Podcastplayer.org news

About.com has a guide to buying MP3 players. Unfortunately it’s targetted much more at imagined pop music listeners than podcast listeners (and certainly not toward people who might want to record as well as listen.) I’m also slightly worried by the wooliness and inaccuracy of some of the information. For example the article states:

The first type of connection option, known as USB, is the more common one found today and is something supported by both PCs and Macs. It is also somewhat slower in regards to how quickly it transfers music from your computer to the player then the other standard, FireWire. FireWire however, is primarily supported only on Macs.

That’s somewhat disingenuous, as it fails to differentiate between more important speed considerations. Sure, USB1 is relatively slow, but USB2 and Firewire are effectively equivalent - they are both faster than any media player (that I know of) can transfer. And the article fails to mention that flash storage is almost always slower than hard drive storage.

Fundamentally an MP3 player good for listening to a bunch of short music tracks, is not the same as an MP3 player good for listening to podcasts, is not the same as an MP3 player used for listening to long, detailled classical pieces, is not the same as an MP3 player used for a mix of playing and recording, and so on. Any article that fails to even acknowledge such differences, let alone differentiate between different needs and features, is only of limited use.

Oh, and the article tried to open a pop-up.

Read the article at MP3 Players Buying Guide