Earlier this week I became entirely too sick of dragging my laptop around everywhere to listen to audio files in the car. So, I decided to sell the damn thing and buy myself a tiny audio player. I first bought a 30GB Creative Nomad II Zen Xtra, with high recommendations from Mr. sn0w. I took it home, ripped it out, plugged it in. Nothin’. I was under the impression I’d be able to mount it as a drive and just copy files over to it, but it turns out I’d have to use a utility to move stuff over into the player’s DB format. Strike one. Then I discovered that most of the opensource software for doing this tended to crash if my files weren’t organized in a particular manner. Strike two.
And then I discovered that there was no folder navigation on the thing and I’d have to rely on playlists and metadata to choose my songs. Since I organize all my audio files by folder, and listen mostly to books in the car these days, this caused huge problems because it is a pain in the ass to make certain all of my files are in the format necessary to allow me an easy way to listen to them in order. Steeeerike three.
So, I took it back to Fry’s the following day and got an iRiver IHP-120. I am in love.
When I got it home, I plugged it in (USB 2.0) after doing a tail -f /var/log/syslog for grins. BAM! “Hereyago, Farris, have a /dev/sda1!” A couple of seconds and an apt-get or two later, gnome-volume-manager was happy to take the further burden of mounting the device off my hands as well. So, now all I have to do to add files is plug it in, open nautilus, and drag anything I want to it. Text, porn, software packages, anything.
But onto the audio. When it starts up, I have hundreds of options, all easily accessible with the nav buttons. I can browse intuitively through my folder hierarchy to find quickly any album or book I want. Oh, and it’ll play MP3, WMA, WAV… and OGG! It’ll record audio, either from an external source, analog or optical, or from the more-than-decent internal mic. The remote looks cool, but don’t know exactly how much I’ll be using it. Possibly for jogging.
I charged the thing Tuesday night, and have used it heavily since then, mostly on my 1-hour-average commute between Plano and Arlington. The battery still claims to be at 3/4 charge.
I almost decided to take it back and order a Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer. In fact, I was just about to hit “buy” on their site when I glanced at several forum posts about “rebuilding.” NO FOLDER NAVIGATION. Damn. The Neuros has a built-in FM transmitter, which would have made hooking it up to my car stereo one step quicker than the iRiver, but the reliance on clean metadata and the time it takes to rebuild a DB, which is mandatory, killed the deal.
So, now I’m 100% content with my iRiver, and recommend it to anyone, nerd or otherwise, who wants a very functional and well-featured portable media drive.
I’ll email a Double Chocolate Milano to anyone who can confirm for me whether I might be able to crack this thing open and put a larger harddrive in it. They sell larger versions, but I don’t NEED more space, and would rather keep the dough. I would however take the drive out of my laptop and swap them if it were possible.
My comment or something is:
I miss having an income and being able to buy cool toys.
I’d still settle on being able to listen to something other than kid songs in the car (tho it beats the screaming, so I play along).
Well, if your housenerd sees how cool this thing is, I know he’ll wanna spring for a matching his/hers set.
There’s an article for the 5g version on how to dismantle it without breaking the plastic case, and how to extract the drive. It’s a compact-flash drive. I dunno about the 1.2g but since there are 1.2g CF drives, I would assume it’s the same. The 5g models were selling for mondo cheap though some references on http://www.slickdeals.net (or maybe it’s http://www.slickdeals.com) but It’s probably expired by now.
Actually, there isn’t a 5gig model of this one. This line uses Toshiba 1.8″ type II pc card drives. (Yeah, I took mine apart last night)
Unfortunately, 1.8″ drives like this are hard to find, especially for cheap.
Cool. Check the link on the iRiver.
An hour for Plano to Arlington is not bad, actually!
I think you got the best option. In my experience, the FM transmitters are not all they’re cracked up to be. 1. They are a power drainer. 2. You often have to switch the channel because of interference from local radio channels. 3. The signal is not steady, and the built-in logic most devices have to compensate for the change in volume isn’t too good - you still have a lot of volume fluctuation.
I’ll take something you can plug into your car stereo jack every time.
I came to the same conclusion, as my Belkin TuneCast II just wasn’t cutting it. Then I found out that iRiver have their own brand of FM transmitter and gambled on it. It’s great! Powerful enough that I can even tune to a used frequency and still not get anymore noise than I would from a decent radio station.
Yeah, the hour drive is an average. In light enough traffic, I can get there or back in 40 minutes exactly. Given that it’s precisely 40 miles from my garage to my parking spot at the office, and there’s no way to start at 60mph and stay at 60mph until I get to the office, this of course means that I don’t always drive the speed limit on 190 or 161. But fortunately I’ve got traffic most of the time to act as a governor.
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