Re: [tlug] "Long Live Portable OGG-Players"

["Lyle H Saxon" <llletters@example.com>]

On 4/29/07, Niels KobschÃtzki <n.kobschaetzki@example.com> wrote:
> In Germany it's different. All of the stores have 90% other players
> and some give only some special place for iPods and accessories. Here
> in Berlin you can see that more and more ppl have iPods just because
> of the headphones but I still see a lot of those cheap flash-based
> mp3-players around (more or less USB-sticks with mp3-playing
> capabilities).

Well... you could also say that the iPod is more or less a cheap hard
drive with electronic music file playing capabilities....

> But I have to say that the greatest advantage of an iPod (except of
> the interface and smart playlists based on rating/play-/skipcount) is
> it multilingual capabilities. Here I won't get any mp3-player that
> will display Japanese titles correctly (or Korean or Russian or
> whatever). And I hate it when I have to transcribe each of my non-
> alphabet song-titles, artist names or whatever. What are you guys
> doing with that? Is there any other player which gives you some kind
> of UTF-8 capabilites?

Song titles - I'm slightly interested in them when I'm loading up my
music player, but after that, I just listen to it by folder and could
care less what the song titles are.  I do notice iPod users on the
trains often searching for things.  It's a different way of using a
player - I have the total list of things at home, and just load in
what I want to listen to (into three main folders) for the next few
weeks or so (into 2GB of flash memory).  If I want to listen to
something specific, I navigate to the relevant sub-folder and if I get
sick of a song, I skip to the next one.  As for the song titles
displaying in Japanese, they do when the file name is Japanese, but
for my Japanese language CDs, I skip the on-line database deal and
just give the lot of the songs the album name with a track number.  I
just listen to the songs, I don't need to call them by name.

One thing I wonder about with the hard-drive based iPods - how long do
the batteries hold out between charges?  My 2GB Creative runs for
couple of weeks or so of three-hours a day (Monday-Friday) usage
between charges.

Lyle