Help Needed! MP3 Players...

[Happy Monkey]

iPods are the standard bearer at the moment. You have to sign up for their service, but you only have to pay when you buy music - it's free to put mp3's you've already got or to rip CDs you've got.

Of course, iPods are more expensive than others.

[Elspode]

Here's the sum total of what I've learned about mp3 players so far:

1. Cheap mp3 players usually suck in most important ways such as build quality, features and capacity. That said, the most affordable mp3 players are the solid-state/memory card-using varieties, typically with a capacity ranging from 128 megs to 512 megs as a built in base. Nicer ones will allow the use of a memory card, and one gig cards can be had right now for around $60, give or take. A decent basic player of such a variety will cost you between $80 and $120 if you buy well.
2. HD based varieties offer both vastly increased storage (typically from 4 megs up to 60 megs, with price increasing proportionally as storage increases). Typically, features and usability are also proportional to price. I am using a Creative Labs Zen Touch 40 gig. It performs well, has a nice big mono LCD screen and an interesting, if not always precise, touch-control surface. Disadvantage? This particular model has no bookmarking feature, making audiobooks basically inconvenient, if not outright impossible to deal with. User software to load it up is great, and USB 2 is blazingly fast for the transfer of files. Full album of mp3's at 128k sample rate takes about 25 seconds to load. Ripping takes longer, but that's a different subject.
3. IPODS are awesome, but comparable Creative units can be had for about 25% less money, along with other brands. Creative seems to have the best competition out there among major players, but there are literally dozens of other manufacturers doing a fine job. Archos comes to mind, but their stuff is also pricey. Excellent quality used units can be found on Ebay (that's where I got mine, and it was virtually unused. I purchased it for $70 under best retail price I could find, shipping included).

Bottom line? Research online. Set a budget for the purchase, then go hunting on the Web. Virtually all units will come with their own software for handling the files. Some of that software will rip CD's, some will not, but there are lots of excellent standalone apps out there, the best ones are actually free through Sourceforge public license software sources. Some units will function as a direct "extra drive" with Win XP, some won't, so if stupidly simple ease of use is important, make sure you check that aspect in advance. My new one does not appear as an extra Windows drive, but my old ones did. No big deal in my case, but it might be in yours.

Good luck!

[SteveDallas]

HD vs. flash memory.... you are generally paying more per unit of storage with the flash devices. This may be an acceptable tradeoff depending on use... flash memory is solid state and essentially immune to being jostled around. While you won't have to leave a hard drive unit sitting on your mantel for fear of upsetting it, the chances of hard drive failure are higher than memory failure. (My 40GB ipod's drive died about 13 months after I got it... it's currently out being fixed courtesy of the Best Buy service plan I bought on it.)

Also, it's ipod vs. the rest. ipod is really the fashion leader (although after digging around I decided it was the best bet for me, and I'm as unfashionable as they come), so if your kid has his heart set on an ipod, he might rather have a cheap ipod shuffle than a Creative unit with more capacity.

No matter what brand you buy, you will be able to copy existing CDs to it, and/or buy music online. I still find my best bang for the buck is to buy CDs, used wherever possible, but then, your son probably doesn't listen to the same music I do!

[dar512]

MP3 is a music compression and file format standard. MP3 players can store and convert MP3 files to music. The player consists of some file storage mechanism, mp3 conversion firmware, and an amplifier.

The main difference between the players is the storage mechanism. The great majority of the players use either flash memory for storage or a very tiny hard drive. The flash storage models range from a few MB to 2GB of storage. The hard drive models are generally 5-40GB. The flash versions are cheaper and fewer moving parts - so less to go wrong. The hard drive versions can hold a lot more songs.

Another major difference is how the music gets from your computer to the player. The easiest method (I think) is the sort that acts as a usb removable drive. Then it's just a matter of plugging the thing in and dragging and dropping the songs from the computer hard drive to the player. Some players use proprietary software to get the music from the PC to the player.

The ipods are well thought of, but I'd avoid the shuffle models. I think it's daft that you can't choose what to play. ipod is not the only viable choice.

99.9% of my mp3s come from converting music from my cd collection. There are also lots of free mp3s out there from bands just getting started - and a lot of podcasts as well.

If you do want to get music from a service - itunes etc. beware that they are generally in a DRM format. You're player has to be able to read that format in order to play those files.

Good luck