I two have a creative zen microphoto and it's really good. it doesnt have the style the ipod has but that dosnt matter cos it makes up for it with sound quality.

Edited October 2, 200619 yr by mrspidersir

yeah, the sound quality on there is fantastic!

i like the way the menu is configured and such - and really good reception with the aerial.

my older sister has a zen microphoto, and i actually like it. hers is an 8 gig, which wouldn't really hold all my music [i'd need 20+ gigs] but i like it a lot more than iPods...for a number of reasons really..apple wanted to copywrite the word Pod, which didnt go so well, itunes [in general, i hate it] and lastly, the whole new interface. iPods might have games, alarms, stopwatches etc, but they really don't have the battery life, especially the video. 5 minutes of video almost cuts your battery life in half..plus, its an mp3 player, not youtube. i reserve mp3 players to music. maybe files for transfers at school/work, but primarily music. i have a tiny little 256mb mp3 player/flash drive that has about 40 songs on it, totalling 3 hours if i push it. i might remind you that i have over 2400 songs, all of them are legal, most of them are off CDs, some off itunes although $1 per song really doesn't go so hot with me, so i don't do it unless i absolutely have to. but even still, i don't use itunes as a player, i used it to get songs for my schools radio station [im the music director] and it was basically 14 bucks to the expense of almost everyone but me because i didn't really like most of the songs, but it shut people up.

the radio station even tried itunes for a day, and it totally went haywire. we're running 866MHz processors and special sound cards that have 1/4" output L/R for mixing. as good as it went, it didn't go so hot. itunes had issues with our sound card, the music sounded terrible, and the computer crashed over a dozen times, i didn't really keep track as to how many, but over ten. i'd rather use WMP. but i like winamp best, so thats what i do use

my suggestion is to do what i do, and use ipods as 'external drives' and just have the computer recognize it as a USB device, drag and drop music, and forget the software. it works better that way

i know this is kind of an old post, but it was in the new posts thingy lol

anyhoo, i use rockbox on my iPod. it not only sounds better, but i don't have to use itunes

plus, with rockbox, theres a lot of features which the iPod software should bloody well have. like 1, gapless playback and 2, a graphical EQ. how can you make a 300 dollar mp3 player that doesn't have a graphical EQ? my 50 dollar creative zen nano plus has one.

the iPod sounds a lot better now that i use rockbox on it, the bass is there and the highend hasnt been cut out. so its all good.

i'd buy an iPod video if i could get it in about 8 gb or so, maybe 10. friggin 30 and 80 gb is way too much for me. i have 6gb of music, so i don't need 30 gb, i don't understand how someone could have 80gb of music unless they actually had theyre own radio station.

i don't like the look of the Zune. its kinda plain/ugly imo. the iPod isnt much better, but i like the look of my nano a lot (its 9 months old and its mint condition ^_^)

i have since gone back to the original iPod software because there are some features i like, ie) better battery life and it can shut off properly now. other than that, i liked rockbox a lot better. the gapless playback and the EQ were my favourite 2 features. (if only an apple programmer would see this post)

anyway, im out.