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Sony used to make a nice set of ear buds that hooked over your ears and had pretty decent sound for the size. I used them with my minidisc player at the gym. Way back when I had a minidisc player....and went to the gym....boy, that was a long time ago.
For LT - I've got a 20GB Creative Zen Sleek (seems to be discontinued, if Amazon is to be believed) and I really like it - it looks good, it's reasonably easy to navigate the contents and its own software is OK for sorting out files. I've never owned an ipod so can't do comparative reviews but I would recommend the one I have.
My shuffle is currently clipped on my belt buckle. The headphone cord makes it look like I'm listening to my penis, but in reality it is Stevie Wonder's Superstition.
I joined a gym and most of what it plays is rap, so I had to break down and get one. ITunes frequently crashes the laptop when I try to transfer my cds.
I am also a new iPod Nano owner. My wife won one at a conference she was at and offered it to me. Listening to Bob sing "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) right now...
I am using shuffle right now, but it's weird to have Bob mixed in with Beat on the Brat.
One thing I can say, and I know this isn't news really, but wow does Apple do design well.
Wow, that's a lot of work Sci...I keep looking at all the genre stuff, etc and wondering why I would bother. But then, I tend to be very artist specific when I want to listen to something.
I finally bought an ipod a couple of months ago to replace the Rio Karma I'd had for about three years. I would have bought the next-gen Rio product if the company hadn't dried up and been blown away by a light breeze. It still pisses me off that no one has come up with a product that has the features and ease of use that Rio put together in 2002.
I ended up with an ipod for a couple of reasons:
1) Although I am not overly fond of their vaunted UI, and it doesn't have several features that I'd like to see, I could live with it;
2) It handles podcasts more gracefully than most other devices I saw, and
3) There are software packages other than iTunes that can manage your stuff, so I wouldn't have to use than hideous glob of dreck.
I don't rate it by the quality of the song, but by how often I'd be willing to listen to it when it appears. 1 star = 20% of the time 5 stars = 100%. And I'm slightly OC when it comes to organizizing.
richat, ratings are how iTunes decides what to put on my nano. I only have a 4 gig nano (but many many more gigs of mp3s), so I have a playlist of songs I *always* want to have on there (primarly for workouts since there are certain songs that really get me motivated), and then I have a smart playlist whose size is 4 gigs minus the size of my "always" playlist, and includes songs that have a rating of 3 stars or greater and that I haven't heard in over 4 weeks. In this way, I can be assured that I'll always like* the music on my nano and that it is something I haven't heard in a while.
*Like sciurus, I "like" all the music that I've ripped to my computer, but I use ratings as a way to rate my expected listening frequency - if it's on my nano, I want to be sure it's not something I'm likely to just skip
Oh, and I also have a "New" playlist where I keep new music that I'm evaluating and deciding how to rate. This playlist is also always on my nano. It can be a pain to mess with the size of my smart playlist constantly since the size of my "New" playlist changes; I wish iTunes had a way of specifying a playlist size relative to other playlists' sizes and the total space on the iPod.
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