![]() To keep Messages, Mail and Notes up to date across devices, you can set up iCloud for Messages, iCloud Mail and iCloud for Notes. But until Apple at least supports subscription services and the WMA/FLAC/OGG file formats, I can't justify purchasing any iPod hardware.Instead of using the Finder, you can use iCloud Photos, Apple Music and similar services to keep content from your Mac in the cloud and available to all of your devices – even when they’re not near your Mac. I respect the way the pioneering iPod has collectively led the industry out of the dark Napster ages. It meets every one of my criteria, throws in video support, and even goes a little beyond with support for Flash Lite games. dapreview gave the Clix high marks, and so has everyone else who has reviewed it. I've owned a few iRiver products in the past and they've always been excellent. To complement the 30gb hard drive player, I also picked up a flash device- the new, larger 4gb iRiver Clix. And it worked with our Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription as well. It's a great little device, and as promised, we just dragged and dropped our music on it- which happens to be a mix of MP3 and WMA files. Their top pick was theĬreative Zen Vision:M. The Digital Audio Players Review website had the most helpful advice. It's not ideal, since it's tied to Microsoft, but it's the best I can do. When connected to a Windows XP or Windows Vista machine, MTP support allows you to drag and drop music directly on to the device- without installing any software. Due to lack of choices, I was forced to compromise on devices that support Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol. The Cowon is a decent player, but it suffers from Soviet Russia-era design aesthetics. The sole exception, at least for hard-disk devices, is the Cowon X5L. Unfortunately, music devices that can be used seamlessly and interchangeably as a generic external USB hard drive and digital music player are quite rare. ![]() But when my wife wanted a new music player to replace her aging Rio Carbon (RIP- a great little player for its time), these are the criteria I used to evaluate them. How did Apple get this so very, very wrong? Of course, use iTunes if you want, but you shouldn't be forced to use iTunes because the hardware is a brick if you don't. You can't even use it as an external hard drive without setting up a separate, special partition on the device first. The iPod fails miserably on this count: it requires iTunes installed (or another custom application) to transfer any music to the device. Every music player on the market should have this down to a science by now: The iPod requires custom software to work.That's just crazy talk! And the list goes on: there's no voice recording, no EQ settings, no gapless playback, etcetera. Heck, you might even want to record FM radio. ![]() I'll never understand why the iPod chooses to deliberately ignore FM radio and its rich history in the music industry. You'd figure a company that had the guts to make a stunning, wholesale switch to x86 processors could deign to support a few alternative audio formats on their music players. And what of OGG? Or FLAC? Clearly, the hardware is capable, but the political forces inside Apple won't allow it. The conspicuous lack of WMA support is a not-so-subtle f*ck you to the Windows community. Although Jobs grudgingly made the iPod Windows compatible two years after its introduction, he still gets his jabs in. While I can certainly understand the desire to own music, why not give us a choice? Apple's insistence on purchase-only models is a huge mistake. For that same six bucks a month, I could buy a whopping six tracks from the iTunes store. And it's in a very respectable 192kbps 2-pass CBR format, too. I can stream any of this music to multiple PCs, or I can download it to my hard drive or mobile audio players. I'm a member of Yahoo Music Unlimited, which gives me unlimited access to a massive library of music for 6 bucks a month.
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