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reki107

Zune or iPod?

Zune or iPod?  

11 members have voted

  1. 1. Zune or iPod?

    • Zune
      4
    • iPod
      7


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So here's the situation...

I'm gonna get a Zune (Microsoft) or an iPod (Apple), but I can't choose which one I want. I figured since There are minds here on the forums, I'd post my question here.

So I need to know, should I buy a Zune or an iPod? And please tell me why you chose either one.

EDIT: okay, I'm getting myself a Zune 4 for Christmas...Even though I'm an atheist...? But go ahead arguing about Zunes and iPods! :D

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Neither.

Get a simple mp3 player with none of those pointless features that these expensive players have. It'll cost much less and, guess what, it'll be able to play music just as well while taking less space.

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Jodwin said:

It'll cost much less and, guess what, it'll be able to play music just as well while taking less space.


:( but i like my extra features... *cry*

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Jodwin said:

Neither.

Get a simple mp3 player with none of those pointless features that these expensive players have. It'll cost much less and, guess what, it'll be able to play music just as well while taking less space.


Agreed. I have two MP3 players. The first is a really old Dell Digital Jukebox that holds an obnoxious amount of music. The other is a smaller and more portable Sansa Fuze, which can hold a good amount of music on, and has a memory card so you can put even more stuff on it.

As for the two you mentioned, I haven't had any experience with a Zune, but I borrowed a friend's Ipod once, and I wasn't a big fan of the way it was set up. Namely the touch pad (is that what they are called?) for the volume on the bottom, if I turned the "wheel" too much, I ended up blasting my ears off. You also have to manually lock the player as well, because if you turn it to the side while holding it or having in your pocket makes a menu come up. Not good for someone who likes to change the volume a lot during a song.

So in the end, I'd say stay away from an Ipod and buy a Sansa Fuze.

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Jodwin said:

Neither.

Get a simple mp3 player with none of those pointless features that these expensive players have. It'll cost much less and, guess what, it'll be able to play music just as well while taking less space.

QFT
Not to mention that the cheaper brands are generally a lot more resilient than the Ipod at least. My friends seem to go through ipods like they were candy. Can't speak for the Zune, I never met anyone who owned one.

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I wouldn't touch an ipod with a 20' barge pole even if it wasn't my barge pole. Why? That god-awful itunes interface for "organising" the files on the device.

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I have both a first gen Zune 30 and a Zune HD and they both suit my purposes well and haven't given me any problems. The HD is especially nice as a PMP.

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I love my iPod. It's got a big colorful screen, holds 120 GB of music, plugs into my truck, has a cool cover, and has my name engraved in the back. Best of all, I got it as a Christmas present!

With that said, a generic MP3 player will still do the trick. I've got at least three different players, each with a different library. I got a lot of use out of those before getting my sleek new iPod (which is like 2 years old now).

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Yes, but we'll all make fun of you if we see your Zune! ;)

I have an iPod Classic. It was an easy way to burn through several hundred worth of gift cards for Best Buy. You don't have to use iTunes to put music on them if you don't want (yeah, I know you wnat to buy music from there).

iTunes has DRM-free music now. You can likely buy some and take it to another player, but there may be other steps needed, like manually converting the format. I've never actually bought music from iTunes so I can't say.

I find every one of those other kinds of players each has to be judged on its own merits. One of my friends had awesome luck with a Chinese copy of the iPod.

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Last year, I got an iPod shuffle for $50. It's just five buttons (volume, ff, rewind, play/pause) and two switches (progression/random, on/off).

No screen, no expensive features, just music. If you have 500 songs, it would be a challenge to find the ones you really like, but for people have have around 150, it's fine.

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Neither.

Never saw the point in paying for the brand, which is what you'll be doing if you buy them.

Then again I'm not one to give a damn about latest and greatest gadgets. I was happy with my Watson CD-MP3 discman for 6 years and I still think it has the best sound quality and equalizer settings of all the portable audio devices I've used. Finally got annoyed by the size of the thing so I got some cheapo 1GB player but that quickly got replaced by my phone after I changed the 256MB memcard to a 2GB one. It has more than enough room for what I want to listen to at any given time and I just change the album set every month or so.

I could probably do with 4GB or 8GB, but damn, 120GB as anything past the 20GB mark is just retarded.

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Belial said:

I could probably do with 4GB or 8GB, but damn, 120GB as anything past the 20GB mark is just retarded.


Depends how you want to use it...I carry my entire collection on my iAudio D2 and I'm well on the way to maxing out it's 32GB. (16 internal + 16 in the SD slot)

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The Ultimate DooMer said:

Depends how you want to use it...I carry my entire collection on my iAudio D2 and I'm well on the way to maxing out it's 32GB. (16 internal + 16 in the SD slot)

Well sure, if I wanted to carry everything around I could probably fill up 500GB or more :P

I don't really listen to a lot of different things at the same time, so 2GB is enough for say, the APB discography, which later got switched to the Lords Of Acid discography + Shatter OST, which will probably soon get changed to Shatter OST + Module discography, and so on.

I wouldn't even want to carry around say, all 20 Trance Empires or all 15 Distance To Goas or all 10 Terrordromes. One of each is enough as filler albums, since unless they're several years apart they tend to sound very similar.

I'm still used to changing memcard contents just like I was changing CDs in my discman.

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I have an 80GB iPod Classic that I got for Christmas two years ago and I hate to admit it, but I like it. Once I figured out that you can use Winamp to manage it, I've had nothing but good experience with it.

The ability for video lost its novelty fairly quickly, but it's a nice option. One of the first things I did when I got it was rip a bunch of my Scrubs DVDs and put the videos on there and watched during my breaks at work.

Belial said:

I could probably do with 4GB or 8GB, but damn, 120GB as anything past the 20GB mark is just retarded.


Well, it's nice being able to carry your entire music collection around with you. At this time mine's about 20GB as it is. Although I agree that at a certain point, it's just too much space for what's needed. I couldn't foresee filling up my 80gb iPod any time soon, but the option is nice (and for that matter, I could use it for a portable hard drive in a pinch if I needed to).

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Belial said:

I could probably do with 4GB or 8GB, but damn, 120GB as anything past the 20GB mark is just retarded.


Uhh, if you're like me and buy a new CD once a week or so (don't ask me what I listen to) and encode at a high bitrate it'll fill up pretty fast. If I'm not mistaken I think some players might even play FLAC, but my last iPod was stolen about a year ago so what do I know?

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Jodwin said:

Neither.

Get a simple mp3 player with none of those pointless features that these expensive players have. It'll cost much less and, guess what, it'll be able to play music just as well while taking less space.


Exactly my words.

I had written an article long ago to express what sucks about modern MP3 players. The iPod has almost all the undesirable features and shortcoming an MP3 player can have, so thanks no.

Nomad said:

Once I figured out that you can use Winamp to manage it, I've had nothing but good experience with it.


What happened to simply copying files, organizing directories as you want, and, oh miracle, keep the filenames as you like? And on a computer without iTunes, preferably? Any device that requires special software to manage it while it's nothing more than a standard filesystem on a disk/flash memory, is just moronic.

Heh, at least they don't bitch your own MP3s with DRM just to copy them over the iPod anymore...do they?

Abyssalstudios1 said:

iPod shuffle for $50

No screen, no expensive features, just music. If you have 500 songs, it would be a challenge to find the ones you really like, but for people have have around 150, it's fine.


And me and Jodwin got this for Eur 18: 2 GB, nice screen, FM radio, folders & lyrics display, equalizer, good sound, and plays stuff without DRM crap. Oh and it works on AAA batteries, so when iPod fanboys are looking for a socket, me and Joddo just plug in another AAA and highfive each other while continuing to listen to our favourite music ;-)

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Nomad said:

Well, it's nice being able to carry your entire music collection around with you.

nice != worth the money

Texas Libra said:

If I'm not mistaken I think some players might even play FLAC

To get a player like that and then matching headphones that would let you tell the difference between 320kbps MP3 and lossless while you're outdoors is even more ridiculous.

But don't mind me, I just love telling others how they should spend money I don't have.

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Just to be clear on what I'm going to be doing with it, I'm probably going to download an obnoxious amount of movies and songs, so a Shuffle is out of the question...So anything 2 gig. 's gotta be 4 at minimum I mean, seriously!

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I have no use for an iPod or any kind of portable music player. I've found that using them out in public is just an excuse for people to be withdrawn and antisocial. It's also a great way of saying to the world, "Hey, mug me!" The only use I would have had for one was to use it in my car so that I wouldn't have to constantly burn CDs (I don't like using actual copies of my albums because my car's CD player tends to scratch up discs) every time I wanted to listen to a different album, but unfortunately my car has no auxilary input, no tape deck, and the cigarette power jack used for the radio transmitting devices doesn't work.

Then there's the problem of not being able to fit much music on most MP3 players below $200.

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I've had a 30 gig Ipod for about 4 years now, and I've never had any problem with it whatsoever. I know a lot of people had trouble with theirs breaking right after the warranty expired or something, but that never reached me. So, I'd suggest one.

I don't know if you like to control what you hear next, but I avoid anything shuffle like the plague. I like whole albums. Also, don't ever do anything 'touch'. I don't understand one damn thing about that phenomenon.

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I've never used a Zune, but I've got one of the old school 20gb iPods and I love it. My only gripes about it is that it doesn't perfectly let songs carry into each other (I forget what the term is called)

but when a song ends with a long note or feedback or something that is supposed to be carried over into the next track, you'll hear (or not hear, really) a slight silent gap in between the track changes. However I fiddled around with the tracks in iTunes and clipped the first 2-3 seconds of the songs that are supposed to be carried over and while it doesn't sound perfect, it's relatively close.

I used to be a stubborn "CDs Only" fag but now I don't think i could ever go back to CDs only. iPod has a very simple interface, and I had no trouble loading my music onto my ipod, though I would suggest ripping the tracks from CDs as opposed to downloading music, it's a lot more organized that way.

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I agree with just getting a normal mp3 player like a Philips GoGear, it has Radio function, your playlist selection of music, some versions play videos, mine is quite standard with these features, nothing fancy.

But if I really had to help you choose, go with a Zune, WAY WAY sturdy, can fall down and only get damaged alittle compared to where an Ipod can break entirely.

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CBF reading the rest of the thread.

I used to own a Zune, the 80Gb 2nd gen. It was a fucking awesome player - way better sound quality than my 5G 30Gb iPod, 25 hour battery life, wifi sync. The bad thing was the software which is this awful bloated poorly-designed Windows-only piece of shit. I eventually sold it because it was too painful to start Windows and go through all the enfornced sync group crap every time I got a new album. Typical Microsoft, great hardware, shitty software.

iPods are fairly standard though the later ones (6G Classic onwards) haven't had their iTunesDB fully cracked yet, so if you want to use anything except iTunes you're only going to have partial success. Also, the more money you spend on an Apple player, the worse in quality the sound chips become. A screenless Shuffle shits all over a 120Gb Classic even though it's less than a fifth of the price. Stupid.

If you're looking for other options, Creative Zen is pretty good, Cowon are also generally pretty good though check reviews for specific models. I used my 30Gb iPod almost every day for 4 years straight and it's still going strong, even battery life is still about 5 hours. But I haven't touched that since I got a HTC Magic (myTouch 3G in America) with Android, which sounds better, holds enough (16Gb) and lets me scrobble to Last.fm in realtime.

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