People are idiots (or... "why portable music players suck")

[turkster]

My own feeling on this is that the more things it can do the better . Clearly playing audio should be top of the list but I'm not about to complain about extra features. I bought my Iriver H340 (40gb) mainly for the extra functionality. This plays audio very well with (IMHO) good audio quality, its got reasonable codec support and very long battery life (15h + in my experience) but its also got fairly extensive (and good quality) recording functionality which was the reason I bought it. It also plays video (better than my PDA!) has an FM radio (quite useful), txt file support (which could be a lot better tbh), picture viewing (not a lot of use) and USB host functionality (very useful to support cameras etc when in the field).

Now from my point of view I would prefer not to be running around looking like a walking computer store with pdas, audio players, portable media centres, stopwatches, phones, cameras, gps devices etc dropping out of my pockets, so the more functions a device has the better!

[autopilot]

Now from my point of view I would prefer not to be running around looking like a walking computer store with pdas, audio players, portable media centres, stopwatches, phones, cameras, gps devices etc dropping out of my pockets, so the more functions a device has the better!

I agree that somethings are made to go together, but think we all too often just end up with a jack of all trades, master of none.

[TooNice]

I think two bigs reasons are - 1) The US music market is based mostly around trashy rock and rap, so gapless is less of an issue over there, and 2) Not enough people demanding it due to blissfull ignorance.

Umm, not sure about that. Take one of the most mainstream rap artist as they come (nowadays): Eminem. All his albums have "skits" which serve no real purpose but to setup the song that follows. So I doubt rap music or America is to be blamed
Look at the Korean players, do they have gapless? Yet not all of them are designed with the American market in mind. Cowon, Samsung, and maybe a few others. Of all the companies in that country (I am sure there are many more).

And I don't think it really is down to ignorance either. Granted, most people probably haven't experienced gapless. But even if they do, do you think that even half the people care (that much)? I am inclined to say no. I do use the gapkiller plugin on Foobar, but switching it off will drive me insane.. In fact, I probably won't notice it the majority of the time. Now it could be because I don't pay enough attention to the music when I listen to music through my PC, and it is a different story if I listen to music on my bed before I sleep. Plausible.. can't say I've had the time to do that nowadays. But though the people who have listenned to music through my PC have commented positively of the sound coming out of my system, none have pointed out the gapless feature. When I point out, the reaction is usually along the line of "oh yea", with a "but its not a big deal" expression.. And I don't blame them the least. As it is, I consider this a top tier feature (a feature I'd like to see in every player).. but of the lowest priority (there are things I value more... which are not present in every players).

[And yes, I have seen gaps in album being compared to a pause every 5 minutes in a movie... but I don't really feel that way]

[Spud1]

• Long battery life - My iPod4g still does 8hrs and its over 1.5 years old now
• FM radio - useless to me on an mp3 player, its an mp3 player not a radio..plus all radio these days is rubbish..
• High quality DAC - check
• Usable album metadata (e.g. select tracks by a certain artist) - check
• Extensive audio codec support - mainstream formats supported, I cba converting to atrac-3 or ogg or wma, I rip my music to mp3 or aac so i'm happy..
• Aural enhancements (e.g. parametric equaliser) - has an equaliser, although i dont use it
• Album (gapless) support - again useless to me, and I think it only has very limited use anyway, I don't see the point in it unless you are listening to albums with 'setup skits', and if thats the case rip the album as one mp3 ffs. What difference does 1 second make anyway? Deal with it.

Call me a grumpy old git, but to me, it looks like the mobile phone market all over again - too much focus on pointless things like mobile TV, not enough on enhancing the main point of the device.

On this I agree with you. I love my 4G iPod, its small(enough), durable (ignoring scratches here), has all the features I want (and pointless ones like games), and suits me fine.

The new iPods though, are just a waste. Who really wants to watch videos on a 3" screen? or photos? Who needs a colour screen? All that does is waste battery life.

[Funkstar]

I think the main reason most people don't notice or care about gappless playback that they don't listen to albums. I know that i'm probably the only one out of my group of friends that does listed to complete albums. The rest just have on the fly playlists and shuffle

[directhex]

[And yes, I have seen gaps in album being compared to a pause every 5 minutes in a movie... but I don't really feel that way]

depends on the movie and the album

if you're getting someone pressing pause, waiting a second, then pressing play, during black-screen scene changes on a movie... you don't notice. same with albums consisting of a selection of segregated tracks. but if someone does it in the middle of an action scene, that's different - and there are albums which flow (pink floyd being the perpetual example), whcih suffer similarly.

[5lab]

the one thing that comes out of this thread to me is that everyone has different requirements for an mp3 player, so its not surprising to see them overfeatured as selling lots of devices with some unecessary features is cheaper than selling lots of unique devices. additionally to this, once you have a player with a good screen and reasonable cpu, adding functionality such as clock, stopwatch, document reading, photo viewing, calendar etc adds precisely 0p to the price once they're developed - something which in itself probaly only cost a few thousand dollars in the first place (i recon i could bodge together an app to do photo viewing, calendar and stopwatch in under a day, and i'm far from the best coder in the world). you only need to sell a couple of hundred devices due to this functionality for this to make sence, and suddenly you're pushing a profit.


as for the list you've got, does the zen sleek not do most/all of them?

[TooNice]

I think the main reason most people don't notice or care about gappless playback that they don't listen to albums. I know that i'm probably the only one out of my group of friends that does listed to complete albums. The rest just have on the fly playlists and shuffle

Thats quite true when you are using smaller players. But I reckon there is more of a temptation of just dragging the whole folder when you have 20-30-60GB to play with.

[TheAnimus]

Its intresting the whole PDA vrs Player idea, myself i've been finding lately that i often neglect my Sony HD3 in favour of my q-tek 8310 phone.

The 8310 (or imate sp5) has:
Wiresless 802.11b
miniSD (so upto 2gig storage on a card)
Windows Mobile 5.0 so mp3,wma,flacc,ogg.
you can watch movies on QVGA screen.
Battery life is more than an ipod.
Its also already in my pocket.

Now the big drawback is the storage and the cost, but as the phone cost me £25 because of the contract, the only cost is the 2gig miniSD.

Its very easy to copy files, can do it over the wireless network (even made a little .net app that encodes my flacc files to 64kb wma for space reasons). This works very well over 802.11b and suites my lifestyle (ie, i can sync a new tune over the campus wireless network).

But it just can't compete in terms of space with my HD3, and its impressive battery life.

[TooNice]

That's an interesting point. With HD based mobile phones on the horizon, perhaps popular MP3 player manufacturers will start to find other ways to make their products attractive.
Video might work, but PDA phones can do those too.

So, who knows, maybe they will have to focus on the niche market that is the tiny amount of people who are particularly picky about audio
[When most consumers find it mobile phones good enough for for general music playback]

It's not a prediction, more of a wishful thinking now. But who knows.. What other type of "bloat" can you add an MP3 player? Or maybe they'll start adding phone functionalities *laughs*

[[GSV]Trig]

What about this?
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=99158

[directhex]

as for the list you've got, does the zen sleek not do most/all of them?

not really. on my list, the most vital ones are gapless & codec support - which are the two that creative haven't bothered with

[smtkr]

The most important ones for me are:

high quality DAC
codec support
gapless

I don't want any of the features from the second list. I loathe the features from the second list.

[oshta]

Portable players should have these
Long battery life: AGREED, Deffornatly
FM radio: Nice touch, but even tho mine has it, i rairly use it.
High quality DAC: Yes, its helps!
Usable album metadata (e.g. select tracks by a certain artist): Yes, that would be nice.
Extensive audio codec support: Clearly important, i wish mine played .m4a's
Aural enhancements (e.g. parametric equaliser): Again, nice touch, but not essential
Album (gapless) support: Yes, shame so little do.

A good PDA should have these
Games
Calendar
Photo viewing
Stopwatch
Video playback
Color screen
Fashionable form factor
Read documents (e.g. .txt)


So on your list i recon my iRiver H140 scores 70% 25%
- It doesnt support gapless nativly, and its codec support tho accepatable, isnt huge (so i gave it half marks for that)
- It donest have any games, a calendar, photo viewing, a stopwatch, video playback, a color screen, but is does read documents (.txt) and has a faily nice form.


Daniel

[Grey M@a]

Just to add to what Hex has said.

Personally as far as I am concerned the market can drop every bit of crap off the players bar the ability to listen to your music files and a decent battery life. No need for diaries and games and god knows what else on an mp3 player. The only reason they put these features on is to keep the high premium price on their item.

[MiLaMber]

People are different.
People *can* use devices in different ways.
Some ppl may well see the Calender on their ipod as a good way of having a mobile calendar..I believe u can sync to it from Ical on a mac?
While most ppl use their their mp3 player for just one thing, music.. other ppl (like myself) use it for video, as well as computer based training (admitedly also video)...
Im all for devices having as much functionality as possible (as long as the size of the device is not impacted in a negative way)..