Greg King wrote:
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:28:30 -0600
From: Gustin Johnson <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [clug-talk] Sansa Clip playlists.... arghh...
To: CLUG General <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
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It should be noted, that for Podcasts I still prefer older ipods. I
have Amarok automatically checking and fetching several podcasts. It
deletes the listened podcasts automatically and it remembers where in
the podcast you were if you stop partway through. It also seems to have
the least awkward way of moving to the middle of a 1 or 2 hour podcast.
The missil, Sansa, Samsung I have tried all suck. It is a shame that
there is no real competition in this market right now. Your choice is
the decent iPod, and a sucky competitor.
If someone has a viable alternative I would love to hear it. As it
stands I may be buying a second hand iPod or the expensive Archos tablet
(which may be able to get the podcasts on its own without the use of
Amarok).
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I have used the original iPod, a Zen Nano plus, a Zen stone, a Zen V Plus,
and an iTouch, all with Windows. The Zen devices are made by Creative, the
company that brought you Soundblaster PC audio cards.
I find the Apple products very seductive but a little pricy and quite
proprietary. The iTunes service makes it simple to find and download content
and there are lots of 3rd party tools to convert stuff for iPod so if money
and openness isn't an issue it's hard to beat Apples products. I personally
don't like the way you need the iTunes client to control the device - maybe
the Linux solution is better in this area.
I personally prefer the Zen devices. You get more for your money - i.e. most
have an FM tuner - and the audio quality is very good. They usually look
like a USB attached mass storage device so it is simple to transfer mp3s or
other content. I'm a very basic user so my requirements are pretty simple -
i.e play a folder/file or shuffle play. I took a look at the latest
Creative products and the Zen X-Fi (video with Wi-Fi) makes me drool but
I'll probably stick with my Zen Nano plus until it dies. Creative now
provides www.xencast.com to centralize access to free content like podcasts
but it has much less content than iTunes and I haven't really used it much.
I usually rip by cds to mp3s with open utilities, but Creative does provide
a client to do this and organize your collection like Apple iTunes, I just
don't use it. I trust Creative products much more than any of the no name
brands, and even some of the late to the game brands like RCA or Sony.
I actually have 2 MP3 players. A 512 MB Creative MuVu (I think) & a 1
GB iPod shuffle (the small square one). Like greg my needs are very
basic at this point in the game, but I am always willing to look at new
things.
For the most part I just use the OS to mange the content on the Creative
device (USB Mass Storage). To this point I have been primarily using
Windows for pretty much everything but continue my migration. I would
imagine I would use the Zen in teh same way under Mac or Linux also.
I was resistant to getting the iPod but for the price I couldn't
complain. I to don't like how Apple seems just as proprietary as
Microsoft in a lot of ways, so looked for a different solution. That is
when I came across Floola (http://www.floola.com). Although not open
source it is free & cross-platform. It is very feature rich & works
better than other similar iTunes replacements (include GCal support).
The feature I like the most is that it doesn't need to be installed &
runs right from the iPod. For people who work in environments where
iTunes is not installed & know that Windows Media Player does not play
iPod directly you will see where that can be a bonus.
It is a little large for my liking (about 23 MB) but has plenty of
features & doesn't seem to be as much of a resource hog as iTunes. The
only caveat that I have found is that you do need iTunes running on a
computer to set it up initially & then it seems to work well from there.
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