I am currently shopping for an MP3 player, and seriously considering the 4 gb iPod mini.

I have a lot of albums that I have ripped in AAC with iTunes, and with Canada now being included for the iTunes music store, I have bought Dream Theater's "Live at Budokan" album ($10 for 18 live songs! A real steal. :D).

I know nothing about DRM. Somebody please explain Apple's DRM scheme, number of transfers allowed and such.

Thanks.

I just got an 4GB iPod mini and I love it. I don't know what you mean by DRM...

Digital Rights Management. Kind of a file copy-protection, to keep you from giving out music you purchased, AFAIK.

Hmm... well, I haven't seen anything about it. As far as I know, you have complete control over music you've ripped yourself. For music you've purchased from iTunes, I'm guessing there's a limited amount of iPods you can copy the song to (each iPod is IDed by a serial number).

I'm not sure how it relates to iPod, but with iTunes, you can authorize up to 5 computers to play purchased music, and you can burn as many cds as you want.

You can actually burn 10 CDs of a single playlist... but there's nothing stopping you from making copies of those CDs.

You can have it on five different computers, but an unlimited quantity of iPods.

Don't waste your money, I believe you can get a 30 gb Creative mp3 player for fifty dollars less. Or the same price.

The 20gb Zen Touch is $100 Canadian more expensive than the iPod mini. Also, like I said, a lot of my collection is in protected AAC or non-protected AAC. It would be like having a collection in Vorbis or FLAC and buying a player that doesn't support them. I wasn't asking for opinions on MP3 players either.

Now when you guys say you can burn a playlist 10 times, let's say I do that, and burn it ten times. Now if I change just a couple songs in the playlist, will I still be able to burn the songs that were burned to CD ten times before?

Minis are hot, and I'd say really the only iPod that's really worth it (HDD-wise, at least). DRM-wise, well everything's been explained. Really, they are a great player. Just be ready to be called a trendwhore

There's no way in hell that I'm wearing those damn white earbuds. :p

I'll probably spring for some Senns or another pair of Audio-Technicas.

I hate the earbuds; they hurt my ears. I use some Sony headphones.

FLAC, or any other lossless format, is not a good example for this since you can just transcode to whatever format your player supports... however a lossy format like vorbis is a good example since transcoding from lossy to lossy is a bad idea

Yea, if you already have iTunes stuff you pretty much have to go with an iPod, unless you wanna "strip" the DRM off the files.

I'm thinking about getting a Zen Micro myself.

even with stripping the DRM the files are still 128kbps AAC the ipod is the only play i'm aware of that supports AAC and transcoding lossy to lossy is still a bad idea

I don't know if you read one of my posts from the past, but the Micro has a huge manufcaturing defect in the headphone jack that Creative hasn't even addressed at this point. They will repair/send you a new one for free, but that takes time. I bought a warranty from the shop I bought it at, so I've been exchanging mine every time it breaks(and they always do).

No, I didn't read your posts but Creative has fixed the jacks now. If you get a new Micro the jack works fine.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=6399532&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat10200050002&id=1077626018247

$30 USD cheaper than the 6gb ipod mini. and it's 30 gb.

And it's still more than $300 here in Canada, doesn't play AAC's and is way more space than I need.

Wait, the increase in space is a BAD thing? :p

I don't need it. Unneeded price increase is a bad thing. :p

I've never had more than 10gb's of music on my computer, and I didn't listen to half of that. I already have a 200gb portable hard drive and a 256mb USB key, so I don't see why I'd need an extra-huge MP3 player if I don't even listen to enough music to fill it.