2 mp3 players left. Help?! (1 Viewer)

[ChrisHeflen]

I know I know another mp3 player thread, but this one is different cause it's about me.
For months I have been searching for an mp3 player to take on my cruise. I have finally narrowed it to two. the Creative Zen Touch 40g and the Iriver H140. The latter, I just recently realized, has been discountinued, but I think I can stil find it.
Does anybody have any advice or thoughts?
I have a question concerning on the fly play lists. The Iriver doesn't do this (according to the Cnet review). What does that mean exactly, that I can't choose a song to play from the player or that I just can't make a list of songs to play unless I pre do it at the computer?

 

[Jake Gove]

iPod does on the fly play lists as well. How it works is that you go through your songs and if you find one you want to add to a playlist, you can mark it. You go into your playlists on the iPod and it's called "on the go playlist". When you sync back with your computer the playlist you created is retained in iTunes. I assume that's how it works on Zen also. It's a nice feature to have if you have 40 gb of songs on there.

IMHO you can't go wrong with iPod. iTunes will even convert WMAs so you can use them on the iPod.

 

[Leila Dougan]

It means that all the playlists have to be created ahead of time on the computer. You can still browse by artist, genre, song title, etc (since those aren't playlists, they are builtin categories) and play songs that way.

As Jake said, the iPod has on-the-go playlist capabilities so that you can create a playlist straight from the device. While it's nice to have, it's not all that flexible. In other words, you can't make multiple playlists, you can't rename it, and only recently they built in support to delete the list. But you have to delete the whole list, you can't delete just one or two songs.

Now, I have no idea about the other players, but unless the feature is drastically improved, I really don't see it as THAT big of a deal. Sure, it's nice, but if you're going to be away from home for an extended period of time (like a cruise) then I don't think it's nearly as flexible as it could be. I find it most handy when I'm at the store, or sitting in the library, or otherwise away from my PC for a few hours or a day.

 

[ChrisHeflen]

So basically I can still search for a song while I'm listening one I have playing, but if I want to have a bunch of songs play in a row without having to do anything, that has to be done ahead of time?

Also the Ipod is a non-option.

 

[MarkMel]

I have the Dell 20G DJ. It lets you create new playlists on the device, it will let you name the playlist, overwrite existing playlists all very easily.

 

[Leila Dougan]

Yes. But, I don't find it as limited as it sounds. You could pick a genre like "rock" then just set it random. So in that case, it would play ALL your rock songs in random order, leaving you with quite a bit of variety (if you like rock, that is). Or you don't have to it random, it could just play it all in order, but I find that gets a bit repetitious because the songs will still be grouped (by artist or by name, depending on how the device does it).