Where to get an iPod

[TimM]

I've been using a friends iPod and have decided that I NEED one.

Started looking at adverts and I gradually built my way up from wanting an iPod mini, to wanting a regular one, then I wanted more storage, then I saw the photo ones.

Now I want an iPod Photo 60Gb which I think is the best there is (at the moment - I'm sure it will all change when I buy one!).

Does any one know of a better iPod that I should buy, and can anyone suggest a good place (preferably cheap!) to get one?

Any help would be appreciated.

Tim  

[TUFFTEE]

Best to go for Eblag! keep a figure in your head and just keep on bidding on differant ones! One at a time! until you finally get one! you could try a bidding program! if you PM me your email i will get it forwarded to you! the first three items you win are free after that you have to pay for it ( the bidding program that is)

[strapping young lad]

but with ebay you have no warranty unless you buy new from a shop

google for ipod on .co.uk and on the right hand side links will show you sites to buy them and one or two will show you where to get the cheapest

[Barry Scott]

www.kelkoo.co.uk is good for comparing prices.

[TimM]

if you PM me your email i will get it forwarded to you!

Thanks Nev, PM sent

 

[zebidee]

Afterwards you could get a Denison ICElink for the 4x4:

http://www.essentialipod.co.uk/section.php?xSec=17&a=goog

[TimM]

but with ebay you have no warranty unless you buy new from a shop

Thanks for the suggestion but I've already tried that, I wondered if any techno junkies out there might have an iPod mecha to suggest or anybody with a corner shop offering 50% discount.

Just trying my luck really!

 

[TimM]

www.kelkoo.co.uk is good for comparing prices.

Thanks Barry,

Use that one quite regular, also use:

www.pricerunner.co.uk for general purchases and as a second opinion to Kelkoo, and in the same way www.dealtime.co.uk

All these seem to be giving me prices around £280, I was hoping someone might know where there is a sale on, for a big saving I be prepared to travel or have it delivered.

Just to throw in another I sometimes use www.fixtureferrets.co.uk which searches for grocery promotions - ever wanted to know where you can buy half price apples!  :lol:

[TimM]

Afterwards you could get a Denison ICElink for the 4x4:

http://www.essentialipod.co.uk/section.php?xSec=17&a=goog

That looked really good until I got to the price, I'm thinking I will get an FM transmitter for it (for a fraction of the price), you just tune your FM radio in and listen away, no wires no hassle.

Now if I can just persuade my bank manager( ) to let me have a Discovery 3, I gather they have some sort if iPod interface in the stereo already.

[thermidorthelobster]

Look good, but they're not cheap, are they - not much cheaper than my iPod in fact.

I have a PodGear CarDock FM which I got from ipodworld.co.uk, and I swear by it.  Not strictly legal for use in the UK though.

[TimM]

Look good, but they're not cheap, are they - not much cheaper than my iPod in fact.

I have a PodGear CarDock FM which I got from ipodworld.co.uk, and I swear by it.  Not strictly legal for use in the UK though.

Now your talking, that looks just like (but possibly a little better) than the one I was looking at, I'm just waiting though to see one a friend of SWMBO has as it is a tiny unit that is truly portable rather than being tied to the car - not sure if this would be any cheaper or any better but first I need the iPod and second I will have a look (you never know).

Not strictly legal for use in the UK though.

Are all the CB's licenced, do we never speed? By connecting your iPod to one of these you are providing a service to anybody within range, so it should be legalised and you should be paid to use one! - though on a serious note do they have a long range? I'm wondering if they should be NOT used near hospitals etc

[Thrasher]

Tim,

You should be ok with a D1 - mine works fine in there - however it's not so hot in the RR3 - as the actual audio hardware is right at the back of the vehicle ... and the range of the little transmitter doesn't quite make it that far!!! I kid you not.

[zebidee]

Look good, but they're not cheap, are they - not much cheaper than my iPod in fact.

I have a PodGear CarDock FM which I got from ipodworld.co.uk, and I swear by it.  Not strictly legal for use in the UK though.

Aye but the thing is that the Denison turns your iPod into an auto-changer! The price isn't that bad when you compare it with the price of an auto-changer for the car & the difference in the number of "CD's" it'll "hold".

The FM kits work okay in some cars some of the time. My trooper has trouble picking up normal FM transmission a lot of the time so the FM CarDock wasn't really that attractive an option.

[TimM]

Tim,

You should be ok with a D1 - mine works fine in there - however it's not so hot in the RR3 - as the actual audio hardware is right at the back of the vehicle ... and the range of the little transmitter doesn't quite make it that far!!! I kid you not.

So that's good news and bad news,

Good for me that I can use it
Bad for you that you have trouble
Good for everyone who uses one (in that it doesn't send out a huge signal like mobile phones that would affect hospital equipment).

If you keep having trouble with your RR3 I could always swop you for my Discovery 1  :lol: (well you can't blame me for trying!)

 

[TimM]

Aye but the thing is that the Denison turns your iPod into an auto-changer!

But surely having the iPod itself is the autochanger and the Denson link is then directly up against the FM style adapters.

The Denison I think wins on professionalism, looks, legality, but it just has the price as a draw back.

If I was going to buy a smaller iPod then the Denison would not seem too bad, but as I'm about to shell out the best part of £300 on the iPod itself, then the Denison kit would just tip the balance from it being a 'small' outlay to the whole kit becoming (in my terms) expensive.

Now if you could find me a cheap iPod Photo 60 to go with it, I would be laughing all the way to next year.

I may persuade myself to upgrade to one later as It would look better and would incorporate charging (saving more messy wires) - but for now I will take the cheaper option.

[Bush Tucker Man]

Being a bit of a 'Techno-Luddite', what are they?

I keep hearing about the things, do you download music from the internet (isn't that still a bit naughty?), or record your CD's via the PC?

What kind of capacity do they give, in track/CD terms?

[TimM]

Well.....

I used to think they were a waste of time (MP3 players in general) as I never got any use out of my walkman style gizmos, but I did download lots of MP3's from the internet, AND copied them from my CD's.

I have an Audi aswell as my Discovery and that had a tape player in it, when I upgraded I fitted an in-dash cd player with MP3 capabilities, this allowed roughly 10x as many songs on a CD as normal.

I still thought iPods and other personal MP3 players were a waste of time, but I recently slated my nephews 512Mb capacity as I have about 25Gb of Mp3's, and he said (in a 'matter of fact ' kind of way) "well just get an iPod then they hold loads".

I've now looked a the market and the one I'm after holds MP3's and/or photos, has a colour screen and can hold 60Gb of data.

I would say an average track is 3-4Mb as an Mp3 so if you say 3.5Mb for an average this would equate to 17odd thousand tracks (iPod quote 15k), all stored in directories and easily accessible.

Suddenly I regret not having one, and am desperate(ish) to get my hands on one, for me this kind of storage means I get get my whole CD collection into one little device that fits in your hand.

I feel that technology had past me (or us) by and I feel it's time I tried to catch up.

Cheap iPods with less storage start at around £50 (I think - not really looked at those) up to the top of the range one I'm after at around £300.

Does that make it any clearer?

[Bush Tucker Man]

Well.....



Does that make it any clearer?

As clear as the proverbial.....

[thermidorthelobster]

Right, iPods 101...

An iPod is a device made by Apple (there are alternatives, naturally) which stores large numbers of MP3s on a hard drive or in flash memory.  That bit you probably knew...  Current capacities are up to 60GB.

As a guide, I store my tracks in MP3 format, 128Kbps (which is perfectly adequate), and have 2438 songs (well over 100 albums) taking up 9GB.  So you're talking about about 2750 songs per 10GB storage.  This is actually quite a lot;  it would take me 7 days to listen to all of that back-to-back.  On a 60GB iPod you could store around 15,000 tracks, or about 800 CDs.  Other formats allow greater quantities of tracks per GB.

The user interface allows you to play music by album, by artist, or by genre, including randomising, so if I'm in the mood for Pop music, I can randomise all my Pop tracks and effectively get a tailor-made radio station.  You can also set up automatic or manual playlists;  so if I want to listen to Rock music from 1983, I can do that too.

Putting this all together, you can buy for a couple of hundred quid a device which will store your entire CD collection, and let you take it and listen to it anywhere.  Battery life of the newer devices is something like 10 hours, but that's actually quite a bit of continuous listening.  In the car, mine charges continuously anyway, so in real terms I don't often have to worry about the battery running out.

You can get music onto your MP3 player in a number of ways:  by "ripping" CDs, which is legal as long as you own the CD (and takes about 5-10 minutes per CD);  by buying them online, for example from Apple's iTunes store, for 79p per track;  or by illegally downloading them.  90% of the music on my iPod comes straight from my CD collection;  8% I've bought on iTunes, and 2% is stuff I've downloaded, generally because I can't get hold of it on CD or legally online.  Personally I'm of the opinion that iTunes actually *encourages* legal downloading because it makes it so easy.  A surprising number of people on mac-forums.com hold their music collection entirely legitimately.

The iPod is popular amongst the genre because of the design and user interface;  I've had a Creative Labs one in the past and it just didn't compare to the iPod.  Personally I'd stick to iPods for the foreseeable future, but then I'm a known Apple zealot.

The FM transmitters plug into your MP3 player and broadcast a low-powered signal on the FM frequency of your choosing (some have only limited frequencies).  This means you can tune your car stereo into the iPod and listen along in the car.  Some have higher power outputs than others;  I have a Griffin iTrip, which doesn't really have enough power to be usable in the Discovery or my old Range Rover, but the PodGear CarDock FM I have now is very usable in anything I've tried it in.  As mentioned, these are not legal in the UK as they would need to be licensed as broadcasting equipment.

[TimM]

Right, iPods 101...

etc.

Excellent, that has made me want one even more now.

I knew the menu allowed you easy access to tracks but you have made it sound so much more.

Thanks  

[TimM]

I have a PodGear CarDock FM

The deed is done, I have in my hand a shiny new iPod, just looking now to connect it to the car, I like the look of the Podgear dock link you sent me, but I was wondering if I could permanently mount it somewhere and run a seperate power feed to it (to free up the cigarette lighter socket).

Could you have a look on the back of yours and see if it looks like this might be feasible?

Thanks,  :D

[muddysteve]

My stereo has a little flying lead out the back of it with a standard jack plug on it, cost a whole £6.99! I use it for my laptop so can run it through the car speakers and can be used for pretty much any mp3 player with a standard headphone socket. Not that i use it for that as the stereo has a built in memory card slot for putting all my mp3s on and there's no moving parts so it dont skip when out playing  8)

Steve

[Cherry Bomb]

I have the Denson Ice Link in the Jeep.  Just drop your ipod in the cradle and the stereo head unit thinks it's the mother of all auto changers!!!

Never had it skip, even when on really rough stuff, they're fairly bullet proof.

Oh, and the other thing, if you haven't already got your music stored as mp3 it's worth storing them using Apple's .aif format.  (Can be done using itunes).  It's a modification of the .mp3 codec, same file size but with much better quality.  Almost CD standard!!!

[TimM]

My stereo has a little flying lead out the back of it with a standard jack plug on it, cost a whole £6.99!

That's my kind of price tag!

Can you remember where you got it from?  [-o<

[TimM]

I have the Denson Ice Link in the Jeep.

Zebidee has one of those fitted, he gave me a link to a retailer, I was put off initially by the price, but I'm not really too worried anymore about price.

I've had another look at the spec, and it seems that you replace your cd changer with the iPod, which sounds logical, but at the moment I don't think I want to get rid of it.

Still it's food for thought.  :D

[sulley]

iPods are definately worth it.  Mine survived a 70mph crash witha crash barrier.  Still working without any problems!!

[datalas]

a mate is selling his, you might be lucky if you check...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5804636830&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1

not long left, he was complaining about it only being at tuppence or something :)

[thermidorthelobster]

The deed is done, I have in my hand a shiny new iPod, just looking now to connect it to the car, I like the look of the Podgear dock link you sent me, but I was wondering if I could permanently mount it somewhere and run a seperate power feed to it (to free up the cigarette lighter socket).

Could you have a look on the back of yours and see if it looks like this might be feasible?

You can dismantle the connector and it uses a standard power connector of the jack-plug type, so yes, this would be relatively easy.  I've considered it myself, but I like the portability, also it doesn't advertise that I may have an iPod in the car because I can unplug it!

[muddysteve]

My stereo has a little flying lead out the back of it with a standard jack plug on it, cost a whole £6.99!

That's my kind of price tag!

Can you remember where you got it from?  [-o<

The Stereo came from halfrauds for a grand sum of £150
it plays mp3s from CD or from SD memory cards
The main reason for buying it though is that its a DAB radio and the sound quality is fantastic, like listening to a cd but radio. i can get Virgin (fav station) anywhere i go in cd quality sound.
The lead came from the blaupunkt website bluespot.co.uk

I thought about an ipod or such like but the only time i'd use it would be in the car and for £150 i've got a stereo that does the same job + DAB radio

Steve

[TimM]

Thanks Steve,

but I really mean't where did you get your 'lead' from, I think I'm quite happy with the stereo (at the moment)