mrtheedge2u2

Pound for pound which is the best MP3 player to buy..

I do not want to spend more than 200 pounds.

What are the IPOD touch like?

Thanks

PeteBrant

Utterly ace.

What capacity would you like, though? 16GB will take you over your £200 limit.

DJ Dunk

iTrader: (5)

I'm very pleased with my 160Gb iPod Classic.

boxst

The iPod Touch is brilliant, although if you just want an MP3 player a bit of overkill. If you want a more general device that you can watch videos / play games and connect to the internet, it is extremely good.

Steve

CaptainJohn

ipods are OK but itunes and the associated software are utter bollocks. The actual sound quality of ipods is only average aswell. Its all hype and fashion victim syndrome with ipods. I got rid of my ipod and replaced it with a far superior Sony mp3 player :

Buy Sony 8GB NWZA828KB Wirefree MP3 Player with Video Playback - at Argos.co.uk

You simply plug it in and drag and drop your mp3 files , none of the itunes shennanigans that destroys your collection. It sounds great on the wireless headphones aswell

boxst

At least Sony have learnt, I won a Sony Walkman in a competition a year or so ago and the only way to put music on it was via some Sony software that made iTunes look like a quaility piece of programming.

Steve

Shark Man

Depends on what you want; £140 will get you an 30gig archos that can also play video. Also an ipod classic (80Gb?) for £160 if you must have the chic.

But its somewaht larger in size. But with 30gig....you'll never run out of space if you just store music! (I know with 8gig I never have enough space with decent bitrate music - which is why my phone has a 32gb card)

DJ Dunk

iTrader: (5)

I went for the iPod over other MP3 players mainly due to great Alpine headunit integration. Having 160Gb or tunes to choose from in the car is great. As mentioned, if you want a device purely as an MP3 player you can't go wrong. The Touch does lots of other stuff besides but the lack of storage and for the price puts me off.

There's a lot of trash talked about iTunes, but it does the job nicely when its set up correctly.

Coffin Dodger

Likewise, shade over £200 for more storage than you could ever wish for, very good sound quality, lots of accessories available (e.g. iPod dock for my Onkyo mini system), integrates with the head unit in my car. Very good user interface on the iPod itself. Ok iTunes isn't great but you don't have to use it, there are plenty of alternatives out there....

RMA26

I've got an 8gb ipod touch & its fantastic

Wi-Fi enabled which is very good

messiah

Another vote for the touch - although do not use iTunes to rip your CD's, use a program like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to get the best results possible, DBPoweramp to convert to MP3 LAME (not vanilla MP3), then add them into iTunes for syncing.

You could also use MediaMonkey to sync to the iPod if you don't get on with iTunes - all these programs are free by the way.

subaruturbo_18

yep, i have an ipod touch 8GB got it the other day, but i might be getting an iphone, so it might be up for sale in the next couple of days. pm me if interested

JackClark

Don't buy any other rubbish mentioned by the Apple hate club. Get whichever iPod you can afford and you won't regret it. £100 will buy you an 8gig iPhone, that would be my choice.

Shark Man

Don't buy any other rubbish mentioned by the Apple fanboy club. Get whichever mp3 player you can afford and you won't regret it. £100 will buy you an iPhone, with a pathetic 8gig, which wouldn't be my choice.

mrtheedge2u2

Ok.... clearly a big divide between the lovers and haters lol

Can anyone recommend an impartial site where I can review mp3 players?

Shark Man

You right; definetely Not here Scoobynet still has a core user base in IT (the orginal type of Impreza owner). Consequently we have the Mac crowd and PC crowd. Somethings will never change

I have this site bookmarked for their reviews on other stuff -However, some reviews can be a bit on the old side. I've not checked what they said about the MP3 players: MP3 Index - TrustedReviews

Markus

I think it's ever so slightly obvious that I'm an bit of an Apple fanboy, however, look at the alternatives and not just the iPods. Find what fits your needs and your budget.

I will agree that iTunes on the PC is far, far, far from perfect, I wish it wasn't so, but alas it is. I could put my zealot hat on and say "What do you expect from a Macintosh company? XP/Vista is not their forte" but that is crass, plus it would sound as though Apple just threw iTunes together, which might not be too far from the truth, but I think they put a bit of effort into it.

Maybe I'm daft, but I thought the sound quality of music played is partly down to the format of the encoded music and the headphones being used, and partly down to the actual hardware, and I thought the iPod's hardware was pretty good.
I'll admit Apple's headphones are not the best, but you don't have to use them, you can purchase others, plus I don't think many other MP3 players come with super-duper quality headphones anyway.
As for the audio quality, I'll admit that MP3 isn't that great, but the iPod does support other formats, and I thought that AAC and Apple Lossless were meant to be pretty good. Maybe not up to FLAC/Ogg standards, but decent enough. I could be wrong though.
One other point, we're talking about mainly a portable music device, are you really telling me that you want serious quality sound from a portable device? If you're an audiophile then perhaps yes, but the majority of us are not, and so a decent, say 320kbps VBR MP3 file will probably be just perfect for headphone/in car use.

messiah

If you get an iPod the first thing you should do is ditch the original headphones - and get some better ones like Shure or Sennheiser. You also need to spend a little time fiddling with the equaliser settings to get them to your liking.

320 AAC is pretty good, but it might be worthwhile working out how much space your library is likely to take up before buying an MP3 player - I couldn't get away with a 8gb player - I had to re-encode my music down to 192kbps in order to fit it onto my 16gb iPhone. There's nothing to stop you importing all your music into iTunes now, and if you decide against an iPod, all you have to do is copy it across to another program - its the ripping of the CD's that's time consuming...

Shark Man

I'll back that up, not just the format either - but the software used to encode it (I used to recall old versions of Musicmatch was awful at encoding; making 320kbps sound like 128kbps).

Headphone are the biggest bit IMO; and most standard issue ear/headphones are very poor. The only ones I have found to be pretty good are the earphones that Sony supply; which may not offer the best fidelity interms of clarity. But the sealing of outside noises and good bass response more than makes up for it. Apart from they fall out if I'm eating (most earphone I've tried do).

spireite

BigPockets.co.uk :: AIGO Mp3 Player A208 512MB with display £1.49

£1 for Pence this one

GC8

You cant really go wrong for £1:49, can you?

spireite

ive ordered 2 for my 4 and 8 year olds ,itll keep em happy for 5 minutes

GC8

Ive ordered a couple too. It seemd like the least I could do after Big Pockets sponsored us on the Scumball last year. You might have seen the car driving about, as it still has the namestyle on either side....

boxst

I have to say that BigPockets has some complete rubbish: I have bought a few things from them and they ended up being refurbished and went wrong after a few months.

As you say, for £1.49 you can't go wrong, but I would stay clear of the other 'bargains' on there.

Steve