Need help finding Ideal MP3 Player for my company to give as xmas gifts to our clients

Question

<SPAN class=postbody>The company I work for is planning on giving away 50 Mp3 players to large clients--primarily because we started our own podcast site with daily Metals Updates ( investment company). http://podcasts.gbtg.net/ I picked up 2 Creative Labs Nano players, and found the setup was lengthy, and far from foolproof--if you are not very careful, the Nano would fail to be able to play the wma podcasts you push in from your PC. Worse still, I can not find a way to easily show cleints how to do an auto synch type of function, so the they can just plug the Nano into their PC at night, and yank it out the next day with the newly updated podcast in it...it would also be nice to delete podcasts older than 3 days or so.... Tech support suggested I try the sniffer function, which of course I had already activated---there was no discussion of how to use this functionally for podcasts. Does anyone have suggestions in Mp3 players better suited for this purpose, or for better software than the Windows Media Player or the Creative Media software they provide? Thanks, Dan

Answer 1

danvolker wrote:
Thanks for the reply. The 2 units I picked up are Zen Nano's. While I understand they are supposed to function much like external hard dri'ves, and that is a simple matter to just drag files from the PC to the Nano "dri've", when I did that, the wma files ( the podcasts) would show in the Nano lcd, but they would not play. However, after installing all of the software ( both Creative with sniffer, and the Nano Explorer) the Nano player began magically playing the podcasts.... I had the same experience of two separate PC's, with 2 separate Nano's. I don't really know what specifically made the Nano's play the wma files--if it was the Nano Explorer , if there was some driver that loads when you get the Nano Explorer.... I don't think it was the larger Creative MediaSource software with sniffer---on one of the Nano's I purposely did not load the Nano Explorer initially, and when using the Creative Media source to push the files over, it still failed to play within the Nano. You could easily play the files from the nano, on the PC through windows media player--as if they were on a firewire or USB dri've. But the Nano needs to be able to play the files itself away from the computer. Maybe the nano explorer helped--maybe their was some auto loaded codec that finally arri'ved with the time online... I have no idea.
That's strange. Are the WMA files licensed? If they are you have to copy them with MediaSource or Windows Media Player.
Back to the media sniffer....What I need is relati'vely simple instructions I can send to my clients ( a largely novice computer user base, with essentially zero exposure to MP3 players...they are investors, not generation X'ers :-) The podcasting concept appeals to all of them, but I need to make it very simple to pull the MP3 player out of its Xmas box, plug it into the PC, and have it auto update. We can pre-configure each MP3 Player we send out--if there is a brand where this would help. With the Nano the hardware does not have any pre-config settings that will help. So I'm back to looking for a software ona CD that will install simply and make this auto podcast download a reasonable function for these clients to be able to handle. Making them choose folders, set the folders as a library, then set the deletion dates for old files, and the synchronization behavior in general is too much work for people who have never done any of this. Once they experience the podcasts for a few days or weeks, they will be incentivised to learn "advanced" configuration proceedures---but I don't want this to begin this way.
Really all you have to do is enable the Media Sniffer, and if the files already go into the default directory then nothing else.
Then you would also need to sync the player with the PC, which is essentially just following the syncing process.