Muvo2 versus iPod mini
Published by Becky S July 30th, 2004 in tech
I still say iPod, schmiPod. Set aside the cult of Apple and check out this comparison between the iPod mini and Creative’s Nomad Muvo2. Some highlights:
- Storage: both are 4 GB mp3 players
- Weight: Muvo2 = 3.2 oz, iPod mini = 3.6 oz
- Size: the MuVo is smaller. Compare my picture to this one.
- Battery life: Muvo2 = 14 hours, iPod mini = 8 hours
- Price: the Muvo2 is $50 cheaper
Seriously, a rational comparison (which means discounting the hip factor) shows that the iPod mini is a colorful, well-designed gadget which is larger, more expensive, and plays for fewer hours. If you’re a Windows user–and let’s face it, most of us are–you can extract even more value from the Muvo2 by ripping your CD collection to Windows Media files*, which are much smaller than their mp3 counterparts.
The iPod mini doesn’t make sense for regular old people who want to copy their CD collections onto portable devices and download the occasional mp3. Pay $50 less and get a better product, or pay $50 more and upgrade to a regular iPod with a much larger capacity.
* Lots of people think that the Windows Media format is evil. Propriety, part of Microsoft’s plan for world domination, etc. Um, yeah, but the files are smaller. Smaller! Why be satisfied with 64 hours of tunes when you could get up to 128?
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But dude, the iPod mini totally comes in different colors.
Well if I ever decided to jump into the portable digital music scene (not counting my Porable MP3 CD Player) my momey would go to Dell and their Digital Jukebox.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/dj?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
sorry that isn’t a kewl hyperlink.. I am hyperlink impaired.
Propriety? The quality of being proper; appropriateness
Proprietary? Exclusively owned; private
Microsoft may be the latter, but certainly not the former.
Hmmm…an interesting mistake I made there. I’ll just take my proper and appropriate Windows Media files and slink away now.
apple has one thing going for it, and it isn’t those crappy players: itunes — not the software, the store. alas, if you want to pay to download there isn’t really anything out there that can touch the itunes store. they’ll sell more and more ipods as long as they continue to dominate the download music business.
personally, i’m an iriver addict. my h100 is da bomb. it’s software-upgradeable too — iriver has (slowly) been releasing new features for it. sweet.
as for ripping: i tried ogg-vorbis, and they sound great, but using them for mixed discs was an issue — although nero has ogg-vorbis support now. so i settled on the lame mp3 encoder. sounds great. and if you tweak it and use vbr (and you should be using vbr) you can get the sizes pretty close to wma (which is small because it’s a vbr format) without locking yourself to windows-only players. the best combination for ripping (if you want my opinion) is:
rip to wav with audiograbber
encode to mp3 with lame and the razorlame gui
fix the tags with id3-tagit
what is really great about this approach is step 2, the encoding, which usually takes the bulk of the time, can be done in batch mode with razorlame. so you rip a bunch of cd’s to wav files really quickly and then leave razorlame chunring away all night long encoding them.
and there’s my random post to someone else’s blog for the day.
I love my iPod. My precious!!
Well, it took me a while to get around to it, but I finally posted a pro-iPod rebuttal on my site.
I could not sit idle and let the amazing Apple iPod mini get trounced!
En garde!
;-)