Yes, the news is dominated by this week's revamped iPods, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other good media players out there. Put off the colourful Nano, or the shiny Touch? Then here are ten of the best alternatives. Counting down, in reverse order, we kick of with the...
Creative Zen X-Fi
Click here for the full …
Because some of us care about what we listen to. This is the response from the iTunes generation, who buy a single track from iTunes that they heard on Radio one.
There is a huge demographic that have hundreds of albums, all of which get FULL listens. I love the ability to carry my entire library of music, and know that I have it when I fancy a listen to it.
When I get the Sony Ericsson w890i (next month) it will sport a 3.2 megapixel camera, 3G, bluetooth and a 2GB M2 micro memory stick as standard. I'm going to punt the stick and get a 4GB replacement with a USB convertor so I can transfer files directly to the memory. The Walkman menu system is pretty slick, the only drawback is it's probably not the best for viewing video. The Sony connector thingy is proprietary but the headphone lead has a 1/4" jack at the other end so you can hook it up to other equipment (e.g. car stereo) easily enough.
Best of all it come free with the contract (<£10/mnth) so, someone tell me, why would I want an mp3 player?!?!
I've used Apple/Creative and Archos players but.....
.....I've settled on a Zune.
It nice and workmanlike. The audio quality using WMA Pro codec is stunning for the 192k bit rate (sounds better to me than the 256k MP3 I used to use). Matches up nice and simply with WMP11 and the Zune software. Video playback is good and the UI is really fast and easy to use. Oh and the FM radio is good to have too.
No DRM as I just use my own CD rips (anyone buying 128k audio from a website needs their head examined as you dont own it and its poor value).
It also get plenty of conversation as its totally different to what everyone else in the office has. "Oooh what's that? Thats different!"
Its my player of choice and I'm off to Canada soon to see if I can pick up another while I'm out there.
You've missed the point completely. I am definitely not of the iTunes generation, I have hundreds of full albums, but I mostly listen to them at home, played in Winamp, on my PC. If I'm going somewhere I copy a few albums onto my tiny cheap usb-player. Why would I ever need to carry around 160Gb of music?
I'd hate to come across any system that you dealt with, or have to clean up the mess afterwards. The general computer using public have problems with the concept of plugging in a drive, waiting for it to mount, manually managing their music, finding the right thing to eject the drive. Its much easier for them to just let a piece of software organise the music for them and sort out all of the detail.
Perhaps you'd prefer to go back to the early '80s where it seems your attitude belongs. Keep computers for computer people and too complex for the ordinary people in the street.
...cos I don't want to flatten my phone's battery while listening to my tunes on the train from Manchester to London and back when I have a full day of work in between. That is why I want a pmp and a phone in two seperate but handy packages - until someone comes up with a battery that will support 10 hours of music/video playback and at least half that length of talk time that is.
I'm the owner of an 8GB Sansa Fuze since the start of the week. It connects up fine in linux, amarok offers to manage it etc. The sound quality is really excellent, battery life is impressive, you can use it with one hand and I bought it hoping it would be the last audio player I'd want for a while.
Unfortunately, it's driving me crazy. It's an 8GB player with a 1GB interface. There is no way you can successfully navigate more than a few albums with it, so it is entirely necessary to use pre-prepared playlists.
The only way to browse your content is with the thumbwheel. God help you if you whose name starts with a letter near the end of the alphabet (The White Stripes, The Strokes, Wham, no wait not Wham, The Pixies, The Best of...) because you'll be scrolling that wheel for a while. This wouldn't be so bad if it had less space on it, but I picked it so I would not have to decide what I want to listen to in advance.
This is made worse if you have a lot of artists or a lot of miscellaneous songs. I'd say the album / artist lists on this thing are at least 300 lines long and YOU CAN'T SCROLL BACK PAST THE TOP OF THE LIST TO THE BOTTOM. They might as well have fitted the click-wheel to one of those wind-up radio mechanisms and I'd never have to charge the bloody thing again.
You have the option of navigating by 'Play All', 'Recently Added', 'Artists', Albums', 'Songs', 'Genres', 'My Top Rated' and 'Playlists'. 'Play all' is absurd. 'Recently Added' doesn't do anything yet, because I dumped 5GB on in one go, and 'Songs' is laughable; I have over 1200 songs on this. I would have to scroll through from the top every time with the crappy scroll wheel. It takes me twenty seconds to get past songs that start with '01 ' alone. You can't even navigate the raw disk folders, but apparently that's an unusual feature outside archos machines.
When a song is playing, the scroll wheel is used for volume, which is a massive waste. To navigate to a non-consecutive song you have to click the 'home' button, then into 'music', then into one of the above choices, or click . That doesn't even queue the track. You can either play it straight away (stopping your currently playing track) or add it to the 'GoList', which bears no relation to what you are currently listening to. Why can't I just scroll down the current folder and queue a track? My fingers keep looking for buttons that aren't there. There are other little interface annoyances too. One of the most-used functions if you navigate while a song is playing is the 'back to music list' option, but to go 'back' you have to click forward. Ok, that last one is a bit petty.
I couldn't recommend this to anyone that I didn't hate. I liked the idea of the expansion slot, but that is only going to make things worse. It looks like I'm still waiting for the perfect MP3 player, or at least a decent UI upgrade from Sandisk.
I understand the convenience of mobile phones with built-in music playback. But dedicated music players still gives people two things that the majority of mobile phones (including Sony Ericsson Walkman), battery life and sound quality.
My Walkman A818 for example can go 33 hours before needing a recharge and the sound quality is mind blowing. While I need to charge my phone every two days, I only need to charge my A818 once a week. The W890i, sexy as it is, can only playback music for 16 hours and contains no dedicated sound chip.
About the best mobile phone DAP I've tried was the Nokia 5310, it has a dedicated sound processor (S-E Walkmans doesn't, AFAIK) plus 3.5mm, but the battery life (18 hours with flight mode) isn't nearly as amazing as a dedicated player.
@tony and everybody else using Windows exporer to manage their music
I think iTunes is good. It lets me sync my iPod in a few seconds without touching keyboard or mouse. Why is that bad?
I can't get my head around why *anyone* would want to use Explorer - of all things - to manage their music.
iTunes is a media database, and as such can do stuff a file system simply cannot.
Take smart playlists. Like a super-simple SQL, it leverages the metadata accompanying the music as well as that generated by your listening habits.
For example, want to make a playlist of stuff you haven't listened to in, say, 6 months? Do it with a few clicks in iTunes. Got 30 gigs of music but only a 16Gb player but absolutely need certain albums on there, the rest a random selection from your library? Again, a few clicks and you're set. Wanna refresh that 1Gb Shuffle with some different choons? 1 click.
Anyone that can't see the benefits of this kind of power over a large media collection needs to leave their cave once in a while.
Also, I can't think of a way you'd achieve any of the above in Explorer.
Just as you can't see why I would use explorer, I can't see why anyone would use iTunes.
The features you describe are not things I've ever wanted to do.
I never make random selections, I select a few directories and drag & drop onto the usb-player. I know what music I want to play, I don't want my PC to try and tell me.
My music is already well organised and named in Windows, why would I want to reorganise it again in iTunes?
Playlists are a disaster in iTunes (and even worse in WMP).
Winamp (basic interface) is simpler, faster, smaller, and easier to use. It also plays far more formats, doesn't advertise at me, and is far more configurable.
As far as I'm concerned, the best alternative to a current iPod is a previous generation one. I got an iPod Touch to replace an old Gen 1 Nano, and I've got to say that the sound quality is noticeably worse than the old 80GB Gen 5 iPod (the last one before it became a "Classic").
Oh, and while we're about it - I also hate on the Touch, the slow boot-up time; slow shutdown time; missing features like the Smart Playlist; slow interface; not being able to continue the album/song I was listening to last time I had the thing powered on. And it would appear that some/all of these are common to the "modern" 'pods. :(
That said, the Touch makes a fantastic eBook reader! However, I don't think I'll be looking at a new 'pod anytime soon. Best sound quality on a device I've owned was an old 20GB Creative Zen Touch - shame the user interface sucked badly.
@Steve: I agree (partially) with you Steve - I find iTunes pretty okay, and I certainly need some help to manage 40GB+ of albums. Just wish it wasn't so prone to throw up faults and didn't come with so much baggage.
@Omg: Winamp? Used to be a good system, then it fell into the evil hands of AOL and last time I looked it was less usable than iTunes! And life is too short to go copying files here and there... ;) There's better music players on my Linux kit - like Amarok etc.
Useful article though - especially with the dreaded Christmas looming iceberg-like on the horizon!!
Reminds me why I like this site, I've never even heard them mentioned anywhere else other than the site I bought mine from, despite them easily making among the best media players around. Support for formats other than mp3 (including FLAC), work as a simple USB drive without any crappy proprietory software, no DRM, simple and obvious interface, very good battery life (at least on music models rather than video ones, I still get well over 25 hours from mine) and sturdy enough to last 5-6 years of being dropped on the floor.
Sure, they don't have touch screens, telepathic routines to sort and choose your music and so on, but so what? I don't want a media player to look pretty or tell me what I can and can't listen to, I just want to plug it in, put music on it and then listen to it. I've never found another company that really comes close. The only problem I've had with it is that the remote died, but considering the abuse it's had, that's not really something I can complain about.
iPod mini with knackered hard drive £10 plus a 32Gb compact flash £35 and for £45 you've got a robust, compact, high capacity MP3 player (install Linux and you can play other formats, ogg etc.), you could even pretend that you prefer the "retro look", but imagine the cheap accessories that having an iPod can bring.
I also use my W810 with an 8Gb card (microsd+converter) which was dirt cheap.
If you want video, the old Creative Zen 30gb is wonderful, and I'm sure that most users would agree that it's better than the same spec iPod (chunkier, harder screen, better battery life, more video codecs)
So I want to 'Keep computers for computer people and too complex for the ordinary people in the street'.. by my luddite suggestion that I should be able to simply drag and drop media onto my IPod direct from my O/S, if I so chose?
I wasn’t suggesting that I would manage my entire music collection in this way, just that if I am popping over a friend's house it would be nice just to drag and drop a few tunes I have been working on from my laptop onto my I-Pod. When I get over there I would then just plug straight into his PC and drop them onto his hard disk without him having to spend half an hour downloading and installing Apple's bloatware. That doesn’t seem a lot to ask?
I didn't say that the IPod should only support transferring files in this way or that it should not support software for the creation of playlists. However I do think that perhaps it might be a good thing if we had some choice in the matter - But then that is not what Apple are about is it?
Thank goodness for Songbird, which is an open source ITunes alternative (and you will notice about a third of the size of its fat American brother). It still needs a bit of polish, but it does have the potential to be the 'Firefox equivalent' to ITunes' Internet Explorer.
Why does everyone who thinks that people who dislikes iPods/iTunes uses Explorer to manage our music? There are plenty of alternatives including the excellent MediaMonkey for Windows.
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Yes, the news is dominated by this week's revamped iPods, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other good media players out there. Put off the colourful Nano, or the shiny Touch? Then here are ten of the best alternatives. Counting down, in reverse order, we kick of with the... Creative Zen X-Fi Click here for the full …
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re: I don't get it.
Because some of us care about what we listen to. This is the response from the iTunes generation, who buy a single track from iTunes that they heard on Radio one.
There is a huge demographic that have hundreds of albums, all of which get FULL listens. I love the ability to carry my entire library of music, and know that I have it when I fancy a listen to it.
key things
Personally, the things I'd consider important in a music player are:
Solid output
Good navigation
Works like a USB HDD that plays music (no software required to get stuff on and off)
FM Radio
Good multiple file support
Decent form factor
Decent battery life
It's surprising how few players (including the ipod) accomplish this
Can we have "Best of portable digital audio players" next time?
"Ten of the Best iPod rivals ^W wannabees", yeh, there's a good reason they all suck, they're trying to be an iPod.
All in all the review is FAIL.
You want the list of features I care about:
supported formats (including maximum supported bit rates).
gapless playback.
music browsing by directory.
music browsing by tags.
quality of playback.
weight.
battery life.
£ / GB.
Stability of latest firmware.
Lack of stupid design decisions (putting controls inline on the headset lead is one of these).
No, I don't care about video playback, it's an expensive gimmic best left to devices which have a bigger screen (laptops, portable DVD players etc).
Manage to cover half of the above list and you'll have something approaching a good impartial review.
Forget mp3 players!!!
Convergence is convenience!
When I get the Sony Ericsson w890i (next month) it will sport a 3.2 megapixel camera, 3G, bluetooth and a 2GB M2 micro memory stick as standard. I'm going to punt the stick and get a 4GB replacement with a USB convertor so I can transfer files directly to the memory. The Walkman menu system is pretty slick, the only drawback is it's probably not the best for viewing video. The Sony connector thingy is proprietary but the headphone lead has a 1/4" jack at the other end so you can hook it up to other equipment (e.g. car stereo) easily enough.
Best of all it come free with the contract (<£10/mnth) so, someone tell me, why would I want an mp3 player?!?!
I've used Apple/Creative and Archos players but.....
.....I've settled on a Zune.
It nice and workmanlike. The audio quality using WMA Pro codec is stunning for the 192k bit rate (sounds better to me than the 256k MP3 I used to use). Matches up nice and simply with WMP11 and the Zune software. Video playback is good and the UI is really fast and easy to use. Oh and the FM radio is good to have too.
No DRM as I just use my own CD rips (anyone buying 128k audio from a website needs their head examined as you dont own it and its poor value).
It also get plenty of conversation as its totally different to what everyone else in the office has. "Oooh what's that? Thats different!"
Its my player of choice and I'm off to Canada soon to see if I can pick up another while I'm out there.
Think different...buy a Zune.
@Mark - re: I don't get it.
You've missed the point completely. I am definitely not of the iTunes generation, I have hundreds of full albums, but I mostly listen to them at home, played in Winamp, on my PC. If I'm going somewhere I copy a few albums onto my tiny cheap usb-player. Why would I ever need to carry around 160Gb of music?
@Tony
I'd hate to come across any system that you dealt with, or have to clean up the mess afterwards. The general computer using public have problems with the concept of plugging in a drive, waiting for it to mount, manually managing their music, finding the right thing to eject the drive. Its much easier for them to just let a piece of software organise the music for them and sort out all of the detail.
Perhaps you'd prefer to go back to the early '80s where it seems your attitude belongs. Keep computers for computer people and too complex for the ordinary people in the street.
@Oliver
...cos I don't want to flatten my phone's battery while listening to my tunes on the train from Manchester to London and back when I have a full day of work in between. That is why I want a pmp and a phone in two seperate but handy packages - until someone comes up with a battery that will support 10 hours of music/video playback and at least half that length of talk time that is.
Another "Where's the Archos"
As the Archos 605 seems to be the main player compared with the iPod Touch, where is it or any of it's sibling players ?
Don't buy a Fuze without reading this
I'm the owner of an 8GB Sansa Fuze since the start of the week. It connects up fine in linux, amarok offers to manage it etc. The sound quality is really excellent, battery life is impressive, you can use it with one hand and I bought it hoping it would be the last audio player I'd want for a while.
Unfortunately, it's driving me crazy. It's an 8GB player with a 1GB interface. There is no way you can successfully navigate more than a few albums with it, so it is entirely necessary to use pre-prepared playlists.
The only way to browse your content is with the thumbwheel. God help you if you whose name starts with a letter near the end of the alphabet (The White Stripes, The Strokes, Wham, no wait not Wham, The Pixies, The Best of...) because you'll be scrolling that wheel for a while. This wouldn't be so bad if it had less space on it, but I picked it so I would not have to decide what I want to listen to in advance.
This is made worse if you have a lot of artists or a lot of miscellaneous songs. I'd say the album / artist lists on this thing are at least 300 lines long and YOU CAN'T SCROLL BACK PAST THE TOP OF THE LIST TO THE BOTTOM. They might as well have fitted the click-wheel to one of those wind-up radio mechanisms and I'd never have to charge the bloody thing again.
You have the option of navigating by 'Play All', 'Recently Added', 'Artists', Albums', 'Songs', 'Genres', 'My Top Rated' and 'Playlists'. 'Play all' is absurd. 'Recently Added' doesn't do anything yet, because I dumped 5GB on in one go, and 'Songs' is laughable; I have over 1200 songs on this. I would have to scroll through from the top every time with the crappy scroll wheel. It takes me twenty seconds to get past songs that start with '01 ' alone. You can't even navigate the raw disk folders, but apparently that's an unusual feature outside archos machines.
When a song is playing, the scroll wheel is used for volume, which is a massive waste. To navigate to a non-consecutive song you have to click the 'home' button, then into 'music', then into one of the above choices, or click . That doesn't even queue the track. You can either play it straight away (stopping your currently playing track) or add it to the 'GoList', which bears no relation to what you are currently listening to. Why can't I just scroll down the current folder and queue a track? My fingers keep looking for buttons that aren't there. There are other little interface annoyances too. One of the most-used functions if you navigate while a song is playing is the 'back to music list' option, but to go 'back' you have to click forward. Ok, that last one is a bit petty.
I couldn't recommend this to anyone that I didn't hate. I liked the idea of the expansion slot, but that is only going to make things worse. It looks like I'm still waiting for the perfect MP3 player, or at least a decent UI upgrade from Sandisk.
Maybe I should cave and try out an ipod?
@ Oliver
I understand the convenience of mobile phones with built-in music playback. But dedicated music players still gives people two things that the majority of mobile phones (including Sony Ericsson Walkman), battery life and sound quality.
My Walkman A818 for example can go 33 hours before needing a recharge and the sound quality is mind blowing. While I need to charge my phone every two days, I only need to charge my A818 once a week. The W890i, sexy as it is, can only playback music for 16 hours and contains no dedicated sound chip.
About the best mobile phone DAP I've tried was the Nokia 5310, it has a dedicated sound processor (S-E Walkmans doesn't, AFAIK) plus 3.5mm, but the battery life (18 hours with flight mode) isn't nearly as amazing as a dedicated player.
@tony and everybody else using Windows exporer to manage their music
I think iTunes is good. It lets me sync my iPod in a few seconds without touching keyboard or mouse. Why is that bad?
I can't get my head around why *anyone* would want to use Explorer - of all things - to manage their music.
iTunes is a media database, and as such can do stuff a file system simply cannot.
Take smart playlists. Like a super-simple SQL, it leverages the metadata accompanying the music as well as that generated by your listening habits.
For example, want to make a playlist of stuff you haven't listened to in, say, 6 months? Do it with a few clicks in iTunes. Got 30 gigs of music but only a 16Gb player but absolutely need certain albums on there, the rest a random selection from your library? Again, a few clicks and you're set. Wanna refresh that 1Gb Shuffle with some different choons? 1 click.
Anyone that can't see the benefits of this kind of power over a large media collection needs to leave their cave once in a while.
Also, I can't think of a way you'd achieve any of the above in Explorer.
All I have to add is...
I loathed my Sansa e200r. I love my Zune 8gb w/ Zune Pass subscription.
@Steven Gray
Just as you can't see why I would use explorer, I can't see why anyone would use iTunes.
The features you describe are not things I've ever wanted to do.
I never make random selections, I select a few directories and drag & drop onto the usb-player. I know what music I want to play, I don't want my PC to try and tell me.
My music is already well organised and named in Windows, why would I want to reorganise it again in iTunes?
Playlists are a disaster in iTunes (and even worse in WMP).
Winamp (basic interface) is simpler, faster, smaller, and easier to use. It also plays far more formats, doesn't advertise at me, and is far more configurable.
Alternative to an iPod
As far as I'm concerned, the best alternative to a current iPod is a previous generation one. I got an iPod Touch to replace an old Gen 1 Nano, and I've got to say that the sound quality is noticeably worse than the old 80GB Gen 5 iPod (the last one before it became a "Classic").
Oh, and while we're about it - I also hate on the Touch, the slow boot-up time; slow shutdown time; missing features like the Smart Playlist; slow interface; not being able to continue the album/song I was listening to last time I had the thing powered on. And it would appear that some/all of these are common to the "modern" 'pods. :(
That said, the Touch makes a fantastic eBook reader! However, I don't think I'll be looking at a new 'pod anytime soon. Best sound quality on a device I've owned was an old 20GB Creative Zen Touch - shame the user interface sucked badly.
@Steve: I agree (partially) with you Steve - I find iTunes pretty okay, and I certainly need some help to manage 40GB+ of albums. Just wish it wasn't so prone to throw up faults and didn't come with so much baggage.
@Omg: Winamp? Used to be a good system, then it fell into the evil hands of AOL and last time I looked it was less usable than iTunes! And life is too short to go copying files here and there... ;) There's better music players on my Linux kit - like Amarok etc.
Useful article though - especially with the dreaded Christmas looming iceberg-like on the horizon!!
Cowon Systems
Reminds me why I like this site, I've never even heard them mentioned anywhere else other than the site I bought mine from, despite them easily making among the best media players around. Support for formats other than mp3 (including FLAC), work as a simple USB drive without any crappy proprietory software, no DRM, simple and obvious interface, very good battery life (at least on music models rather than video ones, I still get well over 25 hours from mine) and sturdy enough to last 5-6 years of being dropped on the floor.
Sure, they don't have touch screens, telepathic routines to sort and choose your music and so on, but so what? I don't want a media player to look pretty or tell me what I can and can't listen to, I just want to plug it in, put music on it and then listen to it. I've never found another company that really comes close. The only problem I've had with it is that the remote died, but considering the abuse it's had, that's not really something I can complain about.
Why bother?
iPod mini with knackered hard drive £10 plus a 32Gb compact flash £35 and for £45 you've got a robust, compact, high capacity MP3 player (install Linux and you can play other formats, ogg etc.), you could even pretend that you prefer the "retro look", but imagine the cheap accessories that having an iPod can bring.
I also use my W810 with an 8Gb card (microsd+converter) which was dirt cheap.
If you want video, the old Creative Zen 30gb is wonderful, and I'm sure that most users would agree that it's better than the same spec iPod (chunkier, harder screen, better battery life, more video codecs)
@Anonymous Coward - Alternative to an iPod
Not sure what you mean by Winamp "used to be a good system". Are you referring to the failed version 3? They scrapped that years ago.
Current versions work just like the old Winamp 2 if you choose the 'classic skin' and close the media library.
@AC & Stephen Gray
Wow. Conclusive proof... Totally brainwashed.
So I want to 'Keep computers for computer people and too complex for the ordinary people in the street'.. by my luddite suggestion that I should be able to simply drag and drop media onto my IPod direct from my O/S, if I so chose?
I wasn’t suggesting that I would manage my entire music collection in this way, just that if I am popping over a friend's house it would be nice just to drag and drop a few tunes I have been working on from my laptop onto my I-Pod. When I get over there I would then just plug straight into his PC and drop them onto his hard disk without him having to spend half an hour downloading and installing Apple's bloatware. That doesn’t seem a lot to ask?
I didn't say that the IPod should only support transferring files in this way or that it should not support software for the creation of playlists. However I do think that perhaps it might be a good thing if we had some choice in the matter - But then that is not what Apple are about is it?
Thank goodness for Songbird, which is an open source ITunes alternative (and you will notice about a third of the size of its fat American brother). It still needs a bit of polish, but it does have the potential to be the 'Firefox equivalent' to ITunes' Internet Explorer.
MediaMonkey
Why does everyone who thinks that people who dislikes iPods/iTunes uses Explorer to manage our music? There are plenty of alternatives including the excellent MediaMonkey for Windows.
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