Greetings,

First and foremost... I have searched here, there and everywhere but can't seem to find what I'm looking for to answer my questions. If it's out there handy in easy to comprehend newbie/layman's terms, my apologies and please just point me in the direction and I will be on my way.

I'm very new to the MP3 player world and while I (think) I know what I am trying to ask, I don't know how to phrase it in the correct technological terms. So I will stammer and babble here a bit in hopes of getting my thoughts across and hope for a response. If at any point you read something that causes you to think that I understand the process, I'm sorry for misleading you.

My end objective is to do the following:

*Begin burning my cd catalog as well as begin downloading new music online, saving both to a commonly used high quality/lossless format (that is to say will probably still be supported 5 years from now), that will allow me to enjoy a higher level of audio on a home system.

*Burn cd's as well as download online music to an mp3 player at a rate that will give me 15-20% better quality than what my ears can currently discern, while at the same time not overdoing it and wasting space/memory saving at a higher bit rate than neccesary.

*Obtain an MP3 Player that is highly portable (for use while exercising and while driving my peanut Honda Fit), and at the same time delivers very high quality sound (for an MP3 player).

*As much as possible, KISS, Keep It Simple (for this) Stupid.

I have been looking around the net at a lot of different MP3 (will we always call it that?) players, and I recently narrowed it down from the Clix2 8GB, the ipod Touch and the soon to be released Creative Zen 16GB, to the touch and the Zen, which I realize are two very different players. The Touch would be what I guess many would consider the safer option for someone like me who is completely new to this. The ease of using iTunes (I know... I can expect a half dozen replies telling me iTunes is the worst thing ever), and the fact that iTunes has a large base of customers and probably won't go away soon. Then there is the instant wow factor with the Touch is appealing. After playing with the touch screen in a local apple store this weekend, I can say it is fun. The Creative on the other hand, it doesn't have the same "wow" factor, it has a smaller screen, it doesn't have the support/backing of iTunes in terms of being able to drop itunes Plus right in, and the 16GB I desire isn't even out yet. Having said all that, I am really drawn to the Creative Zen. It has the expansion slot, FM radio, a recorder, it supports multiple video options, I've read the screen (while smaller) is gorgeous, it supports mp3 WMA and unprotected AAC files, meaning it will play back iTunesPlus tracks, though you can't use iTunes to transfer them (will go back to this in a moment), it's not locked into a protected format (iTunes), it supposedly sounds great (very important), has a 5 band adjustable EQ and I just really like the design lay-out, the 5 way control pad and all the various control buttons over the Touch screen (which I imagine is slower to operate). The Zen is considerably smaller than the Touch, which is very important to me as I will be working out with whichever player I go with. I saw an armband on Belkin for the Touch, and I have to say it just looked awkward. Kind of big, kind of like someone trying to make a fashion statement at the gym... "look at me, I have an ipod Touch!" I don't know. I think the Touch looks great but looks really big on my arm. As much as I like shiney new things, In the end I'm much less concerned with the "wow" factor and am more concerned with meeting my needs, and it just seems like the Zen might do this better. I say "might" because I'm confused about the audio format options and the question of the sound quality of those formats. With that, please allow me to tell you one place I am confused...

I read that the Creative Zen sounds great, yet it only supports MP3, WMA and iTunes Plus. Then I go somewhere else and I read that MP3, WMA and iTunes Plus are inferior formats to ALAC or FLAC. Then I read the Nano supports ALAC but does not sound near as good as the new Zen that does not support ALAC. This all leaves me very confused. If ALAC is superior to AAC or MP3, how can a player that supports ALAC (Nano gen3) sound worse than a player that does not support ALAC/lossless? Is it somewhat like saying the Nano is a CD playing through a $25.00 Audiovox amp (made it up), where as the Creative Zen is a lower quality cassette tape playing through an outlaw amp? Or is this comparison worthless, because of the limitation of the processors in MP3 players in general? Another words, even if the Zen I'm leaning towards supported ALAC, using the Zen would I really be able to tell the difference between ALAC and iTunes Plus through a pair of Super Fi 5 buds? Is the lossless format being superior to AAC/MP3 really a comparison intended to be used when I'm sitting at home trying to drive music through a pair of $900.00 Ascend Sierra-1 monitors?

If AAC vs ALAC is critical in an MP3 player, then I suppose I will wait to see how reviews of the Touch go, knowing it will support ALAC. If it doesn't matter, that puts me one step closer to the Zen (which makes me happy), but leads me to my next question...

If I burn cd's to ALAC and download music from iTunes in an ALAC format, how easy is it to transfer the file type from ALAC to an AAC unprotected type (iTunes plus or any others the Creative will except) and then download that AAC type file to my Creative Zen, knowing that you cannot use iTunes to download files to the Zen? My major concerns are, I'm wanting a conversion option that is somewhat easy (somewhat important), not too time consuming compartively speaking (somewhat important), and the most crucial element of all to me, a conversion option that is very *reliable,* well supported and not a conversion program that Windows XP is going to constantly crash out on. My other conern being future use and compatibility. In other words, will I still be able to use the program 3 years from now?

I hope I have somewhat conveyed what I am looking for but to sumarize:

Ease of use

High quality sound

Higher quality (lossless) audio format for use with home stereo system

Small MP3 Player for use on the go and mostly for use while exercising (Cowan A2 and Archos 605 out)

Ease of use

High quality sound

Ability to convert well supported Lossless format into MP3 player

MP3 Player with a very high quality sound so that I get the most out of my music on the go

Ease of use

High quality sound

I greatly appreciate your time and any feedback or direction that you may be able to provide. Please do not hesitate to let me know should you have any questions.

Best Regards,
Hard Bop fan

I'm no expert, but you've got too many nodes in your decision tree here, and I might be able to help with that.

1. For your purposes, forget about lossless on a portable player. You might or might not be able to hear a difference between a good lossy format and lossless, but you won't be able to do it in the gym or in your car, unless you're a dog.

2. Don't bother too much about which lossless format to use, since one lossless format can be converted to another, like, losslessly.

3. I'm not quite sure why you're wanting to burn lossy versions to a CD. Is this to play in your car? Most people do all their format fiddling on their puters, and burn optical disks only for use on a player, or for backups.

4. No one can possibly advise you on settings that will give you a 15-20% margin above what you can hear, even if that is a meaningful criterion. To get any kind of a handle on that, you will need to do ABX testing to tell what settings, with what codecs, are indistinguishable by you from CD/lossless. Then you go one or two steps further up the scale. But if you're keeping everything in lossless (except what you're downloading from iTunes in 256 kbps AAC), it's not a biggie because you can transcode from the lossless quite easily.


So it looks like your choice boils down to iPod Touch with iTunes vs Creative with something else, and, semi-independently, MP3 vs AAC as your lossy codec.

That's enough to be chewing on.

About portable. For lossless you need much more memory then for lossy (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC) files. So it may be better to get HDD based player. In hardware section of this forum was topic about new Cowon A3 - very good player with wide format range support. As for sound - iAudio are known as players with good sound (of course you also need good headphones). For lossless format I can suggest to use FLAC (most widespread and supported lossless codec). For lossy - Ogg Vorbis.

But this is only my opinion, you can get more knowledge by reading HA wiki and corresponding sections of this forum.