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.
