<p>thanks Ejpejp87, I am clueless about all things technological so your post was really helpful! Do you know anything about Napster in relation to mp3 players? Thanks so much!</p>
<p>I just bought a 20GB iPod for $300. I really didn't want to pay that much but oh well. I also bought Best Buy's $50 plan for replacing the battery.
I'll get good use out of it. The only other mp3 player I have is a 256mb that drains the single AAA battery very quickly. Still, I think iPods are too expensive but people are willing to pay the price. I'm using a part-year resident state tax refund to pay for it. I just hope my battery lasts for a long time before I need to replace it.</p>
<p>You probobly got ripped off on the $50 plan but oh well...the ipod truly is a great music player in terms of audio (the headphones suck though) and usability. The looks...well...take it or leave it...it's a good SIZE and if you use that size to keep it hidden away, what does it matter what it looks like.</p>
<p>Napster...stay away would be my suggestion. You pay a monthly fee to essentially rent the music. If you ever stop paying that fee, all of your music is gone forever. The music they give you is subpar quality and laden with DRM (much more restrictive than the extremely lax apple DRM). Just go with real CD's, iTunes, and P2P because then at least you get to keep your music forever (and if you arent going to want it again later in life, you should pick some better music).</p>
<p>thanks ottothecow, I can't believe that anyone would pay for Napster if they knew that their music would be gone the minute they stopped paying! That is pretty ridiculous. Would you recommend P2P or iTunes?</p>
<p>lets see.. P2P is illegal... and free.. and itunes is legal, and costs money.. your choice.</p>
<p>...eh, that is a tough choice, and I am freakishly indecisive.</p>
<p>well, if you have a dollar per song and a credit card to pay it with, go with itunes (and then you dont have to search out good encodings from p2p or live with crap ones).</p>
<p>If you dont care that one in a million p2p people get in trouble, then probobly just find the highest bitrate mp3 you can and use that.</p>
<p>Or do like I do and when you find something you are sure you will like (heard a song and then downloaded a few others to sample), buy the CD. It's full quality and I still like having a real pressed disk with my music on it and liner notes. NOTE: only works if the musicians are talented enough to release CD's with more than one good song.</p>
<p>iTunes or P2P? You CAN use both. Also, there is a bunch of music that isn't on iTunes (Beatles and Led Zeppelin come to mind). As far as Napster, Yahoo Music, and all those, it's basically a music rental service. You have to pay more to put them on an mp3 player (well, anyone but the iPod) or burn them to a CD. And then, once you kill the rental, the songs are gone. In this respect, iPods are the best mp3 players because they are the only ones that work w/ iTunes, the only usefull online music store.</p>
<p>Thanks, otto! Just to clarify, are there any other services besides iTunes that you can use with the iPod mini?</p>
<p>jaimie, i believe that real rhapsody has music that can be played on an ipod, but IIRC Apple is suing them for patent infringement or something like that...</p>
<p>The only legal online services you can use w/ an iPod is iTunes. Napster and yahoo and those won't work. Rhapsody used to work, but I read something saying that it doesn't work anymore.</p>
<p>I looked this up and apparently the RealPlayer Music Store (which is owned by the same company as Rhapsody, but is different) will work with iPods. Rhapsody, however, doesn't.</p>
<p>all illegal systems will work, buying CD's will work, mytunes/ourtunes will work, and the psuedo-legal (its legal in their country but not here and the artists arent getting a cent so why bother) allofmp3.com will also work.</p>
<p>Thanks so much everyone! I think I will go with the iPod mini and use the RealPlayer Music Store or iTunes becuase it just seems the least complicated (and as you can see when it comes to technology, the least complicated the better for me :) )</p>
<p>Do you think I should get a case for my iPod mini?</p>
<p>don't listen to these people. Clearly they don't know curd about what they are saying. You can play any type of mp3 and many other formats on your ipod.</p>
<p>You can download the mp3 fdirectly from certain websites or p2p networks, ie kazaa. When you transfer these into the itunes library it wil convert the songs into a playable formatt.</p>
<p>good to know, hnbui.</p>
<p>cases are useful...</p>
<p>the back will otherwise become covered in fingerprints.</p>
<p>This might sound nerdy, but my S goes online to the public library system, orders CDs, picks them up and downloads tons of CDs on his Ipod for free, returning them when finished. He got the idea from a friend---I was astonished to see how much good music he's been able to get this way.</p>
<p>Go for the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (60 gb) - $264 or so, and it has 60 gig. of storage space! It just kicks the crap out of an ipod any day of the week (price is amazing). Best of all, it's really small (almost the size of the ipod, maybe slightly smaller/bigger) and it's compatible with any and all music download services that allow you to rent the music for a monthly/annual fee (Microsoft's Janus DRM software in the firmware allows one to do this); Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo, etc.</p>