Audio Players I can get in Dublin?

Pygmalion

Hey, I'm looking for a new portable audio player, but I have no way of buying things online so would probably have to get one from a shop (preferably Dublin-based).
Was hoping you guys could recommend one to me, I'll try and outline my needs/wants below but not much is set in stone.

Formats - OGG Vorbis support is essential, pretty much the only thing I demand of my player.
MP3 I'm going to assume will be on every player available, so I won't even bother pointing out whether I need it, take a guess :P.
Anything else not so much, I have a lot of FLACs but would just transcode anyway to save space, and I don't have anything not in the 3 formats mentioned so far, nor do I intend to get any.
I do not intend to play videos on this.

I have looked at the list of OGG compatible players linked to in the sticky but have no idea what I would/wouldn't be able to get offline, I only recognised a couple of brand names and they seemed to be older players.

Size - Physical size: small enough to comfortably carry around and fit in one hand/my pocket.

Storage size: Bigger is better of course, I have a lot of music.
Realistically though if it comes at a large cost, in terms of price or reliability (will be carrying it around a lot, I can't guarantee it won't drop >.>) I'd rather move tracks on and off regularly than have a sub-par player.

Other stuff - As I said before I don't want to play videos on it, don't really need to use it as an image viewer either, nor do I need to record stuff :P.
I wouldn't say no to an FM radio, although I could definitely live without.

Battery - Obviously would be going for good battery life, realistically though I think a 3 hour bus journey is the most I'd use it for at one stretch, maybe an hour or two a day otherwise. Mainly just like the thought of only having to charge it once a week or so.

Price - Won't limit myself here, the last player I bought was fairly pricey (this was a few years ago), but it lasted years while running perfectly, despite occasionally dropping it (eventually falling victim to the washing machine) and had incredibly battery life and a radio (A Creative Zen V Plus in case you like this blatant advertisement), I'd get another one of them but I want one with OGG Vorbis support now.
So I'll just ask that you keep it reasonable, if it's a high price for a good reason I may consider it.

Brian

Either the Sansa Clip+ or Sansa Fuze sound like they would suit you ... they're available at PC World / Harvey Norman / Currys afaik. Occasionally show up at Xtravision too. Have a look around, they're often heavily discounted ... They play OGG, MP3 and FLAC, and the Clip+ has recently got the seeds of Rockbox support (read-only right now). Only thing they're really lacking is storage, but they both have microSD slots for memory expansion. The Sansa View is the model "up" but actually has inferior audio quality, so avoid that if you want the best sound. Both do FM / Voice recording / Drag + Drop.

Pygmalion

Baza210 wrote: »

Either the Sansa Clip+ or Sansa Fuze sound like they would suit you ... they're available at PC World / Harvey Norman / Currys afaik. Occasionally show up at Xtravision too. Have a look around, they're often heavily discounted ... They play OGG, MP3 and FLAC, and the Clip+ has recently got the seeds of Rockbox support (read-only right now). Only thing they're really lacking is storage, but they both have microSD slots for memory expansion. The Sansa View is the model "up" but actually has inferior audio quality, so avoid that if you want the best sound. Both do FM / Voice recording / Drag + Drop.

Had a look and they seem grand, however looking at the wikipedia page I see:

Some Sansa Clip and Clip+ models suffers from a firmware bug which causes the audio playback of files with 44.1 kHz sampling rate to be too slow, ... However, the deviation from true pitch is small enough so that adults with average and below average pitch recognition may not notice it[8]. A workaround is resampling the audio files to 48 kHz, at which the bug becomes barely noticeable.[5] At the time, the SanDisk representative reported the fix and its tradeoffs (3% less battery life) were coming in the next firmware[9], only to part ways with SanDisk ... SanDisk then stated that they do not intend to fix the bug with the Clip, Clip+, or Fuze because of money [10].

A bit annoying that a bug for which there's a chance I may not notice it and which can only be worked around by resampling all audio files I have (would this mess with file-size or quality much if done from a FLAC source? From my understanding it would increase filesize without increasing quality but I may be wrong) won't be fixed.

I'm still considering it but really this just annoys me. Since it's a firmware thing I guess it's possible that using Rockbox would fix it.

Brian

It may be possible to determine if it's a specific batch, have a look.

Pygmalion

Baza210 wrote: »

It may be possible to determine if it's a specific batch, have a look.

Doesn't seem to be, as it affects the Clip, Clip+ and Fuze, and they say that they won't fix it and will "stay with the current design", I assumed if it only affected that batch they would've mentioned it.
Ah well, I probably shan't be getting it so.

Thanks for the suggestion though, and with the amount of fuss it seemed to cause on a lot of forums you'd imagine they would've fixed it, especially since it seems to be something that could've been fixed in software (The Rockbox developers offered to do it if given specs :P)

Brian

It's kinda weird, I know 3 Fuze/Clip+ owners and it hasn't seemed to have occurred on theirs, as well as plenty of people on head-fi. Maybe you could return it as faulty if it exhibited that problem? Another suggestion would be the Cowon D2 that Click.ie sell. It's €20 more expensive in-store, but maybe you could use 3V? They might even allow payment by Laser if you have that.

Pygmalion

Baza210 wrote: »

It's kinda weird, I know 3 Fuze/Clip+ owners and it hasn't seemed to have occurred on theirs, as well as plenty of people on head-fi. Maybe you could return it as faulty if it exhibited that problem? Another suggestion would be the Cowon D2 that Click.ie sell. It's €20 more expensive in-store, but maybe you could use 3V? They might even allow payment by Laser if you have that.

:O
Never thought of Laser, which I do have, I'll check out a few places to see if they take it, I know a couple of Irish sites will, this does make it a lot easier :P, and hopefully cheaper.

Brian

Here's some testing done on the Clip+ RE the frequency bug. Seems very negligible (0.2%)

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48208

Pygmalion

Ended up ordering the Clip+ as there's a very good deal on Amazon for it at the moment and I got a voucher.

Just posting this on the off chance someone else was considering getting one and would appreciate the good price.