Like the subject says, is it worth the extra money to buy the iPod or would I be perfectly satisfied with a Nomad? I can get a 30G Nomad for less than the price of a 20G iPod. Any experiences?

depends on which nomad i guess. maybe the new touch ones are nicer/easier to use

but that little switch/wheel on the side of the nomad zen just doesn't appeal to me. I find the ipod click wheel a lot easier to navigate around things. ipod may be simpler and have fewer options, but it plays music and is easy to use.

so if you don't mind the price difference for that kind of stuff (ease of use), go for it.

I didn't pay for my ipod, and if i was buying an mp3 player i'd probably go for the nomad or possibly even the iriver.

i'm thrilled with my ipod, but i do think they're overpriced.

I had the nomad (zen xtra)(the one with the little click lever on the side) for 25 days and hated the whellie thingy used to navigate. Menu system is clunkier than iPod, on-the-go playlists sucked, and it is noticably bigger than the ipod. Only upsides are it has a removeably battery, and it supports WMA.

On the 25th day it broke and sound started only coming out of one ear (on all headphones I used), on the 28th day I took advantage of Amazon's liberal returns policy, and on the 29th day I ordered my iPod which I love to this day. Get the iPod.

I never cared for WMA audio. Back in 99-00, microsoft used to say how great it was and how you could get cd quality at 64kbit/sec. well if you don't mind everything sounding metallic/underwater, it was fine.

I use AAC 128k for now when i rip or encode new stuff, and i'm quite happy with that. If you have a collection already ripped in WMA, that might influence your decision.

i know the ipod doesnt' show you many details. when you're playing a song, all you see is the artist, song name, and album name. no bitrate, codec, or file size. now i don't care about those when i just want to listen to a song, but some people might want more info.

the ipod does not do gapless playback. I don't know if the nomad does it or not, but i DO know that apple won't add a feature unless they're sure 99% of the people will use it. they keep things as simple as possible, and even then, they're slow to add features.

if for example, you want to put entire concerts on an ipod without pauses between songs, the only thing to do is to rip them as one big wav file per disc, and then encode that to aac. The other thing that helps is changing the extension from m4a to m4b. then the ipod thinks its a book and it will set a bookmark whenever you stop playing it.

maybe someone with a nomad can weigh in about its details

this is great info guys, thanks!

I've been looking into getting an Ipod for X-mas and was just at Itunes. It says there that you can now use the "join tracks" feature and it will play the songs without a gap. I don't have an Ipod yet so I don't know how well this works but I thought I would pass this along.

could you link to this!?

anyone know how to do this? Is it only on new ipods?

It's just at the Itunes site. I'll try to do the link for ya - scroll down, it says Handy Concept for Concept Rock.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/import.html

Since we're talking Ipods - any thoughts on getting a 40GB over the 20GB? I really want to put all my PJ boots on the thing so I don't have mess around with the cd's all the time - as well as my other music. Is 20GB gonna be enough?

Sorry, I gotta post this again.

Get a Rio Karma, it is simply the best DAP for playing music.
The most important feature to me for it is probably gapless playback, which means no little glitches between tracks (this is especailly noticeable in live albums, and experimental work - think The Fragile or Abbey Road).
It also has one of the most intuitive interfaces on the market, and a wide variety of suppport for multiple codecs (mp3, wma, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC).
Also, it has a 15-hr. battery that is very consistent and long-lasting (I've had mine for over a year, and it still gets over 12 hours on a charge). It's extremely easy to navigate with the RioStick joystick and scroll wheel, it comes with a fantastic set of earbuds (Sennheisers), it has a drop-in docking station with cool pulsating blue LED lights that comes standard, the list goes on....
I did a lot of research when I bought a new mp3 player, and for just playiny music (no text reader, games, etc.), this is the best there is now, IMHO. It's quite compact (a little thick, but it still fits fine in pockets, even tight ones), but its very light (~5.5 oz.)

Anyways, I'd at least suggest you look into it as an option. The first place to look would be the forums at http://www.riovolution.com, at which I am an pretty active member (KarmaMaster1507)

EDIT: It comes only in 20GB, which you can find for less than $250 online, or get a price match in store from a big-name online retailer for ~$250.

Just my thoughts though...

Ok, can I ask another question then - how does the Rio work with your car stereo?

Well just like any other protable audio player (although there are no 3rd party plug-ins for the Karma like the Ipod). You could easily hook the dock up to your car (which has RCA outputs and ethernet by the way), or you could just have the unit itself. A tape adapter or FM transmitter can be connected to the headphone jack and sent to the stereo, or you could buy an adapter for you stereo to use a line-in jack on it and use the RCA outputs and a 1/8" male to 1/8" male jack to connect there (if your car doesn't have a line-in jack)

Alright, now I am throughly confused. I have been researhing these things for about a month and have flipped flopped a bunch of times. First I thought I like the Zen Touch player but a friend of mine had a Zen player a while back and said it sucked. Said the hard-drive just crashed on him. A bunch of friends of mine have Ipods and all say they love them. They love Itunes and how easy it is to organize their music. Now you come along and tell me this Rio is the way to go. I'm not bitching at ya, it's just confusing. OK, what I want is this: I want to take all my Pearl Jam bootleged discs and all the torrents on my computer and dump them on an MP3 player. I also want to have other cd's on there as well. I want to be able to call up any concert and listen to it, whenever I want to, whether I'm in the car or whatever. I'd also like to make up some of my own favorite playlists and save them in the player and call them up whenever I like. Is all this possible with the Rio player? And can you give me a ballpark figure as to how many boots I'd be able to put on the thing? I want them to be in a good sounding format - not dumping everything to MP3's just so it will all fit.

This can be done on any version of iTunes. It requires you to rip the files directly from the cd using the join tracks feature. It can't be used to join already ripped/downloaded tracks. It also means that you won't have separate tracks for those that you join. So if you want to listen to only the second track of a joined pair, you have to fast-forward through the first track (but this is easy using the scrub feature on the iPod)

You'll be able to fit about 40 cd's worth of music if you use FLAC only, since its lossless and the files are very large. When I put on music I put it in very high quality (192-320kbps). It is very easy to get it to play in your car.

Is it like the Ipod where everything has a gap? I know on the Ipod you can do it w/out the gaps but then you're dumping the entire show as one file and I don't want that. Also, the reviews I read on the Rio (on CNET.com) the people who were down on it said that the thing wasn't very reliable. Their motherboards kept crapping out. I think I may be better off just sticking with cd's.

the biggest thing that sold me to the ipod, which i love, is the firmware and the software. the firmware on the ipod is so simple and easy to use, and itunes is a brilliant music organizer. A++ on those features.