To say that my Creative Zen Vision:M is getting a little long in the tooth is an understatement. 30 gigabytes is simply not enough storage for any self-respecting music fan. Herein lies the problem: NO ONE is making an excellent high-capacity mp3 player. To get the obvious out of the way, I refuse to buy an iPod. Refuse, refuse, refuse. My reasoning is simple: The customizability on the iPod is atrocious, iTunes is garbage, and I’m not going to help perpetuate the Apple Cult. With that out of the way, my only other option at the moment is the Cowon iAudio X5, a player so close to the verge of being discontinued that I’m not even giving it a second thought. So what is every digital audio player manufacturer on the Earth busying itself with at the moment? Shoddy flash memory-based players with paltry memory or hulking and unnecessary personal media players with criminally bad battery life. Who honestly watches video on a 2.5” screen? Anyone? If so, why?
There is nothing inherently impossible in what I’m looking for. I feel like an LP enthusiast circa the late 1980’s, when it seems as if the market is taking huge steps backwards and perpetuating garbage. I’ll provide a basic break down what I want:
- At least 100GB of storage
- Support for mp3, but support for FLAC and OGG should ideally be included as well.- A reasonably decent screen. I don’t care about watching movies on the thing, but I would like to see album art and have a custom background.
- Good to excellent playlist creation. The last player I had with decent options in creating a playlist on the player itself was a monstrous Zen Xtra in 2003. Every player I’ve had since then has been a gigantic step backwards. Whoever thought it was acceptable to require users to create playlists on their PCs and import those to the player shouldn’t qualify as human. And this “on-the-go” playlist nonsense is shameful.
- Absolutely no software required. No bullshit, bloated proprietary software should be necessary to drag my already-organized collection over to.
That’s it. I will put up with lackluster design and fiddle with half-assed controls if need be. It consistently amazes me that people are willing to put up with crap like iTunes and the limited functionality of the severely-crippled mass-market players. I don’t claim to be any sort of digital audio expert, but seriously, there isn’t a single good mp3 player on the market at the moment, and a soon-to-be discontinued player by a minor company is the best we’ve got. Are my expectations too high or are people just willing to settle for crap time and again?
