker for me (with the iPod touch) is its inability to receive a Shoutcast / Live Encoder stream. I did find one way to stream audio, but it seems to be more of a "push" setup - and, of course, it only works if you're using iTunes to manage all your music.

As far as I can tell, it comes down to a choice between: scrapping an existing audio library setup that I've had for close to a decade and move everything to iTunes, or void the warranty (and risk having the device brick'd) just to install VLC / MPlayer on it.

I can understand having no support for audio streaming over the cell network, but I'm just talking about streaming to other parts of the house using a local wifi network.

Apple has their own proprietary way of streaming with itunes shared libraries

I did some testing earlier with my rommmate's iPod touch, but I couldn't find a way to stream to it even *with* iTunes (the "remote" app that thought enabled streaming turned out to just allow the touch/iPhone to be used as remote control for iTunes or Apple TV - bleh).

So far, the only possible solution I've found is a commercial app from Nullsoft - although it's hard to tell if it can receive any icecast stream, or only "official" shoutcast streams.

Ah, but you underestimate me. I have an office, with a gazillion of gadgets in it and enough wires on the floor to trip on and break a leg.

Old news. Sony Ericsson Walkman phones have been doing that for a couple years now.