Flist! Advise me!

[active_apathy]

iPolyhymnia is unwell; my 4GB 2nd-generation iPod Nano is having problems holding a charge, and can hold approximately one-eighth of my digital music collection. Consequently, I am planning to buy a new MP3 player.

I'm considering a 16GB 4th-generation iPod Nano 32GB Creative Zen X-Fi, but I am aware that there may be better options. Size (around a happy sort of credit-card gum-packet smaller-than-medium), storage space and battery life are my main concerns, and I have no particular need for PDA features - I like to keep my gadgets somewhat specialised, and may consider buying some kind of smartphone at a later date. So, the new!Nano seems appropriate for my purposes.

[Poll #1380664]

Remember, the future is in... well, my hands, actually. Or, at least, this particular part of the future; it's not like I can say "ADVISE ME WELL, OR DISASTER MAY OR MAY NOT BEFALL YOU AND YOURS! (IT WON'T, BECAUSE THAT WOULD PROBABLY MAKE YOU SAD, BUT ADVISE ME WELL ANYWAY)" with any meaningful menace, even if I didn't care that meaningful menace had a significant yet non-certain risk of making you sad, which I do, so I wouldn't, in all probability.

Um. Yes. Precisely.

ADVISE ME WELL, OR I SHALL CONFUSE YOU A SECOND TIME-A.

Comments

[daphyn.livejournal.com]

On Amazon.com, I got my 120GB iPod Classic for $219.95 USD with free shipping... it does absolutely everything I need - plays music, and holds podcasts, it'll play videos if that's what you want it to do, and it comes with a really cool version of Solitaire as well as two other games (a trivia one which isn't all THAT much fun and a weird one called Vortex). It is approximately $100 USD more than the Nanos (ETA: Actually it's only about $50 more than the 16GB Nano), but considering that I have a very extensive music and video collection and have as yet been unable to fill up my 120GB, it may be worth it to you :)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Price isn't a major concern (and buying it here would be significantly cheaper than Amazon, who have taken more than enough of my monies for postage). And here they're about $AU50 more than a Nano, which is also somewhat cheaper.

The classic may be slightly bigger than I'd like to carry around with me, and I don't think I'd need quite that much space - I have a passport drive if I need to move lots of data, and I'm not entirely sure I want to convert much of my ~400GB collection of TV and movies to an iPod-compatible format. Unless there's a particularly easy (and reasonably fast) way to do so, anyway.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

I am a non-Apple heretic, and I have had amazingly good times with Creative's Zen series (nano, micro, whatever they are up to now) and lately with Sandisk's Sansa. Not too many bells and whistles, you can turn on drag-and-drop copying, nothing proprietary... but frankly, I don't use playlists much so I don't know how much that ability is worth to you.

[potatocubed.livejournal.com]

Seconded - I've used nothing but Creatives and had no problems with them at all. The one time my Nano died an irrecoverable death Creative held up their end of the warranty bargain with no complaints.

The one thing I would say is that if you use iTunes, you'll want an Apple player for convenience. Otherwise you have to burn all your iTunes stuff to CD then rip it to the mp3 player, which can be a bit of a fiddle.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

I tend not to buy music from iTunes, where there are alternatives in vastly more common formats. Mostly, I use iTunes as a moderately convenient music manager, but the last five or six updates have found interesting ways to savage my metadata. I have learnings in librarianism. I like for my metadata to be right.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

I have a set of playlists set up in iTunes to randomly select music, with the selections weighted according to rating. The Sansa has a smaller capacity than I'd like, or at least the ones I can find from vendors here. There's a disturbing lack of Creative on their websites, though they do seem a viable option, and would natively suport my TV collection.

...unless I try Creative's own website, on which the Zen X-Fi looks very nice indeed.

[trueflight.livejournal.com]

If you do end up going the Apple route (which is what I'd do, but mostly because I have a Mac and other MP3 player's aren't compatible), make sure you buy AppleCare. It's only $30-ish more, and it covers EVERYTHING.

[raze--the-rose.livejournal.com]

I have a creative zen. Never been happier. Screen scratches easily, though. I take good care of mine but my coworker got the same one (on my recommendation) and hers looks like crap.

Never had a problem with it.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

This is good knowledgestuff. The X-Fi looks fantastic indeed, so I will make sure I get a screen protector for it.