PCA Forums

I'm starting to look at picking up an MP3 player. I've done some preliminary reading on the subject and read some reviews. I'm leaning towards a flash-drive player right now. I will be using this mostly at the gym and the idea of the player hitting the floor while I'm working out and killing the HDD is not appealing to me. However, I could be persuaded to an HDD one if anyone has expereince with dropping them. Anyone have good/bad expereince with players in this ream?

iPod Shuffle

Hey,

What you (I) really want (and I have one, so I'm speaking from experience) is a PDA that has an SD card port in it. This is totally the way to go. They have good battery life, high quality audio, very powerful output, and many volume levels. Most of all it has the best playability available. Think of it: you have a fairly large LCD screen on it! You can scroll through all of your songs! What happens if you want to get to a particular song on a Shuffle? You have to keep clicking until you find it. Plus you can have more than one SD card with a PDA, so there is unlimited theoretical memory. You can also create play lists, do repeat, do shuffle. You can fast-forward/rewind to wherever you want to on the track, just by dragging the slider. A PDA is definitely the way to go if you have the money. If you don't then maybe an iPod, but they come with all the fancy shmancy software, and I have seen some computer programmers become confused when they tried to install it. Very finicky. Also you will never be able to play wma files etc. Just mp3. I guess if that’s all you want then sure, but if you are a fan of wma (and you have got to love the lossless option) then you need something beside iPod. And if you want to be able to transfer documents and other computer files then definitely go with an SD card. But if you do, make sure that you get a card reader. LOL, it takes HOURS to be able to Hotsync when you have a couple hundred megabytes to transfer to your SD.

(IMO)

Actually on second thought for the gym you might not want a PDA. If you get a good soft case for just about anything it should survive an impact though. High Gs are what kill things, so simply spreading the impact time over half a second will drastically reduce the Gs of the fall. I would trust a hard disk with a good case around it on a concrete floor, maybe up to 6ft if it is a fairly light one. If you get a neck strap for a solid state you are less likely to drop it. One of my friends goes snowboarding, and he trusts his solid state to a soft case. SD cards can take a 10ft fall with no protection, so again I recommend these. Go SD I say, and maybe not a PDA if you are going to the gym, but hey, PDAs are great.

LOL, I'm making my self look stupid.

iPOD Shuffle or the Archos Gmini XS200 20 GB unit if you want space....


http://www.bizrate.com/marketplace/prod ... 96156.html

I didn't want to fork out the $$$ for an iPod shuffle (not to mention the fact that I would then have to admit that I own something marketed by Apple . I picked up a 512Mb Creative Muvo Tx FM yesterday. So far its been really easy to use. Went to the gym yesterday afternoon and didn't have any issues. Sounds great, nice volume, lots of features. Best of all, it works great in Linux. Works just like a USB drive.

I only have one issue with it, and I haven't even looked for a solution yet. There is no support for playlists, which is not great when playing albums. It plays tracks in a folder in aphabetical order, so my temporary workaround is to just put the track# at the beginning of the file name. Works great. It came with a bunch of software that I haven't played around with, so there may be an easier solution in there.