Howdy!

Which would you choose???

Apple Ipod 30gb for

I found that the iPod goes louder and sounds better than my last Walkman but that in part is down to the compression used on the NetMD's. I get on better with the iPod software than I ever did with the Sony carp!

Well impressed with my iPod... I'd buy another as and when the need arises

Pod for me but what else did you expect me to say

I can't comment on the sony, but I love my ipod video (30gb). Only thing is the case is easily scratched, but nothing a decent cover can't prevent!

how about a creative Zen Vision M ?

30Gb, £150 on Amazon.co.uk (black one - the pink one is £130 !!!)

Whichever you choose make sure it can play AAC or that it will be upgradeable to do so.

With the change to non-DRM AAC files at the iTunes online store my feeling is that AAC is going to become the new MP3. AAC is royalty free & gives much better quality per meg than MP3, so I reckon that now it's not tied to the iPod, people like Creative will start to incorporate it into their players.

Wait for a Creative that can play AAC or get an iPod.

That only matters if you are downloading music. If you're ripping from CD, you choose the filetype you want.

That only matters if you are downloading music. If you're ripping from CD, you choose the filetype you want.

True, but AAC is still better quality than MP3 or WMA if you're ripping from CD & most people will probably end up downloading something. I never thought I'd buy downloaded music but I found it's a great way to buy 'singles'. (I still buy my albums on CD though).

The Sony is a good price but Apple & Creative make better players. If he decides not to buy that Sony & he doesn't want an iPod, then he may as well wait a little & get an AAC compatible player. I'm sure Creative etc will add AAC PDQ now that their customers can use iTunes.

I must admit I have bought a the odd track from iTunes when I haven't been able to find a decent quality one elsewhere

But once I have the track I've then stripped the drm from it so I can do what I want with it

At the end of the day I still prefer to buy a CD at least then I can choose the biterate I want when I rip it.

I am tempted (now I have the spare drive space) to rip my cd's to AAC to replace the MP3's I have atm.

I've got the Sony NWA1000 which is the 6GB version of what you are looking at. The unit itself is quite good and I find the sound quality mor than adequate (however I used to suffer from glue ear was was 80% deaf so my judgement on sound might not be reliable!). Using the walkman is fairly simple but all the fingerprints do show up on the glossy case. I've got the black one. I had thought about silver until the assistant in Currys said he'd thought the same but had seen how the fingerprints showed up on their demo walkman.

The Sony software is in a league of its own. I think it's the Conference South!!! It is truly dreadful. The version I have is called Sony Connect and there are times it's locked up my laptop. Last Christmas my mum got my dad the NWA1200 walkman (8GB) and it came with different software called Sonic Stage. This is far better software and I'm tempted to swap the connect software for it.

I'd give the walkman a score of 8 out of 10. However the software would score much lower.

Maybe, this (SmartRatings - Reviews & Ratings for Ipod) will help make up your mind as to which one you choose to buy. It is only iPod, but it has user and expert reviews which you can browse over and see which is the cheapest one on the list.

I've had my iPod for the best part of two years -- and I'm very happy with it. The sound quality is great - esp if using other headphones.

I've also got the iPod HiFi dock - absolutely fantastic.

I've bought quite a few albums from the iTunes store and never had any issue, I also find the iTunes software to be very easy to use and setup, would be iPod all the way for me. In fact I will probably by one of the newer ones later in the year.

I have the Sony NW-A1000 and love it. The sound quality of it is IMHO miles better than ipods. The DACs on ipods can be pretty poor.

Although, it has to be said that i-tunes is better than Connect by a long shot. SonicStage is miles better than connect (more stable), but still nowhere near as good as i-tunes.

It really depends on what you want. Are sound quality and capacity the biggest factors for you? How aboue ease of use transferring files? Battery life?

The new sony stuff is mostly flash-RAM based. So it only goes up to 8GB which is imho more than OK for music. It may not be the best thing for your 3-month pelegrimage around the world with the relative limited capacity. However, you're not doing that and the whole point of having a USB-enabled device is so that you can easily transfer and update your music collection.

On the plus side, battery life on flash-players is a lot better than hard disc based storage. The new sony stuff will give over a day's continuous playback with a full charge.

If you don't need video playback, then there are a load of players to chose from, and various marques. However, most of them force you to use proprietary software (sonic stage for sony, itunes for ipods, etc), and you can't use them as a generic mass storage device to transfer your music. Whether that's important to you or not, I don't know.

If you did want a sony one, I may be able to help you out

Cheers TF boy. Got the ipod in the end and love it!

What bit rate for cd imports would you say is the best for balancing sound quality and space on my ipod. I would love to put everything on ipod in apple lossless but that will eat up space quickly :-(

120 something kp per whatsit will be perfect.

Incidetally, if you want to show the album covers on the ipod whilst playing you can either buy the artwork from the itunes store or do what I did last night Select all the tracks on an album, right click and choose "Get info" to open up a new window.

Now open up www.play.com in internet explorer, find the album, click on it and bring up a decent sized picture of the album.

Drag the image from play.com onto the box next to the "artwork" check box in itunes.

Hey presto, job done

Incidetally, if you want to show the album covers on the ipod whilst playing you can either buy the artwork from the itunes store or do what I did last night Select all the tracks on an album, right click and choose "Get info" to open up a new window.

You don't have to pay for the album artwork from the iTunes store.. all you need to do is create an iTunes account so you can access it, this will enable you to dload all the artwork you need and also the weekly freebie (if you like it of course)

Oh, thats interesting. I assumed I'd have to buy it.

120 something kp per whatsit will be perfect.

A bag of 120 peanuts (or should it be a bag of cheesy crisps) to that man there! :P

The bitrate (in kilobits per second or kbps or kb/s) for a given "sound quality" will depend on the format / codec used. MP3s start to sound very good above 192kbps. However, ipods can use AAC which I believe is a more efficient codec, so you may have a similar sound quality at 128kbps as you do with mp3s encoded at 192 Although, the quality of the DACs and algorithms used on a tiny portable player will have a bigger impact IMHO than the outright bitrate. In other words, you may not benefit that much from lossless if the amplified output of a portable player is of mediocre quality. Any benefit of lossless compared to 128kbps compressed is immediately lost as soon as you play it back

IMHO, I don't go above 192kbps on my sony mp3 player. It sounds as good as it's gonna sound

Oh, thats interesting. I assumed I'd have to buy it.

Nope they're definitely free!

As I said you just need to create an account with the store, but you don't have to buy anything at all

Cheers TF boy. Got the ipod in the end and love it!

What bit rate for cd imports would you say is the best for balancing sound quality and space on my ipod. I would love to put everything on ipod in apple lossless but that will eat up space quickly :-(

I've not started using AAC as yet so most of my music is in mp3 format, I rip most things at 192kbps apart from my favourite stuff which I rip at 320kbps.

FYI you can select multiple MP3's in iTunes and right click to choose "convert to AAC". Possibly a waste of time unless your MP3's are at a very high bit rate and you're short on space.

Initially I did some 'blindfold' tests & found that at anything above 256kbps MP3 I couldn't tell the difference; so I starting ripping at 256kbps MP3. Then my bro' proved to me that I couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 & 192kbps MP3, so now I rip at 192kbps MP3.

The iTunes store currently sells songs at 128kbps AAC (DRM protected) but in May will start selling songs at 256kbps AAC (no DRM) The iTunes songs I have bought sound a little 'tinny' (but OK) compared with the 192/256 MP3's. If it's not too expensive I shall probably make use of the upgrade option they have promised to bring all my purchased music upto 256 AAC.

Some files sizes for comparison: (song is Do Nothing by The Specials)

128 AAC - 3.6MB

128 MP3 - 3.6MB

192 AAC - 5.4MB

192 MP3 - 5.3MB

256 MP3 - 7.1MB

CDDA - 38.9MB

I'd say that 192 AAC is probably your best bet.

I'm quite fussy over my audio so I have compressed my entire library from CDs to 256kbps VBR mp3 . This gives excellent quality but without wasting too much space. I suspect that 192kbps VBR would suit but I with a lower rate of 128kbps I have the best of both worlds.

I would use AAC is I could have more control over its bit rate encoding (rather than use iTunes for everything). I still have the original CD rips in WAV format so I may do it one day (or week) in the future.

As for the hardware itself, I use an iPod nano (2nd generation) and it has great sound quality when using decent earphones such as Sennheiser PX500. If you can get hold of some Ultimate Ears triple.fi 10 Pro Earphones or Shure SE210 Noise Isolating Earphones it will sound even better.

Some reviewers claim that both the iRiver and Sony Walkman players have superior sound (with the Sony being the best) but I've not tested them out enough to judge for myself. The iRiver clix 2 is an excellent brand new media device and has a simple drag and drop interface. The Sony on the other hand uses the infamous Sonic Stage which is a pain.

Thankfully I use a digital connection from my iPod to listen to it in the car so the sound quality is much better than through the onboard analogue output. For me the biggest reason I stuck with the iPod nano (2nd generation) is that it has gapless playback and since I listen to dance mixes and continuous music most of all, this is important to me. I don't think the other players have it but if you go for the 30GB iPod it will.

If you have any further questions, just ask.

I have the Sony NW-A1000 and love it. The sound quality of it is IMHO miles better than ipods. The DACs on ipods can be pretty poor.

Although, it has to be said that i-tunes is better than Connect by a long shot. SonicStage is miles better than connect (more stable), but still nowhere near as good as i-tunes.

It really depends on what you want. Are sound quality and capacity the biggest factors for you? How aboue ease of use transferring files? Battery life?

The new sony stuff is mostly flash-RAM based. So it only goes up to 8GB which is imho more than OK for music. It may not be the best thing for your 3-month pelegrimage around the world with the relative limited capacity. However, you're not doing that and the whole point of having a USB-enabled device is so that you can easily transfer and update your music collection.

On the plus side, battery life on flash-players is a lot better than hard disc based storage. The new sony stuff will give over a day's continuous playback with a full charge.

If you don't need video playback, then there are a load of players to chose from, and various marques. However, most of them force you to use proprietary software (sonic stage for sony, itunes for ipods, etc), and you can't use them as a generic mass storage device to transfer your music. Whether that's important to you or not, I don't know.

If you did want a sony one, I may be able to help you out

Hi TF Boy, are you able to lay your hands on some Ipod compatible sony ICE?

Can you only use an iPod with iTunes?

Just ordered myself a Roomster and I'm gonna need some kind of decent MP3 player as it has the MP3 aux in socket rather than a CD changer.

I'm looking for something that will hold quite a lot (don't have a huuugge collection but don't wanna risk running out of space for a few quid more), keep its charge for a decent amount of time, give me good sound quality (so I can't tell the difference from a CD) and also download/play podcasts.

Any suggestions?