I don't remember, but I may have written something like this before, if I have I apologize and feel free to mail me a kick in the junk

There are many types of consumers in the world. There are intelligent consumers who research their product and find out which of the available models have the features they want at the price they want to pay. Even if you have the money to throw away on a designer brand, you want to make sure that what you are getting at least seems worth it.

Then there are impulse buyers. They go window shopping, or just happen to walk by a store and then there it is: the object that will solve all of their problems, at least for the next 20 minutes.

Then there are the fat lazy sacks of crap who sit at home all the time and buy girls gone wild and diet pills that they see ads for on Comedy Central.

Finally there are the MP3 shoppers. These people have to be the most ignorant and willful people ever to have landed on this planet from wherever they came from. Most of them don't even know what an MP3 player is, because the object that they are shopping for is a specific brand of MP3 player called the iPod. The iPod is not the worst MP3 player on the market, but from a pure money to features look, the iPod is the worst value on the market. However, upon showing the better products with a lesser cost, the MP3 consumer will invariably turn aside other models because "the iPod is easier to use" or "it has to be an iPod because she'll freak out if I get her anything else". These statements are erroneous and the people that come into my store and neglect to listen to my advice need to burn and die in hell for making me obsolete.

In conclusion, as far as customers and consumers go, the MP3 consumer is one of the worst. He is dwarfed only to the tantrum child owning mother, the "drool on your merchandise but not buy anything because I no speaka de english" foreigner and the "I want to haggle because I'm too cheap to pay retail price and if you don't haggle I will chew your face off" granny.

I just bought an iPod because of...well...basically everything that you said.

It's obviously the most well known iPod, and iTunes is pretty easy to use, but there are some other good MP3 players out there.

What other alternative is there that doesn't involve the RIAA coming for me, my children, my children's children, and the little dog too?

This isn't really a review is it? It's more of a rant...

Couldn't agree more. I got an iPod as a present, and then some iPod gear, so I can't switch to another type because then my accessories will go obsolete. All of my friends with iPods have had them crap out on them (I've gone through two) and I have a very low opinion of the product.

Well god forbid I go for the retard easy version(I'm an iPod owner if you couldn't guess).

Buy creative for the love of anything thats holy, I have a old 3gig creative zen which has done me for years and last year brought a 1gig creative zen stone for use in the gym, they are reliable, looks much better and smaller than the ipod mini, weigh next to nothing, has a seriously long battery life, no drm, uses a standard mini usb connection and you can plug it straight into any pc, no additional software required and copy songs straight to and from it.

Oh and it's cheaper, why the hell these are not outselling the ipods 10-1 is completly beyond me.

Yep, this 'review' is really going to put a dint in the iPod's sales. Take that Apple!

Seriously, if it plagues you that much, why not do a real review of the iPod, and point out both its merits and its flaws, and then (and I feel I should emphasise this point) let the readers make up their own minds. Don't just scream and rant at them because, God forbid, they like a product that you don't.

Drong:
Buy creative for the love of anything thats holy, I have a old 3gig creative zen which has done me for years and last year brought a 1gig creative zen stone for use in the gym, they are reliable, looks much better and smaller than the ipod mini, weigh next to nothing, has a seriously long battery life, no drm, uses a standard mini usb connection and you can plug it straight into any pc, no additional software required and copy songs straight to and from it.

Oh and it's cheaper, why the hell these are not outselling the ipods 10-1 is completly beyond me.

It's a little thing called "marketing" and "consumer perception" that forces the Zen into the "good cheap iPod alternative" category and not the "uber-awesome iPod killer" one, despite all the good things going for it. And this is to be expected, considering (as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong) Apple has far better marketing campaigns than Creative.

buy one of these instead...absolutely amazing bit of kit ( if you like dance music )...

http://www.pacemaker.net/device/

A fair appraisal, I am damn lazy and don't want to do research. I do like Itunes though.

squirrelman42:

Finally there are the MP3 shoppers. These people have to be the most ignorant and willful people ever to have landed on this planet from wherever they came from. Most of them don't even know what an MP3 player is, because the object that they are shopping for is a specific brand of MP3 player called the iPod. The iPod is not the worst MP3 player on the market, but from a pure money to features look, the iPod is the worst value on the market. However, upon showing the better products with a lesser cost, the MP3 consumer will invariably turn aside other models because "the iPod is easier to use" or "it has to be an iPod because she'll freak out if I get her anything else". These statements are erroneous and the people that come into my store and neglect to listen to my advice need to burn and die in hell for making me obsolete.

Sorry for the trim, but I removed the 'Hi I'm angry, and Bye I'm still angry bits'
I know you used most to cover not making too broad of a statement but I have to call you into account for some of the picking an ipod = uninfomred consumer.

I can't speak for others but the reasons I chose the iPod were:
-Ease of repair and replacement.
It's a sealed system with off the shelf parts and very easy to repair or replace
components
-It's an apple product
The rabid fan base insures a very long support life for the product.
-It's built form off the shelf gear
So it's upgrade-able. 20 gb Ipod + swiss army knife + 40 GB toshiba HD = 40gb Ipod.

I consider it a very cash friendly feature to pay a little more and get a player that is fairly durable, that I can fix myself, and judging by the number of instructional websites on the topic I'm not the only one.

I like my iPod but i detest iTunes with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns.

Nettacki nailed it... It's all about marketing.
It's pretty clear to me that the Ipod is an example of a marginal product succeeding in the marketplace less on its merits and more on a damn good marketing campaign. (All the cool kids have one!) Naturally, Apple isn't the only company- by far- to do such, but it's surprising how much fawning they generate.

Move over console wars!

I had a Creative (brand) MP3 player before it snapped in half. Now I have an LG (life's good) MP3 player. In my opinion if it plays music then it is a good music player, the brand is meaningless.

Ahh, Creative, my arch nemesis. So far as I know, you, Drong, are the only human being on the planet who has any luck getting a Zen to function for any measurable amount of time. In fact, a while back, Creative lost, oh, thousands of repeat customers in a fiasco that blew quickly out of proportion, and yet all complaints were legitimate (I chimed in with a few myself). Lack of driver support for anything that isn't the latest hardware (even then, not a guarantee), buggy hardware, useless tech support... this isn't a Creative bashing thread, is it?

No, sadly, it isn't, so I will follow the line the thread started... before bashing Creative some more. I am, I guess, a hybrid intelligent/impulsive shopper. Usually I research, sometimes I find something I wasn't looking for while in my perusings of stores I happen to be at for whatever reason. Naturally, I have an iPod, a 2 gig Nano which some trespasser dropped in the back yard, so it's mine now bitch! Sure, it's not flashy, but it gets the job done. The iPod digital interface I installed in the Explorer, on the other hand, is a finicky little bastard, but I can't blame Apple (or Creative) for that. I'd probably buy another, bigger model if this one bites the dust (even if I hadn't bought the accessories, like a digital interface for a Ford) because I figure Apple wouldn't have sold as many as they have if they weren't doing something right.

Don't forget the customers looking for an mp3 player who assume they're all called iPods.

Now, what else is wrong with Creative...?

Jumplion:
I just bought an iPod because of...well...basically everything that you said.

It's obviously the most well known iPod, and iTunes is pretty easy to use, but there are some other good MP3 players out there.

That's exactly my point. If it's not made by apple it's not an iPod. They are all MP3 Players.

I don't have any portable devices of any kind, save for an MMD memory card.
And I don't get mp3s. The compression on those containers is horrible. .WAVs are where it's at.
Speaking of which, does anyone here actually put effort into compressing their media for space? Whenever I get a video file in wmv, I convert it to xvid-mpeg 4 and whenever possible, my pictures are png.

Anarchemitis:
And I don't get mp3s. The compression on those containers is horrible. .WAVs are where it's at.
Speaking of which, does anyone here actually put effort into compressing their media for space?

Now, now, if you make your own mp3s, and not buy from crappy sources or steal them, they come off quite well. I, while filling said two gig Nano, pulled a double conversion from CD to lossless .wav to near lossless mp3 (as a direct conversion would have been far too simple [/sarcastic tone]), and I honestly can't tell the difference. I'm a bit of an audiophile, in that I can't really afford to be an audiophile but do what I can with surprising results, and, except for the fact most CDs don't have proper bass response, it all works perfectly fine for my purposes. Actually, it seems that the two songs I got free from iTunes for purchasing... something... have better bass than CD based wav based mp3, but that's a topic for another thread I've been thinking about starting.

Also, converting my .wavs to mp3 saved me 36 GB of space on my hard drive. Think about it.

[EDIT] And a two gig Nano is far easier to carry than the 100 CD tower that went into it.

Well, I think it's obvious I prefer quality over space in the context of audio. But when something comes as an mp3, I won't convert it to WAV because that'll make it bigger. I keep WAVs the way they are whenever they're encountered. Also, Audacity can't take mp3s.

iamnotincompliance:
[quote=Anarchemitis]
Now, now, if you make your own mp3s, and not buy from crappy sources or steal them, they come off quite well. I, while filling said two gig Nano, pulled a double conversion from CD to lossless .wav to near lossless mp3 (as a direct conversion would have been far too simple [/sarcastic tone]), and I honestly can't tell the difference. I'm a bit of an audiophile, in that I can't really afford to be an audiophile but do what I can with surprising results, and, except for the fact most CDs don't have proper bass response, it all works perfectly fine for my purposes. Actually, it seems that the two songs I got free from iTunes for purchasing... something... have better bass than CD based wav based mp3, but that's a topic for another thread I've been thinking about starting.

Also, converting my .wavs to mp3 saved me 36 GB of space on my hard drive. Think about it.

[EDIT] And a two gig Nano is far easier to carry than the 100 CD tower that went into it.

Well, that is nice but conversion from CD isn't lossless. Music CD's are encoded at 144kbits when they are manufactured. So any compression scheme that can handle sampling at that rate will be lossless when ripping and encoding from a cd. Unless you're converting masters, all the lossless formats really do is eat space needlessly.

iTunes is an abomination against media software.
I love my creative Zen stone. the screen might be tiny, it might be a bitch to navigate through, it might not even have breakout, but i love being able to drag and drop in windows explorer without installing some piece ofg crap marketing bollocks that's only use is to take up valuable disc space an put tracks on a glorified and tinny-sounding walkman.

Really!? People are having a discussion based on this troglodyte's post?

As nilcypher points out, this isn't a review - it's a rant. It's a rant in the grand tradition of the pompous comic book store owner The Simpsons so cleverly lampoon. It is also a poorly written diatribe that would be more at home on the Myspace page of this disenfranchised individual.

I also find the last paragraph pretty offensive in its xenophobia. But the most glaring error in this sophomoric effort is the writer's failure to classify himself, the electronics salesman. So allow me to fill in. The electronics salesman is a person who should be damn glad people buy anything from him or the store foolish enough to employ this ass. Ultimately you are a customer hospitality service, your skills as a salesman are unwanted, and your piddling commission no doubt reflects this reality.

So do us all an enormous favor and move your "review" to Cnet, where maybe some other bitter individual can sympathize with you.

This thread should be locked.

I'm not sure what word describes the type of review you've done here, but it's not "review."

Why is iPod the most popular? Mostly advertising, personally I don't see much wrong with the iPod as long as you get it second hand. The prices are a joke, unfortunately, since I like to my "iPod" or whatever I have as a USB mass storage device, 1-4 Gb isn't going to cut it.

Try finding a more reliable high capacity Mp3 player with as much tech support. Now before you mention the Creative Zen, I haven't tried it, so I don't know about it, except that its also too expensive. Once people realize how much it costs to make high capacity mp3 players, the prices should go down, plus competition should help a lot, its just not there yet.

I don't think people are stupid for buying an ipod. Perhaps uninformed, or following a trend. Now, if you bought a Zune, I'm sorry, you must be stupid. Even if you had no idea how bad a knockoff made by Microsoft would be, no amount of ignorance can excuse you. Thats right, your sweet hearted grandmother who got you one for Christmas? A moron! No excuse!

PS, I use 2 sandisk 512Mb mp3player/recorder/fm radio models. They're not great, but they were cheap, and although I can't even hold enough songs to get me through a few days, its not too big a problem. Plus they run on triple AAAs, so that means I don't have to have a computer/wall to charge from. If someone wants to mail me an ipod, I wouldn't mind a 80gb+, don't bother with color screens, video, or touch, those aren't worth it either.

To each his own, I suppose, although if we truly want to yammer on about sound quality and the accurate reproduction of music until the end of time (which should probably be a thread in it's own right), then we'd be tossing DVD-Audio and SACD at each other rather than encoding schemes. While I'd like to have either one of those at my disposal, I'll stick with the mp3 laden iPod because (a) even if either format was popular, that would still require repurchasing my entire library (plus something that can actually play said format) (b) I'd still have to carry them all with me to listen to them, which was the whole point of converting them to the easy-to-transport iPod in the first place, and (c) I listen to all... 263?... songs before and after each conversion. That's why I say I haven't heard the difference.

Now, if someone wants to be a bastard and throw the master tapes into the mix, fine, but I leave those out above because that'd be prohibitively expensive (to buy, and to buy the equipment to listen to), and that'd likely be even harder to carry around.

Again, to each his own, and that's why my cars have Pioneers capable of reproducing sound outside of the human hearing threshold.