MP3 Players – Syron Clip MP3 Player > iPod Shuffle

I used to have this purple AAA battery-powered MP3 player which held around 500MB worth of music and cost me $30, and it worked fine, even after my brother broke the glass part of the display. It was easy to use, and the sound quality was ok. I considered seeing if I could replace the glass, but eventually the MP3 player stopped working, so it was time to get a new one.

Which brings me to JB Hi-Fi, where I bought a little iPod Shuffle for around $100 and a pack of 2 silicon covers for it. I loved the tiny size, made it look cute, and the clip which allowed me to attach it to the bottom hem of my shirt, instead of having to put in my pocket where I occasionally used to press buttons by accident on my old MP3 player. But that's where the praise ends.

What I disliked about my little iPod Shuffle was that is seemed that the only way to add music to it is to use iTunes. I had to add music from my computer into the iTunes library and then from there "synchronise" it to my iPod. The "synchronising" part took ages. It took so long that I rarely changed the songs on my iPod. It was only when I had time to kill that I freshened up the tracklist. On my old MP3 player, I just plug it into my PC, copy and paste MP3 files, and I'm done, and if I were to try to copy a file with the same file name as a file on the player, it won't allow me to, so I avoid having duplicates.

Now, if I had loaded all the files of a particular folder into iTunes by using the "Add Folder to Library" option, say I wanted to add some new files to that folder and then also have them on my iPod, I can't just use "Add Folder to Library" again because that would result in duplicate entries in the iTunes library. And I have the same issue again when trying to synchronise music to the iPod, too easy to end up with duplicate files as iTunes converts the file names to something like "aJKhsaJewiot.mp3". Speaking of file names, I name my MP3 files in a way that makes them easy to search and arrange. But iTunes does not allow me to sort my library by file size. Man I hate iTunes… most frustrating software I have ever had to use.

Another complaint is that when I turn the iPod on, compared to my old MP3 player, the time between switching it on and hearing music was noticeably greater. I worked around it by turning it on, then while I wait for the ability to hit the play button, I fiddle with putting the head phones on. Aside from the frustration of having to put music on the iPod using iTunes, my little iPod Shuffle made for a decent MP3 player.

One day, I was reading the newspaper and came across a small review of the Syron Clip MP3 Player which looked just like my iPod Shuffle. When I lost my iPod Shuffle (later found it under my bed), I decided to buy a new MP3 player. Since I loved the little clip thing on the iPod Shuffle, I decided to buy the Syron Clip MP3 Player as it also has the awesome clip thing. But because it looked like an iPod Shuffle clone, I tried to do some research on it to make sure it wasn't just some cheap bootleg product. Unfortunately, I couldn't find much information about the product, even though the company that makes them, Syron, claims that their Clip MP3 players are their "most famous and popular" product.


Syron Clip MP3 Player (Green) – Looks like an iPod Shuffle, doesn't it?

Although it felt kinda suspicious, I ordered one from the website. I picked the cheapes 1GB model, green colour, and it cost me $35 for the MP3 player and includes free shipping. After paying for the MP3 player by online bank transfer, I got an e-mail confirming payment, but over a week later, no response and no MP3 player. I called Syron to find out what happened, apparently the colour that I wanted was not in stock and they were waiting for it to be restocked. They told me that normally they would've sent me an e-mail about the delay, but for some reason, that didn't happen.

They asked me if I wanted a different colour, such as pink or orange, but I want my budgie green MP3 player. Eventually my order was delivered to me. Upon opening the package and taking a look at my new MP3 player, my first thought was "Is this green?". To me, it looks more like yellow-green or lime, not really the budgie green that I saw on the Syron website. Oh well~ it's still sort of a green colour.

For something that has the same storage capacity and function as an iPod Shuffle but less than half the price, the product quality is a good example of 'you get what you pay for'. The clip and the play button were slightly crook, but not really something that is bothersome at all.

The plastic box it came in was chipped in the corner, maybe it got damaged while being delivered, who knows. It came with head phones and a cable for connecting to PC by USB. Aside from a very brief list of what the various buttons do, there was no instruction manual. The MP3 player came pre-loaded with songs from Australian artists as a way of promoting music from local artists. I never ended up listening to them, but I have save a copy on my computer.

While I love the clip thingy, the tiny size and the ability to quickly copy and paste music files onto it, there are some things about the Syron Clip MP3 player that bother me. Number one annoyance would be the way it resets the volume to very loud whenever I turn it on again. Also, the Syron Clip MP3 player lacks a shuffling function. It seems to play music in the order that it was copied onto the player.

Overall, I'm loving my new Clip MP3 player, it's like taking the best of my previous two MP3 players and combining it into one~

One thought on “MP3 Players – Syron Clip MP3 Player > iPod Shuffle”

  1. If you consider iTunes frustrating, NEVER buy a sony player like I have one. The only program you can use then is SonicStage, an iTunes clone, and a bad one at that. You only get duplicates on player and library if you have the same song in different directories, so adding the same folder twice won't get you new entries, but moving or copy paste (or even editing ID3 Tag) will. It basicially checks whether a file from the same location with the same ID3 is present on the player, not sure about file size, but I guess that one doesn't matter for the reason of two songs from an album being the same size by coinicende probably.

    My player was one of the first with a HDD in them, it's the Sony NW-HD-5 …. it was produced for roughly half a year, then iPod won the market. The sound quality is the best I ever had from a mobile player, might be better than your average "Hi-Fi" stuff at home and the battery lasts roughly 14 hours (and that's when you change songs, go back and forth through menus and listen on ~30% volume, which can be really loud, depending on your phones), and it has 20 GB space for music … sorts stuff by artist and albums, can shuffle either an artist, an album, all songs, up to 5 favourite lists you can change on-the-fly or playlists (.m3u) which are simply added to playlist folder and sorta look like the fav lists. It cost €350 back then I think, awfully expensive, even if compared to today's iPods, but I used it for maybe 8 years, virtually every day without and greater problems, so it cost me like 13 cents per day of use ….. which is not guaranteed with other mp3 players. I hope it'll never break, the alst thing I want is a smaller mp3-player with less functions, but the second but last thing would be an iPod. I do not support companies that sell products (iPods) for which you have to buy stuff that is normally included (power cord) extra and even for that have to buy another extra (the A/C adapter; yeah, the adapter and the cord come seperately, and you also *pay* seperately, at least it used to be like that) and sound quality is medicore … iPods are not meant to be mp3 players, they are "multi functional mobile entertainment centres", in one word "universal", and "universal" is an euphemism for "doesn't fit properly anywhere". If NW-HD-5's would be still produced, they'd be at the very top of my wishlist for presents or to-buy list, in case mine breaks. I like having a replacement for something you cannot replace, funny, eh?

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