On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 11:36:53AM -0700, Ben Barrett wrote:
> Boy, Joseph, you don't seem to have anything really good to say about any
> players other than Apple's -- and I disagree.

Not true, I said the iAudio has excellent recording, but I do not know at
thing about its playback.  ;)

Creative's players come with free Windows viruses, and SanDisk's come with
crappy firmware that doesn't yet have RockBox as an alternative.


> Now I don't try every model, nor have I owned very many MP3 players (less
> than 5), but I have NEVER had any problems with my Creative Labs player (are
> they just bad people, did they harm you, or is there some other reason why
> they don't deserve $? :)

They cheated me personally, for one, so I am already hating them.  Then
there was the incident with the Zen preinstalled virus.  Then there's the
fact that they're trying to pull a SCO in the courts because their product
can't compete in the marketplace.  Then there's the promise of Ogg Vorbis
support for one of their older players before all of this to get people to
buy it, followed by an announcement after many people bought that it
wasn't going to happen.

Then there's the whole Linux support thing..  Creative promised drivers
and documentation for all of their sound cards and whatnot.  They
delivered no documentation and a partially working driver.  Then they
stopped providing support.  Creative Labs' own OpenAL implementation for
Linux still supports only OSS and only stereo.  Other people have tried to
improve upon this limitation, at least to go as far as providing
positional audio on Creative Labs' own hardware, but Creative rejected the
patch when it was offered to them.

They're an evil company, they produce substandard products, they don't
give a rat's ass about their customers if they don't run Windows (and even
if they do run Windows), they'll say anything if you'll buy, they'll lie
to you after you buy, and then you will suddenly no longer be able to get
through.


> I agree, though, Apple does a really nice job engineering their devices
> all-in-all, and there is a bit of unfortunate back-lash against their
> popularity.  Too bad we're not special and unique for buying Apple anymore
> :)

There's always a backlash against Apple because it's Apple.  Bill Gates
made a fortune on convincing people to buy "Anything but Apple!"


> For me, I just need good battery life, decent amp & sound quality, and a
> fair interface that I can use while riding my bike if need be :)  I've used
> some players with very small screen and som with no screen, and crappy
> buttons, etc, but I am not a power user in the mobile audio realm... Just
> want to point out that so often a simple cheap device will get you what you
> want, and you won't be heartbroken when it falls in the river or gets
> smashed... ;)  I mean to say that I have *not* experienced any bugginess or
> unreliability -- and I haven't noticed any missing features, it plays my
> music as I wish.

Personally, I like the no screen models for this.  It's hard for them to
screw up that kind of interface, if the thing doesn't crash regularly.  In
fact, I wouldn't use anything else while I was biking or such things.

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