Recommendation -- iPod?

[davem at mich.com]

------- Original Message -------
>From    : Andrew Farris[mailto:flyindragon1 at aol.com]
Sent    : 8/12/2009 2:36:06 PM
To      : ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Cc      : 
Subject : RE: Re: Recommendation -- iPod?

 On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 09:01 +0000, Mark C. Miller wrote:
> My current MP3 player has gone to the great tech
yard in the sky.  I'm 
> thinking of joining the rest of the world
[apparently] and getting an 
> iPod.

After watching my brothers (admittedly amusing)
issues with his ipod &
now ipod touch, I voted to flip Apple the bird, and
go elsewhere.

> I'm running Ubuntu 9.04.  My concern is whether, or
how well, the two 
> functions of charging the device and managing the
music work on Ubuntu.  
> It seems charging should be no problem -- a USB
port is a USB port -- but 
> transferring songs from the hard to disk to the
iPod, building and 
> managing playlists are important.

In my experience iPods aren't worth the trouble they
cause. but...i feel
that way about a lot of things anymore...

My personal recommendation is to check out Cowon mp3
players. I just got
a Cowon S9 32GB mp3 player
( http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/cowon/s9/ ),
and I'm loving it so
far. You can add/remove music/videos/pics as though
it was a flash
drive, or through a management program (i.e. using
rhythmbox), sound
quality is awesome, natively supports ogg and flac
formats, looks nice,
and feels solid(even though it's mostly plastic).
I've also heard people
mention Creative Zen players as a nice alternatives,
and I seriously
thought about getting one, but i wanted the ogg &
flac support... which
the Creative players didnt appear to have.

+.02

-- 
Andrew
_____________________________

I have a number of Cowon iAudio players in the family
and we all love them. They have some nice features
like the ability to play files in order of "file
modified" time. This feature is great for listening
to podcasts in order of download. They also have a
sleep timer so you can fall asleep at night while
listening and the unit will shutdown after a preset
time to save the battery. The battery life on the
Cowon players is much longer than the Apple products.
The ogg and flac support is nice but the best feature
is that no special software is needed to use a Cowon
player. Mine work with all versions of Ubuntu (and
all versions of windows and MAC OS too). That alone
makes them a cut above the Apple products. The Apple
products are designed to be a sales channel for
iTunes. The Cowon products are just designed to be
good portable media players. 

Dave M.