An iPod is an MP3 player, so one can't contrast them the way you want. The main disadvantage of the iPod as compared to any other MP3 player is that it costs more for the same functionality. The main advantages are that it will generally be easier to use, it will look prettier, it works with DRM-locked content from the iTunes store, and there's a big infrastructure supporting iPods -- there are lots of accessories available, some cars are now manufactured with iPod docks, etc.
I own an iPod. I've been an Apple user for decades. Both are functional but you need software to rip you CD collection into MP3s and/or to download music from the internet. This can be had for free. It's a matter of how much hassle you want to go through. Also, the iPod is easier to use than any MP3 player in the house. So it comes down to cost versus ease of use.
Since I listen to a few podcasts and audio books on mine, I needed bookmarking (e.g. the ability to remember where you where in several tracks). I'd flashed my old iRiver to support the third party rockbox software, but that suffered mechanical failure (after a few years) when the 5 way button broke loose.
The only manufacturer I could find to support bookmarking out of the box was Cowon, so that's I have an iAudio 7 now.
Best tip I had was, look at the manual online. Most players have PDFs of the manual online, so you can see what you're getting.
Other must have for me are: Works as external hard drive on any machine (including Linux), so I can put podcasts on without installing anything on work computuer. Long battery life.
Other nice to haves: FM Radio. Clock (with alarm).
Down side: Cannot read playlists. While cheaper than an iPod, it's more than many other players.
I had a 60gb iPod photo a couple of years ago, then found I wasn't using it as much as the mp3 player on my phone, so I sold it to a coworker. I am an Apple fan in general, but I did research other players before I got my iPod. Many people really like the Creative Zen models, fwiw.
I think iPods are generally superior to other mp3 players, although you will pay more for an iPod. They are well-designed, have good longevity, and they look great. Even the Nano now comes with a reasonably large screen and is capable of presenting videos if you want to watch a television show on your lunch break or something.
For me, the big capacity iPod was just too much, and One More Thing to carry around. My Sony Ericsson phone has a great mp3 player built-in, and with an m2 expansion card, I can put as much music as I might want to listen to on the phone. That said, I miss just being able to sync playlists and songs and notes and my calendar to my iPod (nevermind that my calendar is also synced to my PDA and my phone!), and if you have a Mac, using the iPod is extremely simple.
Even if you do buy an iPod, I wouldn't recommend using iTunes to download music unless you just like it or it turns out to be the best way for you to go. Plain mp3s are much more versatile, and if you change computers you aren't in much danger of losing music, whereas Apple's proprietary format requires you to confirm that you actually bought this or that mp4 before you transfer from one computer to another. You can set the iPod to naturally import to mp3 rather than mp4, and I'd suggest you enable this option on iTunes if you get an iPod and use iTunes.
Other mp3 players' software (and my phone's software!) either don't work or don't work as well with a Macintosh; I have to dump things straight to my phone's expansion card in drive mode and then build playlists from inside the phone if I want a playlist. This is a pain, so I have got used to just copying a CD or two or an already-made playlist from iTunes onto the memory card, then just shuffling on the phone so that I get a little variety.
Depending on what you want, you can pay under £10 for a little flash drive-style mp3 player. If you want a little more and are sure you'll use an mp3 player, I'd go with the nano as the lowest-end option and not bother with the Shuffle, which has less functionality. For bells and whistles, the iPod Touch is a beautiful gadget, and it will let you connect to the net using wifi (depending on connections, natch). It also comes with a range of good and fun applications with more being developed by the minute it seems. However, memory on the iPod Touch is usually less, and again you'll pay more for it because it comes from Apple.
As other people have said: an iPod is an mp3 player.
If you're planning on getting music from CDs, there's no difference.
Are you planning to buy DRM (Digital rights management) music downloads on-line? Then the decision is whether you want Microsoft's 'plays for sure' or Apple's format. Apple's store beats the others that support Microsoft's format, in my opinion. Videos and TV shows are available for the iPod too, a feature I use a lot.
Apple's other big win is usability. The scroll wheel works, is easy to control precisely while still allowing large movements.
I'm on my second iPod (the first one was sold on to someone else), and I wouldn't give it up for any other mp3 player.
I have an older-model iPod Nano. Which is exclusively loaded with mp3:s ripped from my own collection. The iPod itself is quite a lot easier to use than other players I've tried. The CD-ripping process is, at least on a Mac, about as easy as it can get:
1) Put CD in the computer.
2) Wait until it pops out again.
You'll need an Internet connection for it to find the name of the CD and the tracks on it, and the album can't be too obscure. Although what counts as "too obscure" is pretty damn obscure these days. The last CD where I had to enter data manually was one recorded by a WIccan coven in Norway and sold on an invitation-only event.
Ipods are overpriced and unreliable, but they are supposed to be more usable than rivals. I have an Xclef which I think is terrific, but I didn't require it to be especially portable or usable. Useful discussion here (http://undyingking.livejournal.com/21155.html?style=mine) from when I was looking -- specifics will be out of date now, but genreal discussion is mostly still valid.
I have an mp3 player and I chose it over an ipod because it does the same thing, was cheaper and doesn't require itunes to put anything onto it. The only downside to my mp3 player is that it's only 1gb, but then even that's more space than I need.
I don't have feelings about apple either way but don't want to use ITunes, also although iPods are very cool and tempting I've heard bad things from people about them updating software (or apple forcing the software updates) and them losing their entire collections. If you want to buy new music I guess an iPod makes sense, but I prefer to use generic mp3 players, I don't even like the ones that need extra software, preferring to use them like a USB stick and just drag and drop. My current one was a cheap freebie as I use mp3s on my nifty new Sony Ericsson phone these days and put language stuff on the freebie, but I would probably go with something by Creative if I was in the market for a new one. They all seem impossibly small and fiddly to me though so I'd make sure I had one with good buttons and a clear display.
I switched off the "auto-sync" straight away and have had no problems since.
I did lose the first 20Gb of music I put on the iPod (though it was still on the original PC), because one of the things that isn't at all clear is that if you use "auto-sync", your iPod becomes a portable copy of data held on *one* machine. If you hook it up to another machine, it discards everything from the first machine and syncs to the new one, even if the new machine has little/no music.
That's why you have to switch off auto-sync ... then you don't have that problem and you can just drag tracks from which ever machine you're on (which are listed in the local iTunes) to your iPod and add them in there.
You *can* use software other than iTunes, but I haven't.
I don't know of anyone who lost all their music from their PC due to an iTunes or iPod update.
And if you lose your hard disk with DRM downloaded songs from iTunes, Apple will allow you to download them again at no additional cost (or so I'm told!)
At least that's my experience :-)
I'd prefer to be able to drag music *to* (and in particular *from*) an iPod, but that's not possible with iTunes ...
... getting music *from* the iPod is possible using other (free!) software though, and I use podplayer, though I believe iDump does something similar.
I had an iPod. It was very pretty, easy to use, and well designed. It needs iTunes to load music onto it, and once I had formatted it using my PC I would have to reformat it to load any music onto it from my Mac, also I had several incidents where it would refuse to believe it was sync'd to the computer, and I kept having to reload the whole library instead of updating a few tracks. Then I dropped it and the hard drive packed in.
Now I have a 2gig Creative Zen Stone Plus. It is very small, has reasonable battery life once charged, and you load it up as a USB stick, which means I can load it from both computers I have, and use it as a memory stick as well. this cost me £35. I might go back to an iPod or other large player at some point, but right now I like having a smaller, cheaper player that I am less worried about breaking and is easier to load music on to, even if it doesn't hold that much and doesn't have as great an interface as the iPod.
Er, I have both of these - a hard disk iPod and a 2Gb Creative Zen Stone Plus. So I'm going to have to agree with liz.
I use my iPod in the car and other places where it is safe - but I want lots of music, and lots of video. (The hard disk is double thesize of the one in this laptop I am using now)
But I use the creative zen stone when I want something small and lightweight which I can bash around without any worries. Plus at the price I can break it and not be bothered about replacing it.
I would go for the cheap option - and change the music often.
PS The Zen Stone is better for putting things on random rather than , say, listening to e-books.
What is the interface like on the creative Zen? I want to be able to find a specific track (or at least directory) on occasion. How easy would that be.
My two-pennorth (spelling?) worth: I have never been an Apple fan and would have advised my Mother to buy and MP3 player but as she had already bought an Ipod and, of course, she then wanted me to load it for her. It was without a doubt the easiest system I have ever used and my Mother now happily rips her own CDs (for personal use only) with no problem at all. I think it is easy to use.
If you own a Mac, then getting an iPod would make sense, because they work best with Macs. If you don't own a Mac, it would be simpler, I think, to get a plain MP3 player which works like a USB stick (drag and drop files from your computer to the player), because it's a simple interface which is less likely to break (unlike upgrading the iTunes software and having things no longer work).
I suggest you make a list of the features you want, considering that different people use their players in different ways, so what one person might want, you might not need. What would you be primarily using it for? Music? Your own music colletion ripped from CD? Audio plays? Podfic? Do you want random play? Custom playlists? Large storage? Light and robust? Video?
Me, I wanted one that I could use for recording podfic onto, so I didn't really care that I couldn't do random playlists on it. When I want random music, I use my desktop (since it has my whole music collection on disk there, its random play is about as random as one could wish for).
The one thing no-one has mentioned (I think), that watervole might be interested in is that a number of the MP3 players have built-in microphones, suitable for recording folk music sessions, committee meetings and other stuff (useful if you can't type but need to dictate notes for someone else to key in later).
You *can* buy an add-on microphone unit for iPods, but it's built-in to some of the other MP3 players.
Another thought/feature to consider ... the small/cheap MP3 players run on one or two AA/AAA batteries (and you can buy fairly cheap NiMH rechargeables), which the more expensive players (including the iPods) run on built-in rechargeable packs (which are nearly impossible to remove/replace, certainly not if you're doing a long journey) ...
... for my iPod I have a little "sled" that pickledginger sent me from the US. The sled contains a bigger rechargeable battery, with enough power to recharge my 80Gb iPod three times, and the sled recharges using the same cable as the iPod so there's very little extra to carry. If you're away from the house travelling and unsure whether you'll have access to a recharging point, then either having something like the recharging sled or being able to use standard batteries may be a great feature for you.
Another feature that I don't think watervole would use, is that you can get a digital camera card reader for the iPod so you can copy the photos from your camera to your iPod portable hard disk. But now that camera memory cards are so cheap, it's not such a good feature.
... iTunes is free, relatively easy to use, and can rip CDs to MP3 easily.
iPods play MP3s (as well as Apple's own AAC format) and my 80Gb iPod has 12,000 MP3s on it (no conversion required).
They may need to repaired more than some, because when you break other players, you find it's not worth repairing them so you just get a new one ... I've just repaired my iPod (my own fault, I broke the headphone socket by falling over while running with the headphones plugged in).
It's worth budgetting for replacing the white earphones with something better as soon as possible (Eddie and I love the Sennheiser CX300s for under £20 on Amazon, for in-ear earbuds).
An iPod can be used as a USB memory stick (for carrying files around) BUT you can't put music onto it that way, as it basically uses iTunes to build up the list of songs/artists/albums and stores a file with all the names in it for when you are searching for a song to play.
I have an 80Gb 5th Generation Video iPod, and when I worried it was lost/stolen, I immediately determined to buy another one. And I'm planning on getting an iPod nano for taking to the gym/exercising as something lighter/cheaper ... when I have the money and the need!
I watch downloaded US TV shows as well as listening to music on mine.
iPod sound quality always gets high marks from the Hi-Fi press, and as has been pointed out, there are thousands of iPod docks, speaker systems, car connectors etc. which are designed to work with an iPod.
The only big downside for me, is that they don't come with an FM radio built-in. I like listening to Radio 2 and Radio 4 so that's a problem (I have used my phone in the past as it does radio as well) but that means carrying around two devices and two sets of earphones ...
... I have used the phone as an MP3 player in the past, but find it much easier to synchronise and transfer files to/from iTunes and the iPod.
If the iPhone had a built-in FM radio and a better camera, I'd have been lining up to buy one on the first day of the iPhone 3G.
Oh, and if you have the money, the iTouch iPod is a thing of beauty ... but overkill if you just want to listen to music.
I think one of the basic decision points is how much storage you want. If you want lots (30Gb and up) then I think iPods have a very big edge in usability and functionality. If you want something smaller, such as a flash memory based player about iPod Nano or Touch size (16Gb and under), then there are very good, and cheaper alternatives from Creative, Sandisk and others. I use a 4Gb Creative Zen V Plus, which has enough capacity for me (I'm often changing about half the music on it), and is very robust, I've lost count of how many times I've dropped it. Whatever you get, I'd encourage you to buy decent earphones to go with it, makes all the difference in comfort and sound quality.
My only experience of mp3 players is a cheapie USB stick variety, and I can't compare it with any other model on the market. But one thing I have noticed that a green-minded person such as yourself might want to consider - it don't half burn up batteries. I'd expect to get no more than 8 hours out of a Duracell AAA. I now run it on rechargeables and they rarely last more than 4 hours.
I think there are a number of subjective and objective aspects here:
What desktop OS are you using? Macs work beautifully with iPods, Windows copes, and I imagine Linux would be far more of a struggle.
How much space do you want? My Nano has 2GB, which hardly holds anything, in music terms. Other people have 80GB models that hold their entire music collection all the time.
What are you going to listen to? I bought my iPod with the intention of listening to language lessons. That requires much higher quality of noise cancellation than music (because it matters if background noise means you miss a bit). So I paid a lot for active noise-cancelling headphones.
(I also can't wear in-ear bud headphones.)
(Side point: normal battery life is one thing, but if I'm continually starting and stopping playback due to language lessons, the battery dies much faster because this keeps waking the screen.)
Are you planning on downloading music from anywhere? If so, will you be buying, or not? I use iTunes *only* for updating Album imagery, and that's free. I've never bought anything online-only - I like physical CDs, so rip my own.
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The only manufacturer I could find to support bookmarking out of the box was Cowon, so that's I have an iAudio 7 now.
Best tip I had was, look at the manual online. Most players have PDFs of the manual online, so you can see what you're getting.
Other must have for me are:
Works as external hard drive on any machine (including Linux), so I can put podcasts on without installing anything on work computuer.
Long battery life.
Other nice to haves:
FM Radio.
Clock (with alarm).
Down side:
Cannot read playlists.
While cheaper than an iPod, it's more than many other players.
HTH
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I think iPods are generally superior to other mp3 players, although you will pay more for an iPod. They are well-designed, have good longevity, and they look great. Even the Nano now comes with a reasonably large screen and is capable of presenting videos if you want to watch a television show on your lunch break or something.
For me, the big capacity iPod was just too much, and One More Thing to carry around. My Sony Ericsson phone has a great mp3 player built-in, and with an m2 expansion card, I can put as much music as I might want to listen to on the phone. That said, I miss just being able to sync playlists and songs and notes and my calendar to my iPod (nevermind that my calendar is also synced to my PDA and my phone!), and if you have a Mac, using the iPod is extremely simple.
Even if you do buy an iPod, I wouldn't recommend using iTunes to download music unless you just like it or it turns out to be the best way for you to go. Plain mp3s are much more versatile, and if you change computers you aren't in much danger of losing music, whereas Apple's proprietary format requires you to confirm that you actually bought this or that mp4 before you transfer from one computer to another. You can set the iPod to naturally import to mp3 rather than mp4, and I'd suggest you enable this option on iTunes if you get an iPod and use iTunes.
Other mp3 players' software (and my phone's software!) either don't work or don't work as well with a Macintosh; I have to dump things straight to my phone's expansion card in drive mode and then build playlists from inside the phone if I want a playlist. This is a pain, so I have got used to just copying a CD or two or an already-made playlist from iTunes onto the memory card, then just shuffling on the phone so that I get a little variety.
Depending on what you want, you can pay under £10 for a little flash drive-style mp3 player. If you want a little more and are sure you'll use an mp3 player, I'd go with the nano as the lowest-end option and not bother with the Shuffle, which has less functionality. For bells and whistles, the iPod Touch is a beautiful gadget, and it will let you connect to the net using wifi (depending on connections, natch). It also comes with a range of good and fun applications with more being developed by the minute it seems. However, memory on the iPod Touch is usually less, and again you'll pay more for it because it comes from Apple.
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If you're planning on getting music from CDs, there's no difference.
Are you planning to buy DRM (Digital rights management) music downloads on-line? Then the decision is whether you want Microsoft's 'plays for sure' or Apple's format. Apple's store beats the others that support Microsoft's format, in my opinion. Videos and TV shows are available for the iPod too, a feature I use a lot.
Apple's other big win is usability. The scroll wheel works, is easy to control precisely while still allowing large movements.
I'm on my second iPod (the first one was sold on to someone else), and I wouldn't give it up for any other mp3 player.
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1) Put CD in the computer.
2) Wait until it pops out again.
You'll need an Internet connection for it to find the name of the CD and the tracks on it, and the album can't be too obscure. Although what counts as "too obscure" is pretty damn obscure these days. The last CD where I had to enter data manually was one recorded by a WIccan coven in Norway and sold on an invitation-only event.
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I wasn't sure if there would be any loss of quality when converting from MP3 files.
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I did lose the first 20Gb of music I put on the iPod (though it was still on the original PC), because one of the things that isn't at all clear is that if you use "auto-sync", your iPod becomes a portable copy of data held on *one* machine. If you hook it up to another machine, it discards everything from the first machine and syncs to the new one, even if the new machine has little/no music.
That's why you have to switch off auto-sync ... then you don't have that problem and you can just drag tracks from which ever machine you're on (which are listed in the local iTunes) to your iPod and add them in there.
You *can* use software other than iTunes, but I haven't.
I don't know of anyone who lost all their music from their PC due to an iTunes or iPod update.
And if you lose your hard disk with DRM downloaded songs from iTunes, Apple will allow you to download them again at no additional cost (or so I'm told!)
At least that's my experience :-)
I'd prefer to be able to drag music *to* (and in particular *from*) an iPod, but that's not possible with iTunes ...
... getting music *from* the iPod is possible using other (free!) software though, and I use podplayer, though I believe iDump does something similar.
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Now I have a 2gig Creative Zen Stone Plus. It is very small, has reasonable battery life once charged, and you load it up as a USB stick, which means I can load it from both computers I have, and use it as a memory stick as well. this cost me £35. I might go back to an iPod or other large player at some point, but right now I like having a smaller, cheaper player that I am less worried about breaking and is easier to load music on to, even if it doesn't hold that much and doesn't have as great an interface as the iPod.
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I use my iPod in the car and other places where it is safe - but I want lots of music, and lots of video. (The hard disk is double thesize of the one in this laptop I am using now)
But I use the creative zen stone when I want something small and lightweight which I can bash around without any worries. Plus at the price I can break it and not be bothered about replacing it.
I would go for the cheap option - and change the music often.
PS The Zen Stone is better for putting things on random rather than , say, listening to e-books.
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It would also be useful to have a bookmark.
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I suggest you make a list of the features you want, considering that different people use their players in different ways, so what one person might want, you might not need. What would you be primarily using it for? Music? Your own music colletion ripped from CD? Audio plays? Podfic? Do you want random play? Custom playlists? Large storage? Light and robust? Video?
Me, I wanted one that I could use for recording podfic onto, so I didn't really care that I couldn't do random playlists on it. When I want random music, I use my desktop (since it has my whole music collection on disk there, its random play is about as random as one could wish for).
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You *can* buy an add-on microphone unit for iPods, but it's built-in to some of the other MP3 players.
Another thought/feature to consider ... the small/cheap MP3 players run on one or two AA/AAA batteries (and you can buy fairly cheap NiMH rechargeables), which the more expensive players (including the iPods) run on built-in rechargeable packs (which are nearly impossible to remove/replace, certainly not if you're doing a long journey) ...
... for my iPod I have a little "sled" that
Another feature that I don't think
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... iTunes is free, relatively easy to use, and can rip CDs to MP3 easily.
iPods play MP3s (as well as Apple's own AAC format) and my 80Gb iPod has 12,000 MP3s on it (no conversion required).
They may need to repaired more than some, because when you break other players, you find it's not worth repairing them so you just get a new one ... I've just repaired my iPod (my own fault, I broke the headphone socket by falling over while running with the headphones plugged in).
It's worth budgetting for replacing the white earphones with something better as soon as possible (Eddie and I love the Sennheiser CX300s for under £20 on Amazon, for in-ear earbuds).
An iPod can be used as a USB memory stick (for carrying files around) BUT you can't put music onto it that way, as it basically uses iTunes to build up the list of songs/artists/albums and stores a file with all the names in it for when you are searching for a song to play.
I have an 80Gb 5th Generation Video iPod, and when I worried it was lost/stolen, I immediately determined to buy another one. And I'm planning on getting an iPod nano for taking to the gym/exercising as something lighter/cheaper ... when I have the money and the need!
I watch downloaded US TV shows as well as listening to music on mine.
iPod sound quality always gets high marks from the Hi-Fi press, and as has been pointed out, there are thousands of iPod docks, speaker systems, car connectors etc. which are designed to work with an iPod.
The only big downside for me, is that they don't come with an FM radio built-in. I like listening to Radio 2 and Radio 4 so that's a problem (I have used my phone in the past as it does radio as well) but that means carrying around two devices and two sets of earphones ...
... I have used the phone as an MP3 player in the past, but find it much easier to synchronise and transfer files to/from iTunes and the iPod.
If the iPhone had a built-in FM radio and a better camera, I'd have been lining up to buy one on the first day of the iPhone 3G.
Oh, and if you have the money, the iTouch iPod is a thing of beauty ... but overkill if you just want to listen to music.
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Whatever you get, I'd encourage you to buy decent earphones to go with it, makes all the difference in comfort and sound quality.
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What desktop OS are you using? Macs work beautifully with iPods, Windows copes, and I imagine Linux would be far more of a struggle.
How much space do you want? My Nano has 2GB, which hardly holds anything, in music terms. Other people have 80GB models that hold their entire music collection all the time.
What are you going to listen to? I bought my iPod with the intention of listening to language lessons. That requires much higher quality of noise cancellation than music (because it matters if background noise means you miss a bit). So I paid a lot for active noise-cancelling headphones.
(I also can't wear in-ear bud headphones.)
(Side point: normal battery life is one thing, but if I'm continually starting and stopping playback due to language lessons, the battery dies much faster because this keeps waking the screen.)
Are you planning on downloading music from anywhere? If so, will you be buying, or not? I use iTunes *only* for updating Album imagery, and that's free. I've never bought anything online-only - I like physical CDs, so rip my own.
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I use it for music and some audio drama. (I can't make out the drama on my current cheepo player when there is any background noise)
I usually rip CDs, would like the option to buy a few tracks occasionally - if I can find anywhere that sells my kind of music...