Iopd vs. Nomad Zen

[Librarian]

I'm looking to upgrade to a hard-disc mp3 player (Windows, not Mac) and I've narrowed the choices to wither a 10gb Ipod or a 20gb Nomad Zen. They are about the same in price, and right now, I'm leaning toward the Zen because I don't have a Firewire card which seems to be a requirement for the Ipod, and the Zen will have double the storage space.

Can anybody offer advice of one over the other or even another model in the same price range, and has anyone a particular online retailer that they recommend?

Thanks a lot!

[Librarian]

Well, I picked up the Nomad Zen NX after much navel-gazing contemplation. So far is has been working quite well. There is a bit of a glitch with the software bundled in with the player - when you're importing songs to the player, if there are multiple takes of a song it will skip importing them after the first one, which is a bit of a pain in he posterior since a lot of jazz reissues for better or worse include multiple takes of songs.

The sound quality seems quite good for different types of music - yesterday I listened to Jimmy Smith, James Blood Ulmer and Sonic Youth on the Nomad and all seemed to sound good. The volume-leveling feature worked well to keep things on an even keel. The battery has worked well - supposedly it will work up to 14 hours on a charge, which is a vast improvement over previous Nomad Jukeboxes, which only held about four hours.