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"Buying Flash MP3 Players"

Hey everyone,

I'm in the market for a good, really small flash MP3 player.

I've looked at the iPod Shuffle but am put off by the lack of a screen and choice of playlist. I've heard that new players from Sony have an impressive storage capacity and battery life and models are also available with a built in FM Tuner.

I've never owned Sony stuff before and was wandering what your experiences of them are. Build quality, design, ease of use etc.

Cheers,

Ed

If I was in the market right now, I'd probably go for a Sony HDW3 (something like that) player. 30 hours battery life, 20gb storage, all faults from earlier models ironed out, generally a top device.

But, seeing as I still haven't filled my 15Gb iPod up, and doubt I'll ever need to, I may just get a smaller player.

Tonnes of space is all good, but there's a hell of a lot of crap on my iPod that I just skip right past - I don't really need masses of space - I have a 200Gb HDD for that :D

A fair bit yes.

It seems they have a common fault, rather than just being badly made in general.

'Tis a little odd how the normal ZEN is so well made and thought out, yet the micro one can have so many problems.

I feel sorry for those how paid the money, they're quite a lot aren't they?

Joe Dark wrote:
> Don't get a Zen Micro, I was saying how great mine was until the
> headphone jack broke causing distorted sound. It took 2 months for
> Creative to arrange a replacement and when that came it had a broken
> touch pad. When looking on the Creative forums many other people have
> had problem with Zen Micros, some on their 4th replacement.


:( true :(

Yeah, don't know what the problem is with Sonicstage. Just stuffy people who used the old version once and won't go back to it.

It's improved a lot.

I personally have a NH800 Hi-MD Minidisc player. It gives you 1 Gig Minidiscs that fit about 35-40 albums on. I love the remote, with a nice clear light up screen and easy controls to flip between albums. I thought Minidisc was a dead format before this.

Plus the cheaper NH600 is about £40-£50 on ebay and you can use as many 1Gig minidiscs as you like...

Got me a ZEN Xtra just the other day, and haven't had any problems (yet, anyway).

Seems to be the player I've been looking for really.

30GB is going to take a little while to fill up...

I got a Sony NW-E95, 512mb. £99. I love it. I bought one of those cheap Hong Kong ones first, the sound quality was terrible, plus dodgy background noise. The sound on this Sony is incredible, sh-tloads of bass, crystal clear, v little bground noise.

I use SonicStage with mine, and I can't see a problem with it. It converts the tracks from mp3 to Sony's ATRAC system, which is 64 kps rather than 128, so you can get twice the amount of songs on there. You can convert the player to play mp3s as normal, but I don't know why you'd want to.

I find the SonicStage easy to use, and you can organise tracks into different folders, swap the order around, its all good.

Price has gone up slightly [URL]http://www.empiredirect.co.uk/content/products/details/html/SON-NWE95B.htm[/URL]

Joe Dark wrote:
> Don't get a Zen Micro, I was saying how great mine was until the
> headphone jack broke causing distorted sound. It took 2 months for
> Creative to arrange a replacement and when that came it had a broken
> touch pad. When looking on the Creative forums many other people have
> had problem with Zen Micros, some on their 4th replacement.

My sister's one wouldn't charge properly at first, she sent it back and got a replacement within the week. Now the headphone jack has broken the same as yours.

Most of them are fine, but there seem to be a few annoying problems.

Don't get a Zen Micro, I was saying how great mine was until the headphone jack broke causing distorted sound. It took 2 months for Creative to arrange a replacement and when that came it had a broken touch pad. When looking on the Creative forums many other people have had problem with Zen Micros, some on their 4th replacement.

Creative Zen is bloody lovelly.

I highly recommend mine.

Any more info you want I'll be about for the next half hour or so.