Need mp3 player suggestions for my 10 year old daughter

My mother wants to get my daughter an Ipod for christmas. the problem is she only wants to spend $250 or less. It's hard (if not impossible) to find a real Ipod for that much. I need some advise here: should we stick with Ipod, or should we look to other brands? How about the Ipod mini? It's only 4gb - is that enough space for her? Any help here would be appreciated - she takes her discman and dozens of CD's with her wherever she goes, so this would be a great gift, but we want to get the best we can for what she wants to spend.

 

I think for your daughter the ipod mini would be perfect. 4GB holds a lot of CDs. It's small, cute, and easy to use. Price is right as well. And they come in colors!

By the way, looking forward to the German MMT

 

If line-in is important than go with a brand that has this feature or a portable MD recorder (these would more benefit us), but for your daughter, I'd go iPod Mini.

 

iPod mini.

 

Is that mini THAT much smaller than the regular? I have a 20 gig mp3 player, and I'm just a little afraid to only get a 4gb one. How much music will that hold?

Also, can she store mp3's on there, mixed with whatever apple's music format is?

 

Can't give any advice about the player, but you may want to make sure she uses it with a decent pair of headphones; imho most headphones that come with portables are extremely bright; in addition to emphasizing the worst about digital sound, they may simply not be good for a child's hearing.

 

iPod will do MP3 just fine, along with AAC, Apple Lossless, Wav....and maybe some others?

And $250 is the going price for the mini, if my Sunday sale papers are to be believed. I may buy one for my wife, knowing how much I enoy my 3g 40g model.

BGL

 

It is a fair bit smaller, but of course, the regular one is small too so the difference isn't earth-shattering. She can store mp3's on there as well as Apple's format and WAV. 4GB will hold (according to Apple's website) 1000 songs at 128k. Should be plenty for her.

 

I would never get a loved one an MP3 device. Since MP3 hirts my ears so much, even after just a couple of miutes, then I am sure that this type of CODEC algorithm can't be good for the human ear, let alone the human psyche.

 

Rocky,

There are many different codecs available for MP3. Lame, Fraunhoffer, etc. There are many different encoding methods and bitrates available. I doubt it's the algorithim... it's probably just badly encoded MP3 files.

 

Chris,

Everything you need to know is right here:

http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/

If you click on the "tech specs" link, you'll see a nice comparison of each model.

 

The Dell does accept a WMA format. Brands that have the line-in feature include Archos and Rio Karma but she doesn't need that feature as I said earlier. 4GB is a lot of memory as is, I'd still go iPod Mini for her.

 

Thank you Keith for your concern and ideas on this subject. I really don't know that much about MP3, but I suspect that maybe you are right, there may be several factors involved in this. I always felt that it was because of my age and the fact that I was raised on analog, no difgital at all in the 60's and 70's. I actually feel a pain in my ears when I expose myself to lossy compressed audio material, this includes Dolby Digital soundtracks on movies and anything where there is a compressed audio file. SACDs are the only digital format that I can listen to for hours on end and feel absolutely no pain. I always thought that it was just me and a couple of other old friends, but I have surfed the internet and found many references to this phenomenon in several different whitepapers and disertations, so maybe it's not just me after all.

 

Same here. I can barley stand RedBook CD's, and anything below that is painful to me.