List of OCR-Approved Digital Audio Players

[The Damned]

I find it odd that we'll discuss hardware like speakers, headphones, computers, game systems and all kinds of material related to making music... but we don't have anything that pertains to what we listen to music on. Specifically, the portable players that lots of us have. No one ever mentions them for some reason.

Now, first, I'd like to avoid the iPod series. Yes, they exist. We know that. Lots of people have them. At this point, there are more iPods then there are cars. Recommending an iPod is like recommending oxygen: not really required. Let's talk about other players that people might not have heard of, or that they might have been thinking about, but aren't sure of. Sound fine to you?

OK, let's start with my personal experiences.

Ones I would recommend:

Sandisk Sansa Clip+

Pros:

-Small Size. It's only a few inches long, about an inch wide and not even an inch thick. Very small.

-File Suppsrt. It plays MP3s, or course, but also WMA, WAV, FLAC, Ogg and Audible.

-Battey Life. While a little on the short side, considering the size of the battery it has, 10 to 12 hours (real time, not factory expected) is still pretty good.

-Sound Quality. While some are "audiophiles" that insist they can hear the differences between files formats or lossy versus lossless, or even the type of DAC used, the Clip+ gets really high scores in sound quality. Little hiss or distortion, flat responses, good all-around sound.... go look it up; the Clip+ gets good reviews in the sound department. I can vouch for that. It's a nice player.

-Storage Capacity. The big win for the Clip+ is the MicroSD card support. It integrates with the player's memory to make one seamless collection of music. And yes, it will take a 32GB microSDHC card. That's what's sitting in mine right now.

-Drag and Drop. No software to install, no drivers to mess with. Just plug it in, and drop file you want into the Music folder or the microD card. Simple. Easy. Direct. Also, it does folders, so you don't have to run it through any programs like iTunes to organize your songs.

-Interface. It uses buttons. Actual buttons! No touch-pad, no swiping your finger across or tapping to get it to do something. Simple and easy. Doesn't get any better than actual buttons.

Cons:

-File Limits. For a player that can hold somewhere around 8000 or more files, it seems to have a rather annoying problem: the system uses a built-in RAM system to hold the complete list of all songs. The problem with this is that it quickly hits it's maximum with lots of files. My Clip+ has over 7500 songs on it, but only 5545 of them are listed, with no way to access the remainder. I can only assume that Sandisk hadn't planned on people trying to cram that much data on it.

-Screen. It's a small screen. Two colors, blue on the bottom 2/3 of the screen, yellow on the top 1/3. No album art or anything beyond basic song info. If you're looking for photos or movies... no, this is a small player, that screen would be useless for that.

-Playlists. There is only one playlist on the player, On-The-Go. It only holds 200 songs, and you can't change this without really messing with the player (see below). Also, adding playlists from your computer is a nightmare. I've used Song Bird, MediaMonkey, Windows Media Player, Winamp, all of which are supposed to work with the Clip+... but I've never been able to get it to work. Sansa doesn't help with any software either. It's rather frustrating to be held back with only one playlist that you can't do much with.

Other:

-Rockbox. It's quite Rockbox-able, with many features missing from the original firmware, like playlist creation. There's even a basic Doom game you an play... but with only two colors and a very small srceen, is that really even worth it?

Sony WalkMan S545

Pros:

-Sound Quality. It just sounds great. Sony did a good job on this line. From what I've read on the other players they make, the entire family of WalkMan DAPs get good scores on sound delivery.

-Speakers. Yes, this one has speakers built-in to it. Tiny little speakers. A switch on the side goes from headphones to speakers, and each one has it's one retained volume setting. It's nice little extra, and I find myself using it while on the computer.

-Battery Life. The thing's a battery monster. I've had it playing non-stop for upwards of 40 hours. It's the settings you use, mostly. Screen brightness and time, sleep mode. You can get well over 30 hours out of this thing. My first charge after I got it from the store, I swear it ran for two days non-stop.

-Drag and Drop. Folders are a win. Not needing any software is a win. This is a win, period.

-Screen. It's a fairly nice screen. Not that big, but bright and colorful.

-Interface. Buttons! I love buttons on devices. This has a set of three buttons on the bottom of the screen. Some all this the "Mickey Mouse" face, as it does resemble the Disney mascot. But it does work. 4-direction ring with a button in the middle for selecting, as well as one button on each upper corner. There are also dedicated volume buttons on the side as well as the aforementioned headphones/speaker switch.

-Media. It does play movies and pictures... but it's not that great. Movies have to be transcoded to the right size and format. Pictures fair better, as they are automatically shrunk to fit the screen. Also, it does support more than just Mp3. It does WMA and AAC.

Cons:

-Capacity. Some find 8 or 16 GB fine. I don't. I'd like them to make a 32 or even a 64 GB version. That would be awesome. But we're stuck with 16 as the maximum for this line. Only the X-series and A-series go higher. There is a 64GB A-series, but it's only available in parts of Asia and a gimped version in parts of Europe. Both are pretty damn expensive too. Like, US$400 or more.

-Playlists. No on-player support at all. All playlists must be made using software on your computer. I've used the same programs as I did for the Clip+, but to no avail. I must be doing something really wrong to not get any playlist I make to work. Sony offers software that is supposed to work, but I don't want to even touch that.

Despite the playlist issue, it's a damn good player. I take it with me around the house, in the car, even in front of the computer. Kept, and will likely keep looking at this line for as long as they keep making it.

Archos 5 Internet Tablet (Android OS)

Pros:

-Capacity: From 16 GB flash memory to 500 GB hard drive models, you can get lots of room. I went with the 160GB model because the 500GB model wasn't for sale at the time. Do you need 500GB? Maybe not. But that's not just music. You could also put a lot of movies on there. Speaking of...

-Media. Plays just about everything. In fact, here are the listed formats: MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WAV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, MVK, H.264, Other (mostly some obscure formats no one really uses), JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TXT, PDF and DOC.

-Internet. Has a (mostly) fully developed browser, based upon Opera. You can also get a lot of Android apps for it, but most of those are garbage. Only a handful are of any real use, and most of those are charging a few bucks for them. But for basic surfing, it works.

-Screen. How does a 5 inch widescreen sound? How about if it's 800x480? What if it was touchscreen as well? Lots of screen area to look at things. Good colors, clean display. Very nice to watch movies on.

-Playlists. Use Winamp? Ever make playlist on it? There's your playlist on the 5 IT. It uses the m3u files, and if you don't really mess up your folder when you drag and drop your music on to it, it will still work, just like on your computer. It also lets you create, delete, and edit any playlist you have on it as well. Almost perfect playlist support, a nice change from the usual. It also supports other playlist types, but I never used them that much.

Cons:

-Youtube. When Youtube upgraded their system earlier this year, Archos didn't upgrade their players. All this time later, and there'e still no way to watch Youtube on the Archos 5. It used to, but not any more.

-Sound. Nothing to write home about. It's just average. There is some EQ settings you can mess with, but you're not going to get a perfect experience out of it.

-Battery Life. The thing is a pig for power. Using the browser or playing movies is going to drain the battery like a team of lawyers on a lawsuit. Only the music player gets any decent battery life out of it, and that's because you can turn the screen off while it's running. You lose the touch-screen controls this way, though.

-Size. By any standards, it's big. The screen is great. The width and length are fine. It's just that it's thick. Because it's a hard drive-based player, it has a big old hard drive in it. They could have used some of the smaller 1.8" drives, but those are not made in the larger capacities that Archos offered in this line.

-Modified and Outdated Android OS. It is Android. But it's modified. And it's an older version, namely 1.6. It's a bit behind the times, but wasn't too bad for 2008 and 2009. But 2010 left it sorely in the dust by not only Apple, but also Archos itself. There is no support for the 5 IT anymore. If you get one, don't expect any help from Archos. They've moved on.

Other: I recommend this one mainly for its media support and insane capacity. It's the biggest you can get without moving up to a stand-alone external hard drive. Come to think of it, that is what this is: it's not a tablet with a hard drive, it's a hard drive that happens to have a tablet attached to it. It's not perfect, but it makes for a good jack-of-all-trades player.

Still have it.

Ones I Can't Recommend:

Sandisk Sansa Fuze+

Pros:

-microSD Card Support. Like the Clip+ and the other older Sansa line, the Fuze+ has a microSD slot, and the card does integrate with the main memory. Since the Fuze+ goes up to 16 GB, this combined with any decent card makes for a lot of room for files.

-Sound Quality. Again, Sansa did good on the sound quality. Not as good as the Clip+, but still OK.

Cons:

-Interface. It's a touch-pad. A poorly done touch-pad. This one is slow and incredibly unresponsive. It can take several attempts to get it to move to the next screen. Half the time I used it, I was waiting and waiting for the screen to change. It's just poorly implemented. I've used other devices with resistive screens, and they worked fine. This one, however, just doesn't work.

-Speed. Not just the screen and controls, but the whole system in general is slow. Files take forever to load and play. Changing a setting makes the player almost hang up. Hell, even turning it on takes forever, as it likes to rebuild the library after powering up. The Clip+ doesn't do this. Lots of players don't do this. So why should the Fuze+ need to?

-File Limits. Just like the Clip+, there is a limit to the number of files it will recognize. This seems really arbitrary considering that Sandisk knows what microSD card people can buy, and that they made the player capable of using upwards of 32GBs. That easily pushes the number of files you can put on it into the 10 000 range. Bullshit. There's no reason for this at all.

Other: RockBox-able. I think support for it is early, though. Probably won't be up and running for some time. Some say that the next firmware update will fix all of the problems mentioned above. I say that they could have fixed all of that before they shipped it to stores.

Returned to store almost immediately.

Archos 43 Vision

(Not to be confused with the Archos 43, which runs Android 2.2)

Pros:

-Media. Plays AVI, MP3 and photos.

-Screen. 4.3 inch screen, looks decent.

Cons:

-Touchscreen. Utter shit. Constantly needed to be recalibrated. Constantly off by several millimeters or even centimeters.

-Interface. Terrible scrolling on a vertical menu. There's a reason why they ditched this for Android.

Other: Turns out this is a rebranded Chinese player. It really, really, reeeaaally shows.

Returned to store.

[Abadoss]

The Sanza, while nice, has a tendency to break a lot. My roommate's gone through three or four of them (sending them back and forth between the manufacturer to repair it). So, that's a bit of a con toward it.

Creative's Zen Stone. While really bare-bones (doesn't even have a display), the thing is a freaking indestructable tank. It has survived amazing amounts of abuse and it still runs as strong as it ever did. The sound quality is fantastic (it's Creative after all). It takes a while to get used to the browsing (no display), but it's fairly easy to skip between folders. Skipping back between folders is the only thing that could've been worked better. The last thing that could've been fixed is where the clip is. It sits in a pocket on the protective rubber (yeah, I know I said that... har har...) covering. It's a little too easy for the clip to slide out of the pocket, which can cause some difficulty. I'd give it a 7.5/10.

[Bleck]

Recommending an iPod is like recommending oxygen: not really required.

so let's talk about some alternatives to oxygen

[The Damned]

The Sanza, while nice, has a tendency to break a lot. My roommate's gone through three or four of them (sending them back and forth between the manufacturer to repair it). So, that's a bit of a con toward it.

The Fuze+ or the Clip+? I did mention the Clip+ had a slightly weak clip on it, but could you clarify a bit more? Also, I said I took mine to work with me. That's industrial work. We're talking high temperatures, lots of banging around, being stick in coveralls that get dusty, dirty and wet. I had my 2 GB Clip+

soaked in head-sweat for a day, and it still works fine.

The sound quality is fantastic (it's Creative after all).

Maybe for 2007, but not any more. Personal experience and some tests done with RightMark Audio Analyzer by other sites seem to show they haven't been doing very good with sound output these days. Now, I do prefer personal listening experience to tell how good something sounds, but hard data from lab tests are a big part too. Creative hasn't been doing well in either category.

I used to own a NOMAD Jukebox Zen Xtra (free from a friend) and a Zen Touch (from Creative's site). Both sounded pretty good, but compared to current Creative hardware, it's no contest. The older models are just better.

Creative seems to me interested in trying to out-pod the iPod. They make players that have apps and little widgets that don't really make the player better. They stepped away from sound quality and are concentrating on being more like the competition. Which is a shame, because at this rate, they won't even be in the market in a few years. they already have a sliver of the world market, and it's shrinking each year.

so let's talk about some alternatives to oxygen

Hush, you. You know what I meant.

[Abadoss]

Yeah. The Zen I have is several years old. That's really sad that Creative is being stupid like that. I remember as a kid Creative was always the top of the line and remained that way growing up.

My roommate had a Fuze, I think. Or something. It definitely wasn't the clip. It would short out or die randomly. There were just a lot of things wrong with it, each time. It was so bad, they just sent him a brand new one and that didn't even work.

[OutSpoken]

I had a clip for a long time and another part of it that I absolutely love is the fact that it's virtually indestructible.

I left my clip in the side pocket of a duffel bag and left the duffel bag outside. It was flooded when I opened it and the clip was sitting in at least 2 inches of water. I get home thinking the thing is done for, but it powered up just like normal and it worked fine.

I've also had the clip fall out of an open pocket onto my driveway. I'd completely forgot about it until 7 hours or so later when it was snowing pretty good. I dug it out of about an inch or two of snow and brought it back inside. After about a day, it started to work again (luckily nothing got lodged in the charging port).

I had a second gen iPod classic for a while and switching to this was a great decision. As far as audio players go, the Sansa Clip was awesome in that it delivered portability without sacrificing too much else.

[Benjamin Briggs]

I got a 16 gb ipod nano for chrimbus

squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal

that is all