h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I lost my MP3 player the other day, so I'm looking for a new one, and I thought I'd upgrade while I'm at it. I'm looking to spend around £30, £35 at the very most, and it should be bigger than my last one, which was 4GB. I gather that the next size up is 8GB.
Now, I prefer to buy from High Street retailers because I find things like this last for only about a year, and I want to be able to replace it without too much hassle. However, if there's more than a couple of quid in it, I'd happily go online for a cheaper deal.
Any advice?

A quick look on the internets suggests that if you want 8Gb for less than £35 you're going to have to be very lucky indeed. Most of the ones I'm seeing at that price range are 2Gb, and often pink.

Speaking for myself, and having tried at least six different kinds of mp3 player before being given an iPod free with a phone upgrade, I would now never go back. iPods are just too damn good. But... they're expensive, and you're on a budget. Plus, you don't seem to want many of the things I want from an mp3 player, like a screen so you can see what's playing.

So...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Card-Reader-MP3-player-silver/dp/B0048DJGWI/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1310466169&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001CQT0X4/ref=asc_df_B001CQT0X43568240?smid=A9BITXL21U6X9&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22218&creativeASIN=B001CQT0X4

Together those things come in at £13, gets you a (non-pink) player with 8GB storage. If you don't expect it to last a year, you can't really go wrong, I guess.

I'd still get an iPod, though. (Although not a shuffle, I found them terribly unreliable - but that means your budget has to start at £130.

Yeah, it's well worth saving up for an iPod...

Wow... I just agreed with Twigg on something.

Heavens, that's cheap! I could do with a screen to see what's playing (but not for watching videos), but with this kind of bargain, I'm not fussy.
It would also play wma (Windows Media Player) files, right? That's the format of most of my music atm and, although I'm steadily changing it over after I realized the difference, it is a pain in the bum.

Philips, Sandisk, Kubik all seem to have 8MB players at around that price on Amazon. Some of them have expandable MicroSD slots should you wish to upgrade it to a 16MB or 32MB at a later date (memory cards are always falling in price).

RF

I have an iPod which I was given as a gift six years ago. It's pink but I'm a girl so that's ok. I can still remember the pleasure I got just from opening the packaging, it was so solid and expensive-feeling. The iPod itself has a satisfying weight and coldness which also, in my mind, makes it feel expensive. I'm not generally into expensive stuff but I loved it from the start and I still love it now. I've had no problems with it and have used it almost daily (when I stop and think of that fact I'm surprised that something made these days has lasted so well). If I had to replace it I would have to have another one.

Which does nothing to answer your question

Deb

Just curious, deb: shuffle, nano, touch or classic? And what generation? I used to love nano's and considered them a near-perfect device, then they went and got rid of the clickwheel and stopped them from playing videos, which seemed a massive backward step to me.

I'm very wary of iPods. Apart from the price difference (which is more than enough reason by itself not to consider them), I hear iTunes can cause problems. My brother uses it from time to time on his computer, and I still can't work out where the audio files actually are.
And having a heavy MP3 player sounds tremendously annoying to me . One reason I traded in my last phone was that it was heavy, and swung around in my pocket.

The problems caused by iTunes have been blown out of all proportion, partly because of a Vocal Minority effect (in which something is perceived as bad based purely on the opinions of those who shout loudest) and partly because people are realising (finally) that Apple are not perfect and do not make perfect products.

I've had my (4th gen) Nano since shortly after they came out and have had only two things go wrong with iTunes since then, and neither was particulary difficult to sort out.

It's not heavy (in either real or teeny-tiny electronics terms).

As for the price difference... think of it this way: if you buy cheap you'll only end up spending more in the long run by constantly replacing the cheap thing. In fact, you can get 4th gen nanos for around £35-40 used. They're pretty damn sturdy for modern electronics andthe only reason I can imagine anyone selling one is because they're more concerned with image than there actually being anything wrong with the unit.

I had an IPod mini now they were

Sandisk have some small mp3players for cheap. I can't remember which one, but I got my Boyfriend one for Christmas at around £20. Sansa clip, or something.

mini

How about a combo of the two ideas: a basic MP3 player, with a screen and about 0.5GB of internal memory, and an 8GB chip? How likely am I to find a player like that?
Also, returning to my OP question, will I be forced online for a cheap deal, or may I find what I'm looking for in Argos/Curry's/WH Smith or whatever, at a similar price? I have no problem going into the shop for a free new replacement every now and then (heck, if they want to make their merchandise that shoddy, they can pay the price!) but that's a bit more hassle if I'm posting it back to Amazon.

"I hear iTunes can cause problems"

I had terrible trouble with iTunes... then I bothered to find out how it worked.

If you simply install it and start adding folders to it, it WILL confuse you. It WILL duplicate your music collections somewhere else, somewhere you'd think of as obscure. It WILL duplicate tracks. It WILL "lose" artwork for albums, split albums for no good reason etc. etc. etc.

I had huge and terribly disorganised collection of music, and iTunes was verging on useless and was certainly irritating. Over the Christmas holiday 2010 I sat down, burned my music collection to the ground and started again, adding just ONE album to iTunes. I found out where it stored it, what format it was in, how I could change that to a portable format usable on other players, and how to set it up so that every subsequent addition was done the same way. I then set about adding all the other music I actually listen to to the iTunes library. It was almost entirely painless. There was the odd glitch, but nothing major. I was able to delete all the other music on my main hard drive, happy that the iTunes library had everything I wanted. I then backed it up on another drive with a single drag-n-drop.

At the end of it, I have a complete collection of correctly labelled tracks, no duplicates, all artwork in place. I can back it up by copying a single folder to an external drive. It handles my apps, my photos, my films, my music and my podcasts seamlessly all in one place.

iTunes is not self-explanatory. It is not entirely intuitive. If you're used to the sort of mp3 player that simply appears as a USB disk when you plug it in, iTunes can seem needlessly complicated. BUT: if you take the time to learn to use it, to learn WHAT it does when you tell it to do something, it is in fact perfectly good. Whenever I've heard someone complain about it, when I've quizzed them further it has always turned out that they've simply started using it expecting it to work like something else, and been frustrated when it hasn't done what they expected. People seem resistant to reading the f**^ing manual, especially when it comes to Apple products. There seems to be the perception that you shouldn't have to, and that if you don't, and the product then doesn't do exactly what you want, it's THEIR fault, not yours. I like it, but I know how to use it.

So... It's unintuitive and unless you specifically tell it not to, it misbehaves itself and fills up all your storage space with multiples of tracks. What a fantastic product!

And that's why I deleted iTunes off my old laptop. I had NO ROOM left but then discovered my brother's iTunes had been spawning copies of tracks all over the place! Horrible thing.

I'm a bit late here, but I would suggest a Creative Zen.

It takes up to a 32 g memory, with the added SD Card .
of up to 32 gigs. however, an 8 gig machine & a SHDI card, the sky may be the limit.

This is most definitely an ad in defence of ipods - cos I bleedin hate them. Creative rules ok - & how old am I?

But a Creative - iPods suck male hens

I've had a creative zen for years, very reliable, sturdy, dead simple to transfer things on and off it (drag and drop), Hugely long battery life, no restrictive digital rights stuff in sight, no forcing the user to only use a certain, horrible type of headphones, as its a standard 3.5 MM jack socket.. Mine's only 2 GB but it seems to do for my purposes... I guess if they're doing 8 GB ones now they're still pretty much the same plus, its called 'zen'. Mind, my new mobile came with over 2 GB of memory, and that sounds pretty good too through headphones once I'd gotten a sutiable adaptor to turn the 2.5 MM mini jack into a 3.5 MM standard one But it can cane the battery on the phone so I tend to try uuse the zenstone, so i might still have some phone battery left when I get to wherever it is that I am going..

"discovered my brother's iTunes had been spawning copies of tracks "

See, there's a perfect example... iTunes doesn't just do that spontaneously, you know. You have to tell it to. You might not REALISE you've told it to, because you didn't RTFM. But to then complain that it's doing something you told it to do seems churlish.

"no forcing the user to only use a certain, horrible type of headphones"

Eh? I've never owned, and indeed never even seen or heard of, a portable music player that forced the user to use a certain type of headphones. Is there really such a thing? Every iPod I've ever seen (and I've had (or my family have had) a Classic, a shuffle, three generations of nano's, a Touch and an iPhone have all used standard 3.5mm jack sockets, like every walkman ever made.

Seriously, where do these bullsnit urban myths about iPods start?

"It's unintuitive and unless you specifically tell it not to, it misbehaves itself and fills up all your storage space with multiples of tracks. "

Well, yes, it will if you pound at the controls like a chimp.

If you bother to spend 20 minutes seeing how it works, it doesn't.

It's unintuitive because what it does is complicated. And it is USEFUL because what it does is complicated. And ultimately, it is paradoxically simple to use because what it does is complicated. You just have to actually learn to use it, rather than picking it up and pounding at it expecting it to do what you want.

I'm no fanboi for Apple, btw. I'd just prefer the discussion to reflect facts rather than urban myths like being forced to use a particular set of headphones or hard disks spontaneously getting filled up with millions of duplicate tracks.

(I'm actually quite scared now... I agree with most of what Twiggster is posting to this thread )

Personally I prefer programs that expect you to learn how to use them rather than just clicking the giant cutesy button that does everything for you. The ultra-user-friendly interfaces and plug-and-play simplicity of a lot of modern computer programs do nothing but reinforce the modern desire for instant gratification and Everything Simpler Than Everything Else.

As for the earphones, I do not understand why people bother using the ones that come with iPods. They are the worst earphones I've ever used; tinny and horrible. Useless if you want to listen to something with even a little bit of bottom end.

I can't remember which generation, or flavour of the IPod it was, but on reading the review of one of them, oo quite some time back now, it indicated that the only controls for the device were those built into the headphone cable, and so it indicated you were unable to use other headphones with it, as you'd then have no control over play/stop etc... Of course, I've not owned one and can't now remember which model/type this was, but that did kinda put me off...
For me, at least, I really can't see the point in having to install a whole bunch of software just to transfer things onto a portible media device wehn we've already got built in, easy quick tools for moving files about.. - what happens if you want to put music onto somethign like an IPod from a friends computer, who doesn't have ITunes on it? I'm quite a fan of plug and play these days Though, I would personally rather like to own a nanno, but they're just too overpriced for something which really, doesn't do anything that a far cheaper version would do ... that extra money on it is a lot of CDs or downloads