Redstate

Actually there are lots of brands without a fashionability price premium, but I say Sony to point out one division of Sony sells mp3 players designed for precisely the activity their other division sues people for.

Works great, and only DRM-free music goes on it (and Rush 24/7 podcasts when I can't catch the stream online).

www.scottbomb.com

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. --- John Adams

Their marketing strategists must be almost as brainless as their lawyers - thinking that making their product a pain in the butt to use was the way to increase sales. Thankfully the market slaps some sense into even the dumbest executives,and most companies are coming around to selling easy to use mp3's on Amazon etc.

They got Microsoft to embed DRM into the core of VISTA destroy every video and sound cards, driver model. That expensive HDMI cable made to be tamper proof between your player and monitor was courtesy of them.

Oh and lets not forget the added overhead in decoding HDDVD and bluray discs. Then there is the ability to deactivate players that have been sold. I can't wait till someone actually does that.

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

snark aside, I'm kind of suprised to find anti-DRM rants on Redstate. It's not that I'm a gigantic fan of the concept, I just can't point to any specific way in which my blu-ray discs or the music I download from iTunes is a pain-point in my life.

Keep in mind I've spent my entire life pirating digital bits of all kinds from Apple IIe games on 5.25" discs to DVDs. It's hard for me to get mad at content owners for trying to prevent me from doing this.

Their products all they like. AS they go out of business there will be that many more signposts to deter future stupidity. My problem is when they can get the laws altered to benefit their stupidity. Now we have garage door and ink cartridge manufacturers using the DMCA to suppress competition.

Meanwhile HDDVD and BluRay were both cracked before they were released.

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

because I have been putting off making a purchase so I wouldn't be caught holding on the the "betamax".

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

Last I heard toshiba was shutting down production

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Toshiba has already shut it down. Information Week article here.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

Half my movie collection is still VHS. I figure I'm going to have to buy a case of players before they stop making them so I can keep watching my movies.

And there's no way I'm gonna pay $40~$50 for a movie. I'm having fun in the bargain racks right now, buying old technology DVDs for $5 ea.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

I've had a blu-ray player for almost a year, and don't own a single blu-ray disc. I've outsourced that duty to netflix.

I am definitely against government involvement in such things (well, pretty much all things actually), but I would disagree with the notion that companies that employ DRM on their products will go out of business while companies that let Chinese bootlegs of their product that are 100% identical sell for pennies on the dollar will thrive. Piracy is a big problem in the digital age, I can't fault companies for trying to stop it. I do concede some are clearly more ham-fisted about it then others.

Being opposed to companies that make MP3s more trouble then they're worth is one thing, as it can constitute a business model that consumers simply aren't interested in. But what's your beef with Blu-Ray? Were you planning on ripping a collection of 50GB discs to a media server or something? This is the argument I've heard in the past, which concludes with people saying 1080p video with uncompressed sound simply isn't worth it if they have to suffer the moral stain of DRM.

They will just remaster the disc with the DRM then copy the art and as often as not you wind up with a product that looks better than the original.

As to Bluray Nothing really I haven't bought either yet. But I imagine there are many people that bought HD-DVD that are upset they were locked into a dead system.

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Intellectual property owners have a legitimate interest in discouraging unauthorized distribution of products they want to get paid for. The problem is when their tactics in that pursuit make their product so cumbersome, that the reduced availability of illegal product does not generate enough additional legal sales to make up for the lost customers who would pay for an unprotected file but not for DRM'd garbage.

would disagree with the notion that companies that employ DRM on their products will go out of business while companies that let Chinese bootlegs of their product that are 100% identical sell for pennies on the dollar will thrive.

I don't know if if anyone has gone out of business because they used DRM, but lousy sales of DRM'd music is what has driven many companies to now sell that music as unprotected MP3's. They obviously figure they can make more money selling without DRM.

I do concede some are clearly more ham-fisted about it then others.

It may also be the type of product. I'm not sure anyone has yet figured out a way to DRM music that doesn't cause unacceptable annoyance to a lot of of people who would be willing to pay for non-DRM music.

But what's your beef with Blu-Ray? Were you planning on ripping a collection of 50GB discs to a media server or something?

I'm not the one with who raised that beef, but I think the problem is all the overhead bloat that Vista added to support that protection. Again it's not the principle of DRM, it's how much annoyance its practice creates for their paying customers, not just would be pirates.

It's cheap, so when you have to buy a new one again, and again, and again, you can almost afford it.

Plus there's the fact that there's probably no other player on the market with a) the playlist features of the iPod and b) AAC audio playback.

I've looked, but I can't find an equal to the iPod yet.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

I'm in the market for a new ipod, but only because my ancient 20GB one is out of space. There's nothing to suggest it wouldn't last forever. I broke it once during the first year by being careless, and I took it to an apple store and they handed me a new one, no questions asked.

... then it must be true. North Koreans are told that everywhere else life is so awful, that their own standard of living is great in comparison. Some of them actually believe it. A lot of Apple disciples have similar delusions about the outside world.

It's cheap, so when you have to buy a new one again, and again, and again

I've owned 4 mp3 players, none of them Apple, and none of them ever malfunctioned. That includes the 3 year old Samsung I keep in my car, which I dropped on asphalt from waist level and still works fine. But the iCatechism tells you if you ever buy anything from the evil outsiders it will fall apart.

AAC audio playback

Lots of MP3 players can play AAC files, but their owners don't know it because they never had a good reason to get music in AAC format. (Mine plays AAC, which I didn't know until I checked just now.) It's Apple's proprietary DRM that makes most of those AAC files iPod only.

There's probably another iCatchism item that tells you that if iTunes sells in AAC it must be superior to MP3, more nonsense which iBelievers accept without question. For internet radio stations that want to offer a low bandwidth stream, AAC makes sense. Around 64k or less, AAC does sound better than the same size MP3. But even at the 128k bitrate iTunes originally sold its songs at, AAC has no advantage over MP3. AAC does add other capabilities, but irrelevant to home/car stereos or earphones.

playlist features of the iPod

There certainly are some users for whom an iPod is a good choice, especially Mac users which many manufacturers don't bother supporting. If there's some esoteric playlist method you like and can only find on an iPod, then that's a good reason for you to buy an iPod. However based on your other misconceptions of the outside world, I don't know if those playlist features are really something commonly found on other players.

Mach 3 trio
Creative Muvo

And the Colby

Oh man.

The trio would be fine except for the fact that it is the slowest flash drive in existence. I mean pick your files start the copy process and then come back in the morning.

Colby see above with bad sound as well.

The Zodiac. Man this thing has an entirely new concept in user interface. Completely unpredictable. I mean I have no idea what tapping on a control will do at any given time. Its either because the sensitivity of the controls is off the scale or somebody forgot to initialize variables but whatever its going to do it does and then you have to hope to get it to do what you want.

The Muvo. No controls. If you are lucky you can maybe pick whats next. Also at its price point it should have had a rechargeable battery instead of the strange two piece arrangement that was meant to be lost.

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Its shuffle didn't much resemble random, and any playlist with more than a hundred songs would take forever to load (and just having a lot of large playlists saved would slow down the player start up). Syncing it would get confused about what it already had. What a piece of junk.

It is dirt cheap, so for some people's price-quality trade off preferences it's a rational choice. One defender correctly told me you won't find anything better (or even as good) for that price. But for me, if the universe was limited to Sansas and iPods, I would join the iSheep.

Most of the players I see just have you dump the files into a directory and then sort through them, lacking any capability of having multiple stored playlists you can use, such as all iPods have.

As for AAC: I just go by the documented lists of features that the manufacturers themselves provide, you know, because I'd be a moron to buy something that can't play all the files I have. And NOTHING out there claims to play AAC, that I've seen.

But your first line shows you have some sort of emotional agenda with this, and you intend just to be arrogant and belligerent rather than have a rational discussion among people looking to make sensible purchases, so I don't know why I bother.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

... about what's out there among the alternatives.

Most of the players I see just have you dump the files into a directory and then sort through them, lacking any capability of having multiple stored playlists you can use, such as all iPods have.

That was true for a half gig iRiver I owned many years ago, but not any time recently. Every player I recall looking at when deciding what to buy supports the generic sync protocol used by Windows Media Player and various alternatives like freeware Media Monkey. Some players also include their own sync software in the box, but I found WMP works fine for my purposes so wouldn't bother installing it.

A typical approach is designate playlists to include in the sync - your own manually created playlists and/or automatically generated playlists based on genre, age, user's song ratings etc. Then those playlists and the songs in them are copied to the player.

Playlist based sync has been pretty standard for years. Some users still prefer to use drag and drop, but that's by choice not necessity.

And NOTHING out there claims to play AAC, that I've seen.

I suppose that's typically relegated to the specifications section, not something they bother advertising. Just in the Wikipedia AAC article I see some of the most common players support AAC.

But your first line shows you have some sort of emotional agenda with this, you intend just to be arrogant and belligerent rather than have a rational discussion among people looking to make sensible purchases

OK, I did get sarcastic, which wasn't constructive and I'm sorry I did. But as an extenuating factor I'll say it's sort of like when somebody sincerely believes that Bush faked evidence of WMD and posts some snarky comment based on that sincere misconception - after previously hearing people repeat it as a "known fact" among their circle, responding with a helpful explanation of the factual mistake is more likely to persuade, but doesn't always come naturally.

A government big enough to give you what you need, is big enough to take what you have - Thomas Jefferson

be used in yours as long as it has been materially altered in some way. That is how MC Hammer could steal Rick James "superfreak", beat to use in "Can't touch this".

It has to do with the way copyright law has evolved (a stupid concept). If George Harrison had been in a modern court for "my sweet lord" he would have won.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle