MP3 players~How Big?

One of the things I am trying to get done soon is to transfer all of my CDs onto an MP3 player so I can ship the CD's later at my leisure. I decided to skip the iPod and go for a Creative Zen Xtra. I was thinking of getting the 60GB since I have LOADS of music but I was at BestBuy yesterday and found the 40GB marked down to $180. I bought it but have not opened it yet. I looked about online and it's a better price than I can find anywhere else but I am worried about 40GB being too small for the long haul.

The specs are rather shaky about how many songs actually fit on a 40. One site says 1100, another says 900. The problem is, I am not sure exactly how many CDs I actually own since they are all in boxes to make the house look neater. (Too many is prob the answer!) Has anyone bought an MP3 player and found that they regretted not going a size up??

Also! Anyone have a Zen that they had probs with? Should I wait till the day after Thanksgiving and wait to see what goes on sale?

Is it 40GB or 4.0GB? My 4.0GB ipod mini holds 1000 songs. It has about 40 cd's and a few audio books on it and it is only a little more than half full.

my teenager bought the mini ipod and is planning on upgrading soon to the bigger one if she can get her sister to buy the old one.  So i guess it might be worth going for the biggest you afford.

I have a 30GB Creative Zen Xtra and it currently has 2151 songs on it. A 40GB will be able to hold waaaay more than 900-1100 songs if you convert them to MP3 format. If you copy your CDs directly onto your MP3 player using the software that comes with it, then each song is going to be a file that's about 40MB (in MP3 format it will only be about 4MB). But if converted to MP3 format you should be able to fit about 10,000 songs on a 40GB player.

my teenager bought the mini ipod and is planning on upgrading soon to the bigger one if she can get her sister to buy the old one.  So i guess it might be worth going for the biggest you afford.

iPod mini's are very small in comparison to a 40GB player though. The iPod mini only holds 4GB.

Sorry for the typos!

Its a 40GB and the package says 11000 MP3 or WMA songs. One of the reviews I read online estimated approx 9000 songs.

I really need to go through those boxes and count CDs. <sigh>

Are you happy with your Zen Among_the_Stars?

I've had mine for about a year and a half now and I love it. Soooo glad I bought it and soooo glad I didn't spend hundreds more just to get an iPod because this is just as good (my ex-bf had an iPod so I've used one and can compare the two). I'd recommend the Zen to anyone. My brother-in-law has one too and is happy with his.

I tried to transfer all of my CDs onto it before moving to the UK too because I couldn't bring my CDs with me. It's a really long process and I gave up. lol

Thanks Michelle!

I would definately recommend buying the largest iPod you can afford. I bought an ipod mini when they came out and figured I would never fill the memory; I filled it in a month. I now have the iPod photo 40GB. I have about 3,000 songs on it but the real advantage of the space is you can use it as a portable hard drive. I've stored lots of photos, personal files, etc.  It's become a back-up to my laptop harddrive.

We got a 20gb Ipod recently and so far I think it'll be big enough, though I own more CDs than will fit on it (I think it'll end up holding around 500 albums....) The way I look at it, I have a lot of CDs along the lines of Heaven 17's greatest hits and while I don't want to get rid of the CD, I really don't need that whole album to carry around on the Ipod. So I'm being somewhat selective about what I put on the Ipod....

One thing that you should consider that I didn't is whether or not you want to keep the CDs on your computer too. I didn't think I would, but it's really time consuming to rip every CD in a big library and so if anything ever happened to the player I'd be gutted at having to start over.... So we just spent about £50 (including shipping) and bought a 30GB external hard drive for the laptop because we were starting to get warnings that the laptop's memory was reaching capacity thanks to all the CDs....

DF has a 60GB Zen Xtra and I have a 40GB Zen and we pretty much have them filled, I think he has like 10 GB left and I have about 3 GB.  Of course we've overlapped quite a bit, most of what I have he does.  But we have lots of music!  I say the more then better

[quote author=AnneR link=topic=19013.msg221473#msg221473 date=113222313..

One thing that you should consider that I didn't is whether or not you want to keep the CDs on your computer too. I didn't think I would, but it's really time consuming to rip every CD in a big library and so if anything ever happened to the player I'd be gutted at having to start over.... So we just spent about £50 (including shipping) and bought a 30GB external hard drive for the laptop because we were starting to get warnings that the laptop's memory was reaching capacity thanks to all the CDs....

I am considering this! Thanks for the advice.

Hmm interesting topic.  I've been eyeing the Creative Zen Touch 20GB because it's down around £120 mark which seems to be cheaper than the iPods of the same size going for closer to £200, although I haven't checked for a couple weeks.  Are the iPods more purely based on their reputation or are there aspects of it that just make them better than any of the other mp3 players on the market?

One thing I'm not clear on is whether the Creative players plug into iTunes easily or do they use some other online download service?

These stories about people filling up their 40GB players is scaring me a bit as I have quite a lot of CDs.  I suppose some CDs I haven't listened to in ages and I should probably get rid of them.  What's the old adage:  if it's neither beautiful or practical...
But having said that, music is a finicky thing, I may not have listened to something for ages and then rediscover it.  I suppose the benefits of the mp3 player is the musics all on there and it's compacted in one place so there's no cases to clutter up or take up too much space.  Having said that, I'd find it difficult to put everything on computer or mp3 player, it's kinda nice having a case and sleeve at least for some of them.

Matt

I'll never get rid of my CDs.... I love having them on the computer and the Ipod, but I'll never completely convert for just that reason, Matt - there's something about having the artwork, etc. It doesn't feel "real" to me somehow to buy something as a download.

I think you and I probably have similar CD numbers and a similar obsession with them, and the 20GB is ok for me because I'm not interested in having every album or every track from every album on it, but since your dw is also a music obsessive, you may need a bigger one - dh doesn't have anywhere near the numbers I've got. 

I think you and I probably have similar CD numbers and a similar obsession with them, and the 20GB is ok for me because I'm not interested in having every album or every track from every album on it, but since your dw is also a music obsessive, you may need a bigger one - dh doesn't have anywhere near the numbers I've got. 

The nice thing about having a player that doesn't hold all your music is that it forces you to change things around.  I have an iPod mini, and I get to  have the fun of going through my CDs every week or so and "discover" something that I completely forgot I had.  I think if my entire CD collection was on my iPod (or hard drive) there would be many, many songs that would never get played.  Granted, I'm one of those people who digs through records and CDs just for the fun of it.