[Fungi]

Portable media players aren't something you can sacrifice everything else for sound quality, unless you're part of a very small subset of PMP users. Otherwise, UI, build quality, integration, battery life, all that fun stuff are important factors in determining what's right for you. Personally, I think Apple has the build quality (okay, so it needs some sort of skin/case/etc) and UI (the click wheel is brilliant, can't speak for the Touch/Phone but I'm sure it does fine) down. I'd like to hear some recent iPod offerings to see how they do in terms of sound. It's a shame the older workarounds for transferring files don't work with Touch/Phone with 2.x running.

Apple's definitely no longer the one to pick on nowadays, though. All companies have yet to come out with the "perfect" DAP but most major contenders have at least one thing going for them and have the potential to release more newer, better products. Wouldn't be right to just slap some "loser" label on them and call it a day.

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by _j_ /img/forum/go_quote.gif Can someone explain to me why the exclusion of Drag and Drop file management from iPods and Zunes is considered such a big negative?

I'll try. To be honest, I observed that most people prefer drag-n-drop, including all of my own family members and friends. Most people only listen to a few songs/whatever popular at the time. Most people just rip the CD they just bought, transfer it to their DAP, and then delete the songs from their PC. Most people only have a few GBs as their music "collection." Not many people have the concept of using their PC as a "jukebox" (usually because of having an old PC with inadequate storage space). Most people are more familiar with the file transfer procedure in Explorer. This also explains why there are so many people asking how to transfer songs from their iPods back to their PCs.

This also relates to the funny thing of iPod bashing for "lacking" drag-n-drop, yet the Zune is hardly, if ever, criticized for the same lack of feature.

I can use my sister as an example. She like the design of the iPod, thus I bought her one. Due to the way she used to use a DAP (she used to use a cheapo drag-n-drop flash player), I took the trouble of setting up Winamp as the software to transfer music to her iPod as needed. She still didn't get it. Finally I gave up, bought her one of the Sony NWZ series (pure drag-n-drop via explorer), ans she's happy ever since.

I'm like you. I have tons of music, and having everything synchronized, podcasts/playlists updated, by simply plugging my iPod to my iMac without even pressing any button is beautiful.

Why do manual work while I have a freakin computer that can do the hard work for me?

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fungi /img/forum/go_quote.gif Portable media players aren't something you can sacrifice everything else for sound quality, unless you're part of a very small subset of PMP users. Otherwise, UI, build quality, integration, battery life, all that fun stuff are important factors in determining what's right for you. Personally, I think Apple has the build quality (okay, so it needs some sort of skin/case/etc) and UI (the click wheel is brilliant, can't speak for the Touch/Phone but I'm sure it does fine) down. I'd like to hear some recent iPod offerings to see how they do in terms of sound. It's a shame the older workarounds for transferring files don't work with Touch/Phone with 2.x running.

Just to chime in, to me, a music player has to be able to playback music as intended by the artist. This is why I stick with MD/Sony Atrac in the past just because they were the only way to enjoy gapless playback on a DAP aside from a CD player. Ever since iPods support gapless playback on plain MP3/AAC, I switched, and didn't look back.

Speaking of "sound quality," I consider "good sound quality" as free/hardly noticeable hiss, meaning clean output. I was quite spoiled with MD and their clean output. I started with the 5G iPod, and its output is clean to me (pretty much all iPods have pretty clean output to me, with the exception of 2G shuffle). As for other properties/color of "sound quality," I simply get good earbuds/headphones.

I used to use stock buds and fell to the same "mega bass" mentality. Ever since I bought a Sennheiser can, I find more and more that sound quality is less dependent of the player and more dependent on the cans. Hey, I'm in head-fi for God's sake...

 

[Fungi]

Don't get me wrong, I'm here for good sound too. It's just that good sound alone doesn't make a good player. I need something with a good balance of everything. iPods have a fairly good balance, I think. I don't think iTunes is that bad, and if they can come up with a way to get around the 2.x "hash" it'll be even better.

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fungi /img/forum/go_quote.gif Don't get me wrong, I'm here for good sound too. It's just that good sound alone doesn't make a good player. I need something with a good balance of everything. iPods have a fairly good balance, I think.

There you go.

 

[_j_]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pata2001 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'll try. To be honest, I observed that most people prefer drag-n-drop, including all of my own family members and friends. Most people only listen to a few songs/whatever popular at the time. Most people just rip the CD they just bought, transfer it to their DAP, and then delete the songs from their PC. Most people only have a few GBs as their music "collection." Not many people have the concept of using their PC as a "jukebox" (usually because of having an old PC with inadequate storage space). Most people are more familiar with the file transfer procedure in Explorer. This also explains why there are so many people asking how to transfer songs from their iPods back to their PCs. This also relates to the funny thing of iPod bashing for "lacking" drag-n-drop, yet the Zune is hardly, if ever, criticized for the same lack of feature. I can use my sister as an example. She like the design of the iPod, thus I bought her one. Due to the way she used to use a DAP (she used to use a cheapo drag-n-drop flash player), I took the trouble of setting up Winamp as the software to transfer music to her iPod as needed. She still didn't get it. Finally I gave up, bought her one of the Sony NWZ series (pure drag-n-drop via explorer), ans she's happy ever since. I'm like you. I have tons of music, and having everything synchronized, podcasts/playlists updated, by simply plugging my iPod to my iMac without even pressing any button is beautiful. Why do manual work while I have a freakin computer that can do the hard work for me?

Exactly the explanation I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to type that, makes a lot of sense. I had always also wondered about what the big deal of copy files back to a computer was... I learn something new every day.

 

[Captain ?degard]

I write for anythingbutipod while also owning an ipod touch. Our site is too often misunderstood as a place for people who hate ipods, while in reality its a place to discuss players other than ipods. ilounge is for ipods, abi for non ipods. It's not any more a hate ipod site than a nokia site is a "hate sony ericsson" site.

I think that any decision to get a product should be based on objectiveness. That's why i never recommend anyone a player before they give a ceratin amount of features they want. It's physically impossible to say that one player is better than the other in general, you need feature requirements to narrow it all down. The touch i have is annoying in many aspects, itunes hangs and uses a lot of resources, it doesnt let me see folders etc etc. The sound quality is also not that great and the EQ and such lack compared to other players i have or have had. However, nothing beats it for me on podcasts, audio books and such. I hate doing all that manually which you have to do with other players, once you have trained itunes properly you start it up, wait until its finished downlaoding new stuff and hit syncronize. Itll remove stuff ive listened to or watched already and leave the new stuff. It's yet to fail on me and i love it for being that, so much that i forgive it for using up 200MB of ram and almsot hanging when syncing.

Objectiveness however isnt something most people do. Fanboys of a certain brand buy that brand for god knows what reasons. Ignorant peopel that dont bother to do some research buy the first thing they've heard about, which is why you get ignorant replies like "never heard of cowon, prob bad" and so on. Im still against people i know buying ipods, because they do it out of ignorance and not objective reasoning. I have no problem with people using ipods as long as they buying it was the result of research and not apple's marketing department imprinting the brand in their heads. The people i hate the most are people that reply to topics about what player is the best without there being any feature requirements. People's needs can be as specialized as having the ability to adjust pan/balance because one ear isnt functioning properly, and without knowing such needs up front one cant decide which player is the best. I'm sure there wouldnt be any bashing of anything if everyone chose players based on objectiveness not randomness.

 

[krmathis]

To each their own!

 

[Lil' Knight]

I personally love everything of the iPod, except the headphone out and iTunes. Solutions to these are using a flexible,low-profile LOD and 3rd party software. I use the Xilisoft iPod Rip. Very impressive, managing the playlists is so easy now.

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain Ødegård /img/forum/go_quote.gif Our site is too often misunderstood as a place for people who hate ipods, while in reality its a place to discuss players other than ipods. ilounge is for ipods, abi for non ipods. It's not any more a hate ipod site than a nokia site is a "hate sony ericsson" site.

A lot of times, a site/forum's image is perceived from the way the members converse. Alas, it might not match the original intention of the site.

Another example is dapreview. The mob mentality of the net doesn't help either (eg. digg). But hey, it's cool to provide different information, as long as objectivity remains the focus. There will be fanboys anywhere you go.

 

[Kicksonrt66]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pata2001 /img/forum/go_quote.gif This also explains why there are so many people asking how to transfer songs from their iPods back to their PCs. This also relates to the funny thing of iPod bashing for "lacking" drag-n-drop, yet the Zune is hardly, if ever, criticized for the same lack of feature.

I can only speak for myself, but I see Zune as just Microsoft playing Ipod wannabee (see if that starts some rumbling). SO throw that criticism on top of anything that matches use constraints on Ipods.

Neuros is sort of in between. The storage shows up as a wide open USB disk drive, but it doesn't have a general purpose processor so needs a program on the PC to generate the database. Luckily the specs are all open, and there's a Java version you can leave on the drive and run on pretty much any computer you hook up to.

 

[DJGeorgeT]

Drag and drop is for convenience. I can buy music from beatport on any computer, even at work, and load them up without requiring dedicated software to do so. The only way I would buy a Zune is if it ever gets rockbox treatment.

 

[BloodSugar00]

I think, as already pointed out by someone a little earlier in the thread, yes, drag n' drop has it's base appeal for direct use in windows explorer or the OS concerned (not sure if drag n' drop players on the market have this functionality compatible with Mac OS or linux?). However, as already pointed out, this is not really that quick or practical an option of music transfer and organisation when you have a large, expansive music library and/or are wanting to exchange large quantities of music between a DAP and/or hard-drive. A player being drag n' drop compatible though, means that one can, yes, use drag n' drop directly, but the context is larger than that in that this compatibility means you are not locked down to any one propietary software, such as itunes or Microsoft Zune's complementary software, which, whilst being more efficient than root one drag n' drop in cases of batch transferation and/or removal from an external DAP device, may not be as good as other media mangement programs, such as foobar2000, Media Monkey or the like. A drag n' drop player means you can use such independent, media mangement alternatives and/or drag n' drop. I think this is the larger appeal of drag n' drop players, as someone already cited.

 

[baneat]

I love my iPod touch. I think it sounds just as good as any other source I have put it through (be that computer, Zen sleek or Xbox 360) and it has all these other features built in, too.

 

[shigzeo]

drag and drop does have some very good appeal but ive never really bothered with it. when i had my cowon d2 and meizu m6, i used itunes drag and drop just as i would use an ipod as it was so much easier than using file browsing to find everything and then listen.