I am finally gonna break down and buy an Ipod or something similar. My question is it worth the extra money to go with the orginal or spend the same amount of money and get more memory from a Ipod look-alike. other factor I am consider are ease of use and downloading music, both from comerical sites and cd's I already own. My budget is about $300. any input will be appreciated.
~mike

I've been really happy with my Iriver H320.

Beautiful LCD, better abilities than ipod photo, filetree based mp3 organization. Not to say it doesn't have its flaws, such as the poor shuffle function and crappy U.S. firmware (everyone who owns it pretty much uses the korean firmware).

Either way, it's a great player and I believe boxwave is making an iskin knockoff for it fairly soon. I think they run around 240 bucks.

Oh, yeah. ipods are nice too, im just not fond of it's easily marred silver back.

ive had my ipod for about 6 months and have nothing but good things to say about it. it always performs flawlessly, like most apples.

Well, I've had my 40gb Ipod since Christmas and I love it. There are a few good alternates out there, but all things considered, were I to need another, I'd probably still buy another Ipod.

i've have my ipod for about 7 months now and i have no complaints either.

i would suggest buying one of these right away though:

www.iskin.com these things look pretty damn sharp (and you wont scratch the metal back...i wish i would have bought one sooner)

Seconded. They also serve as a nice little bumper from small drops and bumps that might not kill the Ipod, but might leave some minor damage (scuffing, dents in the chrome back.)

I'll second this, though I have the H340. I'd also get the Irivium software since the firmware it comes with is, yeah, crappy.

If you do have an ipod you should check out this program.
It lets you put songs from your (or anyone's) ipod back on your computer, which itunes won't let you do. It also ignores anything that you already have, so you don't get a bunch of duplicate songs in your itunes when you download an entire ipod. You only get what you don't have already.

iPod Access

and ummm... my brother developed it. It's good though, stable and slick (and free, for the trial). OK sorry, I'll stop spamming for my bro now.

I have a Zen Touch and it works just dandy.

my wife and i have had a number of ipods and have never had a complaint.

same here.

Have an ipod; it crapped out on me after a month but Apple sent me a new one and I haven't had an issue since. It's a great toy.

if you are ever prone to getting stuff stolen, do NOT get an iPod. Whenever someone sinster sees one they'll ALWAYS try to take it. It happened to me...

Seriously? What happened?

i had a party that got a little too big (200 or so) because of whatever (line, lines, lines), and some guy took it. It was partially hidden too.

that sucks, but I guess that's an hazard of a party that size. I was thinking it was one of those 'white earphones, I'm a mark' kind of tales.

haha. That would have been funnier though...

I have to quote myself because I jinxed myself. On the way home from family party tonight, my Ipod took it upon itself to randomly pause not once but twice. It's done this a few times in the past few weeks and each time I was just certain I'd accidently bumped the pause button or something, but this time my wife and I are 100% certain that we did absolutely nothing to cause it to pause . . . and then pause again about 20 seconds later. I need to shut up about the Ipod, because the Ipod senses your confidence in it and uses it against you to make you appear foolish!

I'm pretty happy with my Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I got it for cheap from Creative themselves off eBay. I don't think they sell them any more, but you could perhaps get the second latest and greatest (yesterday's technology) from them cheap (I know MuVo is the flash based one, I don't know what the hard-drive based one is). I don't think you'll get an iPod for US$300, and there are no "clones", there are only "other mp3 players".

I'm still using the Sony Discman I bought a few years ago for $39.95.


Don't laugh. It plays any cd I put in it and has continuous anti-skip capabilities. I even bought a tape adapter for it when I'm rockin' in my '92 Sentra. I love stuff that lasts forever.