looking for opinions on Ipods?

Dennis, I'd be interested to hear why you said Ipod is king, is that from a purely marketing/number sold point of view?  You say there are others out there that are technically better, for a music-head such as yourself I'd have thought you might go for one of those, especially as many of the mp3 players out there seem to be cheaper.

The Creative Zen Touch 20GB seems to go for the cheapest prices I've noticed, as little as £130-140, but I've also read some horror stories of them freezing up.  Don't know if those were just a few duds or if it's fairly common.

I read some good reviews of the iRiver 20GB one as well.  And the Samsung 20GB seems quite good and comes with an FM tuner.  I wonder why none of the Ipods include radio?  You'd think it'd be easy enough to add it on, what with them branching into photos and video.

I'm going to wait for the January sales where I hope to catch a bargain.
One thing I wanted to make sure was that the speaker attachments you often see with Ipods, ie the Bose speaker, the iGroove, etc that you can hook your Ipod into will work with other mp3 players.  I think I was looking at a description of the iGroove and it said any mp3 player can plug into it.

It seems odd to me that only Apple seems to be tapping into this market, but it makes so much sense.  Why buy a whole separate home audio system when you can buy some nice speakers that your mp3 can plug into?  I haven't seen any of the other companies such as Sony, Samsung, Creative, iRiver put out these in the big shops.  Creative Labs was the original and biggest computer sound card manufacturer and Sony has their own audio/video centres, it just seems odd to me that they haven't branched into the sound/speaker hookups for mp3 players.

Maybe I haven't looked in the right places?

Matt

Because of the problems described above, i wonder if anyone would just give a brief (step-by-step?) description of how you actually get the songs onto the MP3 player?   Just so i can see how easy/foolproof if is, and know that i will not be able to mess it up. (i hope).  
What does the software that comes with the player actually do?

I can only speak for the new Sony which I got my wife for Christmas but you just insert your cd, wait till the software identifies it, then click rip. This converts your cd to MP3 (under 'options' you can select what bit rate you want your MP3 to be). Once it has converted the Cd you connect your MP3 player and click another button to add to your player. If you already have songs as MP3s you can import them which is basically cutting out the need for ripping. All the reviews for the Sony software say it is rubbish and very difficult so I should imagine that if you go for an ipod or whatever then it will be simpler than I've described. I believe some machines you can just drag the tracks over.

Hi Matt,
Yes, I say it from a Media frenzy, marketing excellence point of view. I don't own a 'dedicated' MP3 player - I don't need one, I'm a IT guy so my home wireless network has 'become' my sound system. However, I haven't 'hooked it all up' as again, I don't need to as I don't have 'time' to sit there and listen to music! I've just setup a SAN (storage area network) dropped all the MP3's there, shared the network drive and I can listen to whatever I want from that vast library wirelessly on my laptop around my home. I've copied a few faves onto my PDA (with a 1GB SD card) so if I'm (rarely) out and bored I can listen to a few of those via my bluetooth earpiece!

I'll probably wirelessly connect up my living room hifi/TV/cinema surround sound setup to the music on my SAN at some point, just to say I've done it - probably be a few months off by the time I decide to actually do it!

Have a look on the PCpro website (www.pcpro.co.uk  i think!) and there was recently a full review/labs feature on all the most popular MP3 players out there, certain aspects the Ipod took the crown, other aspects it was other machines.

Meanwhile, as everyone is different, there are products to do allsorts of 'add ons' in terms of Ipods...  depends what you want really..  my setup is a different need/want to your setup !

I'm sure some of you heard..  but there is a option for the Ipod which was mentioned a couple months ago..  it's called the 'iBuzz' !  - go check it out! 

Cheers for  now!!
Dennis! West London UK!!

Wellllllllllllllllllll.......... I am now one of the converted.  As I sat on the tube this morning, marvelling at how I could watch an episode of Lost on my morning journey 
HEAVEN.
And the screen/visual quality is AMAZING.
Santa brought me the new 30G... right now I have 2500 songs, 3 audio books and 2 episodes of tv shows - oh, and four episodes of Ricky Gervais' 'podcasts' - and I'm just under 10G used.  Just now figuring out, and realising I don't have to carry ALL music on the thing at once, but if I wanted to, I probably could.
Now for the accessories.... 

Just wanted to pop in and say I love my iPod nano, which I got for my birthday this year.  It's *tiny* , but still has a color screen and clickwheel, and I love being able to just stick it in my jeans pocket and go.  And I don't have a huge collection of music, so the limited space (comes in 2 or 4 GB) isn't a problem for me. 

I have to say though I've fallen in love with the new video iPod- saw it at the Apple store last week- amazing video quality and sound.  It's quite big though, so that' s the only drawback I could see (besides the price, hehe!)