If I was going to buy a portable music player (which I’m not, because I have
my phone, which works well enough), I’d want the following features, none of
which seem to be available with any device on the whole planet. If one
did exist with these features, I’d buy it. Come to think of it,
they’d be cheap, so I’d buy two.
- Music is stored on Secure Digital (SD) or Compact Flash (CF) cards. Two slots please, because it’s cheap to add a second and it would be quite handy to have more than one.
- Takes one or two AA or AAA batteries.
- Has a display. Nothing fancy: one line is enough. Sometimes I want to know the name of the song I’m listening to, or see what the thing thinks it’s doing.
- Plays music properly. No gaps or clicks between tracks. No waiting for a response.
- Plays Ogg Vorbis, AAC (stuff you get from iTunes), MP3, (protected) WMA and preferably every other compressed audio format that exists. No stupid limits on what’s supported in terms of format, subformat (VBR!), bitrate, etc.
- A new set of batteries give at least 12 hours of playback.
- Has a sliding lock, to disable all the buttons.
- USB 2.0 ‘hi speed’ interface (that’s 480Mbps).
- Speaks USB Mass Storage and works when you transfer your files by just copying them onto the memory card via USB.
- Understands artist/album/track folders.
- Understands tags properly. No stupid bugs like treating UTF-8 tags in Vorbis files as if they were ISO-8859-1.
- Comes with decent headphones or none at all.
- Plays at a decent volume, rather than having a maximum volume which is rather quiet.
Update: I changed my mind because my phone stopped playing
music properly - its proprietary connector socket is a bit broken.
I bought an iPod nano 2nd
generation.