I have grown disenchanted with my iPod. I merely want to buy CDs, rip them to MP3s, then transfer them to my MP3 player for my own convenience; yet, Apple seems determined to not only make that difficult (mind you, I have receipts for everything). No, it wants to make that obscurely difficult, so that I cannot figure out what is going wrong.
So I want a viable alternative. It doesn’t need to have any extras: I just want something that will play back my music, with a display that I can read. Oh, and not insanely expensive, either (no more than $200). Suggestions?
Knock yourself out.
http://www.newegg.com/MP3-MP4-Players/SubCategory/ID-23
Can’t speak for their quality. (I was last in the mp3 player market when Rio CD/MP3 players were a thing)
Moe:
How do you feel about, say, a Kindle Fire? Store your music in the Amazon bitlocker and stream it off there? Get one of the 16GB 6″ models and do as much as you can from your cloud.
I use a Sansa clip (used to anyways, it still works, but I use my phone for music nowadays), but I had to upgrade the firmware to rockbox – easy step by step tutorials abound! The 4gb one with a MicroSD slot to expand are $35 on Amazon.
Stupid question: how much of a problem is it to have all the music on the MicroSD slot? And can I plug it into my computer?
Plugs into your computer with a standard mini-USB cord. The Clips have a pretty small screen, though.
The Sansa Fuze has a better screen size. Also has microSD expandability.
The el cheapo ones that are just a flash drive with an LCD display, an FM tuner and space for a AAA battery are what I use.
I like them a great deal more than the iPod my wife got me. I can actually store things in folders! Never have to mess with iTunes, just drag & drop! The battery actually lasts, and when it finally does run down, I can just pop in another one!
When I needed to replace my MP3 player last year, I (cough) went out and found a 80 GB Zune. Yes, some of us still use those.
Otherwise, have you thought about just finding an older smart phone? Turn off the phone features and set it on Wifi only mode and if should work pretty well as a media player device.
Walmart sells an Ematic 8GB MP3 player for $20.
erm, dedicated MP3 players are basically a dead category. What’s the problem with just using your phone?
I’ve been using an iPod mostly out of inertia.
SanDisk has a line of players that understands most formats. Sansa, I think.
Maybe iTunes is your problem rather than your iPod? I use foobar2000 with an add-in to support my iPod Nano, no DRM.
My biggest problem finding a replacement is that I listen to music while riding my motorcycle, and I have to be able to manipulate the controls with gloves on while the player is in my cargo pocket. That means prominent mechanical buttons, and they’re becoming scarce.