iPod Nano Vs. Victor Reader Stream
The last I knew, the Victor Stream plays neither AAC nor MP4 files; unlike the iPods that do. At first, these were Apple proprietary formats. But MP4 especially is becoming more of an industry standard ad less confined to Apple. True, it hasn’t grabbed on yet the way MP3 has. But because Apple products are so ubiquitous and numerous, and because other manufacturers want to capitalize on their popularity by building Apple-compatible devices, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about these “Apple standards” becoming extinct anytime soon.
I’ve seen a couple demos of the Victor but do not own one myself. It appears however, that the Victor attempts to target a slightly different audience than do the iPods, although the two markets do overlap quite a bit.
The few differences that I’m aware of are:
- You can record audio on the Victor. You can do this on the iPod too; but not without buying additional attachments.
- The Victor has a built-in voice synthesizer; the iPod does not. Even the 4th generation Nano has no speech, even though it talks. It talks by playing pre-recorded speech clips as opposed to dynamically creating speech on the fly, as new text is encountered.
- The memory in the Victor is expandable; not so in the iPod.
- You can also store data on multiple SD cards with the Victor and swap them when you want to instantly change the content on the Stream. With the iPod however, you’re stuck with the same memory as well as the same amount of memory throughout the life of the iPod.
- The Victor has been designed from the ground up to specifically target the vision-impaired market. The iPod has not. This means that you’ll probably find the entire feature-set on the Stream more accessible than it is on the iPod.
- With the iPod however, you can use iTunes to purchase and download new music. Plus, there’s a built-in system for transferring music from iTunes to the iPod. As I understand the stream, this process would be somewhat more manual.
- I’ve heard both the stream and the iPod, and to me they sound comparable.
- You can speed up and slow down the playback speed of the Stream; not so with the iPod.
- The Stream can play NLS books. The iPod cannot unless you go through some extra steps to get the books into an acceptable iPod format.
- You can replace the batteries in the Stream; not true on the iPod. When iPod batteries go dead, you either have to scrap it, or sent it back to the factory and pay a fee ($60 or more) for a replacement iPod.
- The Stream comes with a wall charger; for the iPod, you must purchase a wall charger separately, although you can charge the iPod through any high power USB port.
- The iPod cannot easily read DAISY books. The Stream understands them by default and you can use their index features to skip around through pages and chapters, which you cannot do with the iPod.
- The Stream has a built-in user guide but the iPod does not.
- The stream requires no special software (no iTunes) in order to transfer music and other audio to it. You can simply copy your MP3 files directly to the stream. This process is much more convoluted with the iPod, especially if you want to do it outside of iTunes.
As good as the stream seems, I have iPods myself – because I wanted to learn how they work. But also, I have my entire music library stored as MP4 AAC-encoded files and these I could only play on iPods at present. However, if they ever make the Stream able to play these types of files, I’ll certainly get one straight away. It seems that you get more feature-function for your dollar with the Victor Reader Stream than you do with the iPods, IMHO.
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Tom Hesley