The Poor Man's iPod

So, my handy-dandy Rio Karma mp3 player recently died in a cacophony of odd "ticking" noises, probably the result of the hard drive permanantly crashing. I had run out of space on it about a year ago anyway, so I figured it was an opportunity to look at new mp3 players. The most obvious choice is the iPod of course. But I needed more than just 30gb, and $400 for the 60gb iPod was a little bit out of my price range. Of course, I also hate Apple products with a passion, because they usually sell style over substance, so I wasn't looking forward to buying an iPod anyway. (My ex actually bought me a 60gb iPod over Christmas, but I had her return it in favor of having her help me buy the nice little laptop that I'm using right now to compose this blog entry. :-)

So, I began doing a survey of all the other mp3 players out there. I knew I needed at least 30gb, and preferably more, but it had to cost less than an iPod. And I wanted an FM tuner because I never get to listen to the radio anymore. First up was Creative, since they generally have the best value in products. I checked out the Zen Vision:M. This product was the absolute most unintuitive thing I have ever tried. The buttons didn't work very well, so I had to press hard and multiple times, and it would zoom back and forth through the menus too much. Plus I found it hard to actually get to listen to music or use the radio. This is pretty typical of Creative products, good value but not exactly flashy or easy to use. I then tried the Philips GoGear jukebox, which worked better than the Zen but had a pretty small screen. Plus I just don't trust Philips stuff, I've had bad experiences with it. What alternatives are left? I've heard truly terrible things about the Toshiba Gigabeat line of products, including all kinds of bugs and crashes. I can't try out Dell's mp3 player since it's only available online, and I'm not about to buy something I can't try in my hands first.

Finally, while browsing around at Best Buy, I stumbled across an old mp3 playback option: the mp3 Discman. The idea behind an mp3 Discman is that in addition to being able to play CD's, it can play a bunch of mp3's burned onto a CD as well. I had owned a Panasonic mp3 Discman several years ago, but it didn't work very well and was very picky about how files were burned onto the disc. The thing that perked my interest about these devices was how dirt-cheap they were. $35 for an mp3 Discman? That's a ridiculously good deal! Consider the following: Currently almost all 30gb hard drive mp3 players are going for $300, so about $10/gb. But buying a Discman plus a 50 pack of CD-R's (about 35gb of storage space) can be as cheap as $50!! Sure, you have to burn all your mp3's onto CD-R's, and that takes time, and then you have to carry around a bunch of CD's with you. But chances are you have a burner, you have the time, and you already have CD-carrying cases. OK, so it's not as easy to carry around or as sexy as an iPod. Would you be willing to be less "sexy" and have a little more inconvenience if it would save you $250?! And if you ever needed more space, all you'd have to do is spend $10 for another 50-pack of CD-R's! It gets cheaper and cheaper the more storage space you need!

I hunted around for a Discman that had both an FM tuner and support for mp3 ID tags. I finally settled on the Sony NF430 for only $60 at Target. Add a 50-pack of CD-R's for $15 and in total I spent around $80 plus tax for my mp3 player setup. I burned four CD's worth of music and used it on a recent trip to Italy and Greece, and it performed flawlessly. The sound quality was pretty good, I got over 10 hours of music on each CD, and it wasn't too much trouble to just carry around 4 CD's with me when I decided to switch discs. It wasn't very convenient to use at the gym, so I'll probably look into some sort of hip or armband for it. But overall, considering how little I ended up paying for it, I'm quite happy about buying it.