60G Nomad Zen vs. The iPod 673
war3rd writes "According to an article in BetaNews, Creative is going to be releasing an upgraded Nomad Zen at the end of the month that is not only larger than the iPod, but cheaper too. At $400 for 60G ($100 less than the 30G iPod), the new Zen will sport more features, although it may be slightly larger than the newer generation of iPods. I have been putting off buying an MP3 player until I felt that the arms race was settling down, but the new Zen is making my mouth water. So what does the /. community think, are Creative and Apple going to be the top players in this arena? Is it time I jumped onto the bandwagon? One thing is for certain, I am going to be watching the reviews closely."
Viva la Zen!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
The unit also easily stores data files. w00t!
IMHO, the zen is an easy choice - twice the storage, $100 less, tons of reliability, and more features.
Btw, there is also a HUGE Nomad community too! I'll cite Nomadness.net as a great example. Good forums and good Nomad news.
iPod (Score:3, Interesting)
Price (Score:5, Interesting)
All i want (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the next logical progression would be to sport a small plasma screen and play dvd's and divx. These things already had enough room.
Re:iPod (Score:3, Interesting)
I currently have 5 GB of music, and 2 GB of data stored on my 20 GB iPod.
My two cents on MP3 players (Score:1, Interesting)
To my understanding, the Zen is just a smaller Nomad Jukebox with slightly less features. I believe that Creative tends to go with Firewire rather than USB2 (most of the Creative Soundcards also include firewire ports these days), although I'd expect this new player to include both.
I've strongly considered buying a hard drive player, but I'm slightly worried about failure. It'd be nice to move my mp3 collection over to a 60gig player and free up some space, but what if the player gets fried? I suppose I could burn backups to CD too, and I suppose I should anyway, but regardless harddrives are very potentially faulty things.
That, and I only want to buy a player that I can plug in and have it show up as an external hard drive. No iTunes, no MusicMatch Jukebox, none of that nonsense. I want to load my tunes on myself, I don't want the player to depend on id3 tags (as many of my mp3s have poor id3 tags), I just want it to use filenames and folders and behave like a sensible external hard drive that also happens to play mp3s. I believe the Archos jukeboxes do this, but I don't know about any other hard drive based players.
And lastly, I believe the iPod has the Zen beat in battery life. Form factor wise, Mac fanboys will slobber over the iPod and say that anything else sucks, but personally I think the Zen or even the Archos are just fine in terms of appearances and usability.
If this new Zen can plug in just like a hard drive, and it really is 60gb for $400, I might have to pick it up myself. 60gb is about the largest I trust hard drives anyway, much less portable ones.
Re:Viva la Zen!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also the Nomad Jukebox 3 (not the current Zen) has optical-in recording to MP3 or wave. It's not as simple as pressing record on a portable MiniDisc recorder, but it works in a pinch.
Re:iPod (Score:5, Interesting)
I do think so. My 10GB iPod is full, 100% legal-i-ripped-them-from-CDs-I-own mp3s at only 128kb. With just the CDs I *currently* own, I could fill a 30GB iPod with 128kb AAC files, I probably have about 40GB of 128kb AAC I could rip legally. That will only increase as time goes on.
I think the better question is, when is video coming? I mean imagine a 120GB drive and a 3 inch color screen all in an almost iPod sized device - that you could use to play MPEG4 video...
mmm - Future is tasty and on order for delivery soon...
The Zen has always had more features and yet, (Score:4, Interesting)
The iPod has better construction.
The iPod will work with the iTunes Music Store when it comes out for Windows later this year. The Zen won't. What does it work with, WMA's? Yes, for those wonderful WMA music stores that are all the rage nowadays.
The iPod is kicking its ass in the marketplace, and for good reason.
Re:Can it record? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Price (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, it doesn't have OGG support, but it's small (in more than one way), stylist, and under $100US.
It even uses a Lithium-ION battery.
Disclaimer: I do not work for any of the companies mentioned.
They have video players. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It is both larger and maybe slightly larger! (Score:2, Interesting)
Likewise, when was the last time you saw "Dell releases new laptop" on slashdot. It's almost always Apple who is making news regarding product releases on Slashdot.
sigh, so painfully true (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been over two years since Creative bought out Aureal, and they still have neither released a card that supports Aureal's A3D 2.0 standard (still lightyears ahead of any version of EAX), nor open-sourced the drivers for the old Aureal cards.
I can't think of a single hardware company I'd be less likely to give my money to. (What, me bitter about my old Diamond MX300? Why yes.)
2 points. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Nomad might have something going as far as storage goes. But it doesn't navigate nearly or integrate nearly as nice as an iPod. Of course if you are talking iPod on windows vs Nomad on windows then it might be a different story. But NOTHING is nicer than a syncing iPod on a mac with iTunes. Whether i am at my comptuer or on the go, or in my car, my tracks are being incremented and i can rate them on the road and then just sync that when i get home, and use all of that data in a smart dynamic playlist. Its very very nice.
Point 2:
I don't think i would give $10 much less $400 to Creative. They have the worst support known to man for their products. They took 1 1/2 years just to release drivers for their SBLive cards on win 2k. And I'm sure everyone else here is familiar with their support of their own products.
They kind of just PUT stuff out in the public domain and then just let it sit.
Or get an Archos + OSS Rockbox! (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the best things about the Archos is the OSS Rockbox firmware at http://rockbox.haxx.se/ [rockbox.haxx.se]. New features are continually being added that make the Archos a very cool device. Plus, if you aren't happy with the way it works, just hack it yourself! The Rockbox source is very well written and easy to hack. Plus it has games.
Re:Or get an Archos + OSS Rockbox! (Score:2, Interesting)
The great thing about using usb-storage is that the Archos looks just like a hard drive to your system. And with USB2.0, transfer performance is decent.
It can never be too large (Score:3, Interesting)
Why so many songs? I got tired of carrying around a CD player and so many CDs. And even if I brought 100 CDs on a long trip, I'd always find myself in the mood for something I had left behind. No with my entire collection at hand, I always have everything I want.
Re:Creative-ly shoddy support (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:iPod (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:iPod (Score:2, Interesting)
But I'd much rather have a really big hard drive, and stick with my high-bitrate MP3 and OGG files. At an average 256 Kbps with VBR, it's very, very hard to hear any difference from the original.
In other words, a big hard drive would provide quality as well as quantity.
And, I really would fill that 60 GB with music. I have over 140 GB of MP3 and OGG files right now in fact, and it's much more convenient to just mirror big chunks of the collection rather than picking and choosing individual CDs or files.
I just want to know if I can use the Zen from Linux. If so I'll probably buy one, it looks great. If it supports OGG, I'll get one for sure.
Heck I just like the fact (Score:2, Interesting)
in under an hour.
I really do not think a USB2 device can do that.
Archos (Score:2, Interesting)
Also who gives a flying fudgsicle about what the thing looks like. I could care less that my Archos is not pretty. Can you drop your ipod down a flight of 10 stairs, and still have it playing a song when you pick it up from the fall. I can. I have had it happen, and not carpeted stairs, concrete stairs.
ARCHOS is the way to go...cheap in price, yet it is of very high quality!
Re:right on the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the next question the Creative guy goes to is about 48kHz sample rates! The CEO of Creative wants you to use Windows Media and he doesn't even realize that 48kHz is itself like the Windows Media format of the 1980's.
The 48kHz sample rate was chosen by the RIAA for "consumer" digital audio recording (DAT, MiniDisc, Hi8) so as to make it harder to make CD's from those recordings.
The small increase in quality you get by sampling at 48kHz instead of 44.1kHz does not pay for the HUGE decrease in audio quality you get by a Sample Rate Reduction from 48kHz to 44.1kHz. It's more destructive than converting to analog and then back to digital with good converters.
To still be talking 48kHz in 2003 is abysmal. The next rate that's useful above 44.1 is 96kHz, which is high up enough and done at 24-bit or 32-bit and gains you so much quality that you can then come down to 44.1 right at the end and you're better than if you stayed there through the whole process.
Creative's stuff is sub-par. It's good PC gear but it's not good audio gear. iPod is both good PC gear and good audio gear.
In short, iPod and Apple are MUSICAL ALREADY. Creative are not as creative as Apple.
Re:This isn't that complicated... (Score:3, Interesting)
Some problems: Supports USB 1.1 (though they say the USB2.0 version is coming in a couple of months), supports only mp3 (but again they say supporting more formats is just a firmware upgrade away). Also support for Linux and OGG is in the pipeline. The best part is however support for developers, who can put in their own customizations.
Re:iPod (Score:2, Interesting)
Just to add my personal experience; obviously not all albums are the same length, and the thing about VBR is that you can't predict precisely how much space a given track will take up. But I do all my encoding with lame --r3mix, and I find that, on average, most rips seem to come out at about 1.3Mb per minute.
So, assuming your mileage doesn't vary (doubtful), and all your CDs contain 74 minutes of music (very doubtful), you can expect each one of your CDs to take up just under 100Mb. Or, to put it another way, your collection of 300 CDs would roughly half-fill that 60Gb unit.
Which prompts me to muse that if the extra storage is really cheap, you may as well go for it; but unless you're planning to double the size of your music collection within the lifetime of this player, you won't need the space for music. Personally, I only rip tracks I reckon I'll want to listen to repeatedly, and from my own collection of around 300 CDs I've still only managed to half-fill my 20Gb iPod.