So I'm finally buying a MP3 Player....

[DeathBeforeDenial]

I'm 90% sure that I am going to go with the Creative Zen Vision M, the only thing that I am a bit hesitant about is the lack of .AAC support (I mean the quality between AAC and mp3 is like night and day). And because converting AAC's (Unfortunately I no longer have the original .wav files) to an mp3 or any other file type is going to jack the quality really badly I was hoping there was a fix on the horizon. I have heard that there are different firmware additions that can enable the Audio Player to play different formats not included within the players programmed firmware.

If anyone has any info on allowing .AAC playback on a Zen Vision M I would really appreciate it.

A second related question, is there any way to convert one compressed audio format to another without suffering massive quality loss, because that would solve the first problem.

[Agawa]

Hmm, I just got a Creative player - not Zen though - and it works wonderfully. My friend also has had one for two years, it's been through a good deal, and still works fine. Finally, the Futureshop employee I talked to when I got mine seemed to know what he was talking about and highly recommended the brand.

[Kizyr]

Creative seems like the MP3 player I'd be most likely to buy. It seems rather no-frills and inexpensive. The only thing is that I heard funny things about how the headphone jack will screw up after a bit of time.

Anyway, does it play FLAC files? Those might be a better option if you can't use AAC. FLAC's are pretty much lossless compressed WAVs, so it should suit your quality standards. But, I'm no expert. KF

[exigence]

ahh FLAC, the thing about it is it sounds amazing in theory great sound quality and everything but I cant think of one music player that will accept it and they take forever to convert, if you can even manage to find a way to converrt them that is.

[DeathBeforeDenial]

Oh yea, FLAC, I forgot about that. Typically you can just find third party software that can read/convert .wav in FLAC I think foobar2000 and Winamp now do it, as well as a good amount of lesser know counterparts.

Well, after checking, the ZVM can't play FLAC either, iPods can, but only through Rockbox or other related Firmware upgrades. I know that Rockbox is working on compatability with the ZVM, but I was curious if anyone else knew of any other Firmware projects that are currently compatible with the ZVM.

Also, does anyone know if there are means of converting one type of compression to another without losing a huge amount of quality?

[Ozone]

Foobar can rip and convert to FLAC, personally, I prefer Mediamonkey. You don't want to transcode from AAC to MP3, fyi. It sounds terrible. I like my iPod personally, it works really well for me.