Shopping For An MP3 Player

Last weekend I celebrated going out of debt by purchasing a PMP (Personal Media Player). I'd been thinking about getting one for a couple months but, in the last couple weeks, I actually researched the topic. Out of the gate I had decided that I didn't want an iPod. For starters, I don't like iTunes, which is what you have to use for synching purposes. (I suppose there are 3rd party utilities to bypass this.) This is, I assume, because iPods use the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) or some variation which supports DRM. Media Storage Class (MSC) just lets your device be seen as a hard drive. I am a Windows user and iTunes for Winders is a bulky, lumbering memory hog. In fact, I have it on my PC for the sole reason of being able to listen to .m4a files, which are essentially mp3 files enhanced with images. Launching iTunes spawns two or three other processes having to do with iPods which I don't want running and updating the program also means installing Bonjour, some network utility from Apple which I neither want nor need.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Apple. The Dulcinea has a MacBook and an iPod and both are nice little devices.

Having cast off the possibility of an iPod, I looked at Microsoft's Zune – for all of 2 seconds. A) It seemed like it would be the like the bearded Spock to the iPod. Instead of requiring iTunes, one would be doing everything with Windows Media Player, another situation I wanted to avoid. B) The Zune doesn't exactly sell very well and I wouldn't be surprised if MS pulled the plug on it in the near future.

So I started looking at other makers and soon discovered that the PMPs which met my needs were only available in Korea and Japan. Aside from only being sold in the Orient, these PMPs were all video-capable. At best, I'm ambivalent about the ability to watch video on a screen that's only about 2" in size. In theory, being able to watch video wherever the hell you are is pretty neat; on the other hand, why would I want to watch a micro-simulacrum of a TV show or movie? We have a nice HDTV in our living room that's in the 30" range which is perfect considering the size of the room. Perhaps watching a soap opera on a 2" screen wouldn't be so bad. After all, the soap's bread'n'butter is close-ups of faces which clearly reveal the emotions of the character. But small screens are murder on depth of field. Imagine watching Citizen Kane on an iPod – all the detail in the background would be lost. Like that scene where we see the young Charlie K. playing in the snow through a window. How the fuck can you see that on a 2.5" screen? And panoramas are reduced to postage stamps. I don't care how much acid you take, the stargate scene in 2001 just can't be much of a trip on an iPod screen when compared to a nice TV, much less the big screens in a cinema.

While I didn't want to pay for video capability, it looked like I didn't have much of a choice if I was going to get what I really wanted – the ability to play at least some lossless compression audio files, i.e. – FLAC, Monkey's Audio, and Shorten (.flac, .ape, and .shn, respectively). My music collection in mp3 is dwarfed by that in a lossless compression format. Most is FLAC, a sizable amount in Shorten, and a small number of songs in APE.

I was resigned to getting a cheap mp3 player until I stumbled across the incredibly handy site AnythingButiPod. There I discovered that there are, in fact, PMPs available here in the States that support the reigning king of lossless compression formats, FLAC. I was enchanted by the Cowon D2 which supported not only FLAC, but also APE. Here it is in action:



But did I really want to spend $200-$300 for a device that I had planned to basically use when going to sleep? The idea was to find something to allow me to listen to audio dramas, podcasts, and music when going to bed when either A) The Dulcinea didn't want to listen to what I wanted to listen to or B) when M. was asleep in the bedroom across the hall precluding putting a CD in the boom box.

In the end, I my frugality won out and I opted to forego FLAC compatibility. Instead, I bought a nice utilitarian 2GB Sansa Clip.