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[benn600]

What is everyone's feeling on what type of player to buy?  I have owned two solid state players: 128MB MuVo & 6GB Sansa.  It seems like solid state players are better in all cases.  First of all, they use less battery and are typically smaller.  Second, it forces the user to do the work ahead of time by rating songs & syncing those or manually selecting songs.  I find that when you're on the go--just like when you're in your car--you really don't want to mess with listening to junk.  At home, I am more willing to listen to the junk so I can rate it out of my sync playlist.  Who wants 11 thousand songs in your pocket if 80% of them are garbage.  I find that about 10% of the songs I rate are good.

Few questions:
1) Where can statistics be pulled up?  I would like to see quick statistics on issues like Rating spread, number of total albums, artists, genres, average song duration, average song bitrate, date range and number of date values, etc.
2) It seems like people are approaching "enough" solid state.  I have 6GB but I did sync with the second quality setting and can't fit all my 1K songs from my Favorites playlist.  If I were to lower the quality and get a more normal size, 8GB, I think I could quite comfortably fit everything I like and own at the moment.
3) It seems like most jumps in solid state have always been to double capacity--except for the Sansa 6GB model.  Will the next flash player be 16GB?  That is getting huge!  I mean honestly, that would be double my current mix.  Unless people start going crazy with syncing, I would be content with even 8GB at the moment.  I doubt my collection & favorites will double in the next few months or whenever we see 16GB.
4) I only wonder at that point, and perhaps the 32GB or 64GB solid state players, if then the HDD players will go to hundreds of GB.  The big issue here is video, obviously.  But, on a small screen, the quality can be a bit lower.

New conversation on this issue welcome!

[Robert Taylor]

We used to have two disk played MP3 players (Creative Nomad 3, and Zen-Touch)

We bought 4Gb ipods when we started going to gym.

Hard disk players can be touchy if you jump around a bit.

The older disk based players are now our camping music (not much jumping around)

[BartMan01]

My wife's 4GB iPod holds 1000+ tracks.  More than enough for most purposes.

HD based players are good if you need/want your whole library along with you.  I like having my 60GB when out of town on business - but I use it as a combo music player/external storage.

[RFB]

I find that I need to own two players, both a large capacity HD player and a smaller flash one.  For at home use (and sometimes at the mall) I tend to favor my 30gb Zune.  But for out and about, I generally use my Sansa e280.  It's a great little durable player to stash in a pocket as needed and has great battery life.

If I ever get back into exercising, I will use the Sansa for that too.

Rick

[johnnyboy]

I like my large capacity HD mp3 player as it means I get to choose what music I want to listen to at that moment I want to listen to it at.
I dont have to pre-decide before hand what I think I might want to listen to at some later point.

For day to day commuting though and short journeys I think the solid state ones are better.

The new Sansa e280 is 8Gb AND it allows you to use microSD cards so you can get another 4Gb in there pretty easily and if you wanted to be smart could have a couple of different cards with different things on - abit like we used to do with cassettes back in the day!

[benn600]

This brings up more issues, though.  Even if you have 11K songs, what is the point in carrying them with you except in the unlikely event that you'll run into someone who just has to hear this specific song that you have at home but not on your player.

I think the issue is if people are interested or willing in/to changing their music playlists.  I personally have basically no use for playlists, generally speaking.  I am not one to make a playlist with songs I'm interested in at the moment.  I need to try them out more.  But, I will make one for songs I've forgotten about and suddenly found or songs that I'm always thinking: what was that song?!

So many songs in my library are songs that I really do not care for but they were included on the album purchase, so they end up in my library.  If you sync your entire collection to an 80GB iPod, then you sure better have lots of playlists or at least one with your favorite songs because when you're on the go, the last thing you want to do is get frustrated with not being able to find any songs you like.

[Robert Taylor]

When you setup synchronisation in MC, you can create a bunch of playlists specifically for your device.

This is what my wife and I do.

So, I might have a playlist called "Rob's Train Music". I put all the track in there that I would like to listen to on the train each day on the way to work. I tell MC in the device sync options which playlists are for syncing. When I connect my device, it automagically copies the songs in the playlist(s) which I selected under sync options, along with the playlist itself.

Next day, If I modify the playlist (ie. remove some songs, and add some more), and then reconnect my device, it syncs again, removing the tracks I deleted from the playlist, and adding those which I added. (This is dependant on the options Autosync on Connect, and Delete from handheld any files not in sync list under the handheld options)

I don't even consider syncing my entire collection. I haven't come across a handheld yet to store ~45000 tracks of around 300Gb.

I think of my ipod/nomad as an easy to customise subset of my collection.

Works Great!

[razumik]

This brings up more issues, though.  Even if you have 11K songs, what is the point in carrying them with you except in the unlikely event that you'll run into someone who just has to hear this specific song that you have at home but not on your player.

I like having my entire collection on the ipod because sometimes I prefer to listen to entire albums (even if some of the songs are not my favorites) rather than listening to multiple artists in a playlist.  Most of the playlists that I do have are smartlists based on ratings, date imported, etc., so they do not actually require any effort on my part to keep organized.  The ~mix command in playlists is also a good way to automatically create interesting playlists that require very little intervention. 

For running and such I use a 1GB Shuffle.  I actually spend more time setting up songs for it than I do my 60GB Ipod because I am trying to put songs that I am interested in hearing right away, rather than letting MC create the playlist for me.