Lazycoder

Digital Media Players

Coding Horror: iPod Alternatives: “”

I’ve been toying around with getting a big-boy/girl digital media player to replace my iPod Shuffle. The shuffle has been a great DMP for me, I normally just sync over random songs from my library and take it to work. It holds enough for a full day of music for me. But recently I’ve been wanting to watch more video during my commute. So Jeffs article made me re-consider what would should be a slam-dunk decision to get an iPod.

The best MP3 player I’ve owned to date was an old Archos 20GB Jukebox with the Open Source RockBox firmware installed. It connected just like any USB drive, it used a file-based browser so I could copy the files over to the drive as they were on my PC. I liked not having to try and maintain my music library using any kind of interface other than explorer. I’ll probably end up getting a 5th gen iPod. FM Radio doesn’t appeal to me that much, video is video is video. And there are enough 3rd party iPod file browsers out there to nullify any advantage, in my mind, that the Creative offerings have.