iRiver H320 (Almost) Hits The Market 323
skyshock21 writes "iRiver appears to now be taking pre-orders for their H320 hard drive MP3 player. This is the one with the color screen that was featured on Slashdot a while back. Although it doesn't support .flac files like the Rio Karma, it does support .ogg, in addition to the usual file formats (mp3, .wmv, .asf, .wav) and sports a nifty color screen. There is also a review posted on CNET."
Battery life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just my two bits.
Re:Battery life? (Score:5, Insightful)
The iRiver says it has a 16 hour life so figure 10-12 hours realistically. Unless you are flying half-way across the globe I think that should get you to and from work.
Re:Battery life? (Score:2)
In other works, I see your point about a phone screen but I don't think the same applies to a music player. Battery life is still more important IMO.
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, it's great to have a Lithium Ion but what happens when it stops recharging? Am I going to be able to easily replace it or am I going to have to return it to the manufacturer only for them to tell me it's out of warranty and there's nothing they can do?
I have had too many devices' batteries go south without an acceptable replacement route.
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
All these devices are slowly becoming disposable, simply because the turn-over is really quick and the prices are going down.
Re:Battery life? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Battery life? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Battery life? (Score:2)
Battery life is dependant on the way their record it. Remember that the battery life they claim is max battery life, in perfect temperature conditions probably, low humidity, with the volume of the player down to 0, the backlight off, etc. Just because a battery has
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Battery life? (Score:4, Insightful)
The iPod's "dismal battery life" was a result of its form factor. Apple used the smallest battery they could to get a minimum of 8 hours playback, so you could listen all day at work. Now that there are millions of uses for batteries that size, many battery manufacturers are creating higher capacity flat batteries that are also mega cheap. Blaming Apple for using the best battery on the market at the time is kind of stupid.
Incidentally, I will not be replacing my iPod with an iRiver any time soon, because while the colour screen is really cool, the device looks pretty large, has WAY too many click tactile buttons to break and ports that will fill with lint, the visual interface looks pretty dull (reminds me of KDE, ew) and the human interface poorly laid out. It is hard to use tiny little buttons while on the go...that's why the iPod has a huge fucking wheel (and why mine has large, inset, finger sized buttons). Why does everybody else insist on making tiny little buttons and putting them right next to each other? Aesthetics? Who sees the thing when it's in your coat pocket? If you NEED to make some small buttons, at least space them more than a thumb's width apart, so you don't press all of them at once. GOD, why is Apple the only company who can engineer a fucking device that doesn't feel like some sadistic toy?
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for having "less" features than the other players: I think it should be obvious to anyone who understands mathematics that the massive deficit in sales between more expensive, "under featured" iPod and its competitors should be proof that these features are not what sel
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry your needs aren't being met. Maybe that's Apple's fault. Or maybe you have too many needs. Take a long, hard look at why you feel you need feature X: is it because you're doing X all the time and want to continue to do it, or because you might mayb
Re:Battery life? (Score:3, Funny)
See, around these parts, it's not possible to simply be someone who likes Apple products. If you dare to praise an iPod, or OS X, or anything Apple, you are a MINDLESS FANBOY. It means your house is festooned with Apple bumper stickers and posters, and you fantasize about fellating Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, if you mindlessly criticize anything
Re:Battery life? (Score:3)
yeah. the ipod is very nice to look at and the interface is pretty much the one to beat. but if you're buying it on looks alone that's pretty stupid. how often do you shove your mp3 player in your pocket/backpack
Re:Battery life? (Score:2)
Re:Battery life? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Battery life? (Score:2)
I guess if you want to have album covers displayed on screen it's good... but where is XviD support?
Firmware (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Firmware (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine print... (Score:4, Insightful)
Euhm, so.... how much space DO we have left? Could be anything really.. Damn marketing speak!
Re:Fine print... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fine print... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fine print... (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be 1000MB to mean a GB, or 1million KB to mean a GB, or 1millionMB to mean a TB.
Get what your saying, though. Hard drives are always measured in millions, not in 2^20, of bytes.
T.
Re:Fine print... (Score:2)
Re:Fine print... (Score:3, Informative)
20 GB = 20 * 10^9 Bytes = 20,000,000,000 Bytes
20 GiB = 20 * 2^30 Bytes = 21,474,836,480 Bytes
20 GB = 18.5 GiB.
bar = (foo * 10^9)/1073741824
Where foo is the Metric GB and bar is the Binary GiB.
Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it doesn't support .flac files like the Rio Karma, it does support .ogg,
That's pretty close to a contradiction since we have both Ogg FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. You meant to say it supports Vorbis? Or is it just plain FLAC files it doesn't support, but Ogg FLAC is fine?
Re:Um. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know of any player that supports Ogg FLAC, much less a hardware one. They're all content to use FLAC's native container format instead. From what I've seen, Ogg FLAC is more of a proof-of-concept format - at least until the Ogg plugins start supporting it.
Re:Um. (Score:2)
I've got no problem with OGG, but come on, guys...here I am with a 120 gig AAC library and I'm not go
Re:Um. (Score:2)
On my smaller iriver all my voice recordings in OGG Vorbis format will not play. I recorded several audio books at 46Kbs Ogg. Each AudioBook CD is 12 Meg and very clear. The iriver only works with oggs vorbis at over 96Kbs. I would like to see 32Kbs + Ogg Vorbis support. Speex support would be even better(8 kHz, 16 kHz, and 32 kHz). I had to re-record my audiobooks in mp3 with lame (at 26 Meg and lower quality).
Re:Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm getting sick of the whole container/codec thing. Noone knows whats inside of a
Every time
Am I the only one that has issues with these multimedia containers?
Color screen but doesn't play videos? wow... (Score:2, Interesting)
you sure? Re:Color screen but doesn't play videos? (Score:2)
Are you sure? The synopsis may say it supports video formats but neither the product page nor the review indicate that any video formats will work. What is your source for the video functionality?
Re:Color screen but doesn't play videos? wow... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Why no FLAC? (Score:2)
Re:Why no FLAC? (Score:5, Informative)
FLAC would be nice (and easy to add, since decoding it is all cheap integer ops), but the bitrate of the files is so high that the device would need to keep its hard drive spinning the whole time in order to play them - and that'd kill its battery life.
Re:Why no FLAC? (Score:2)
Re:Why no FLAC? (Score:3, Interesting)
Semantics, semantics... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Semantics, semantics... (Score:2)
Is that speaking from experience?
-- james
US release? (Score:3, Interesting)
For all those dismissive of the iPod's interface, (Score:2, Insightful)
On a separate note, why are they putting off until a later firmware update the ability to view pictures and listen to music at the same time? Shouldn't that have been one of the top priority jobs? Shouldn't they wait until they have that done?
Re:For all those dismissive of the iPod's interfac (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For all those dismissive of the iPod's interfac (Score:5, Informative)
Don't believe me? http://www.iriver.com/community/notice_view.asp?pa ge=&idx=31&mode=&strque=&field=1 [iriver.com]
They admit the problems and plan a fix. Never happens. Appology note posted says that they're still working on it, with no date in sight.
Sometime later they post this... http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=37 3 [iriver.com]
and there is much rejoicing at such a comprehensive list of both defect fixes and user complaints/suggestions.
And they don't make this date either, with no explanation ("Late July/Early August" != September)
Sometime later, http://www.iriver.com/support/download_view.asp?id x=609&page=2&p_name=&word=&categor y= [iriver.com]
finally appears. But compare it's feature set with what was promised. A couple of things were fixed, but gapless playback isn't gapless, it just shortens the time between songs. With all the other mp3 players, gapless playback means that one song fades into the next. Shuffle still isn't shuffle.
No, I will not be doing business with iRiver anymore.
Re:For all those dismissive of the iPod's interfac (Score:2, Interesting)
But...But...But they support OGG! How can any company that supports OGG be poorly run? Could it be that maybe supporting free file formats instead of file formats licensing fees is a way of cutting corners? Could it be that companies that cut corners in some areas MIGHT cut them in others?
Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:5, Interesting)
AM is essentially deprecated in the US market (Score:5, Interesting)
When radio first became popular, I believe all stations were AM. When FM technology gained ground and passed AM, the AM market began to decrease. Currently talk radio is the primary reason for using AM, but since a lot of programs are available on AM and FM stations (often the AM will have an FM counterpart) there is a relatively small demand for AM these days. Adding parts/manufacturing expense - thus increasing the cost of the final product - to support AM is seen as a losing proposition (low to negative ROI for the PHBs in the audience).
I like AM. The signals propagate much further than FM, and late at night one can pull in AM stations from hundreds of miles away. However (for me) this is an amusing sidebar: the [lack of] support for AM wouldn't be a dealbreaker in the MP3 player purchase decisionmaking process.
Re:AM is essentially deprecated in the US market (Score:2)
It's a waste of bandwidth to transmit voice only over FM. It can be served by the quality of an AM transmission without wasting an FM signal.
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:5, Informative)
Lo-Fi (Score:2)
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:2)
The only time I've turned the AM band on in my car since i got it (aside from accidentally) was to check traffic reports from a "tune to this band if these lights are flashing" sign
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:5, Informative)
AM is more subject to interference than FM due to the modulation method used, not due to the frequency. AM at 88-107 MHz is susceptible to interference just like AM at 560-1600 kHz. AM carries its information in the amplitude of the signal; FM carries it in the instantaneous frequency. Noise is (generally treated as) additive in amplitude, meaning that in AM noise adds directly to the message, while in FM noise only indirectly affects the message via how it changes the instantaneous frequency. In addition, in FM interference is inversely proportional to carrier amplitude, while in AM it is independent.
The analysis to prove it is pretty complex, but basically - angle-modulation methods (PM and FM) have higher noise immunity by design than amplitude modulation; the cost is they require greater bandwidth. It has very little to do with the frequency they run at.
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:2, Informative)
Here [radioyourway.com] is an AM Tivo-like product, but it is $150. The sad thing is that it is probab
Re:Why Never An AM Tuner? (Score:2)
Now, a Long Wave tuner so that I could pick up Radio4LW and the cricket, that would be worth having.
OH COME ON (Score:3, Funny)
In a million years, I couldn't have predicted "It doesn't have an AM tuner". AM TUNER!?? Are you friggin kidding me?
Come on, just flat out say that you are never gonna buy one of these things.
A color screen... (Score:2, Interesting)
What a waste. If i wanted to look at my digital pictures on a tiny display, i'd look at them on the camera that took them.
My Opinions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My Opinions (Score:2)
Since I only play the whole CD whenever I use the unit, I personally don't mind that.
However, if I did want to filter what songs I played based on artist, what I would probably do was to organize the files I transfer to the player in a manner that would help me do that. I sort of do that already.
I organize the songs into directories as follows:
Artist1
Album1
Album2
Artist2
Album1
Album2
This way I can a
Re:My Opinions (Score:3, Informative)
, no option to play groups such as -all songs by Artist- (The iRiver, although comes with a -rather bad- databasing application, organises songs internally through the filetree)
That is a bit sucky, I have an iHP140, and I can just go to the Artist option, choose the artist, then under the list of albums there is "Select All".
Shame they seem to be taking features out of the newer ones.
Re:My Opinions (Score:2)
This is the one thing I cant stand about the iPod. Who was the smart ass that decided to list songs by artist / album from the ID3 tags! I've got my entire collection in folders just the way I want it. What a shame, none of the ID3 taggers Ive found are any good.
low price too (Score:3, Interesting)
16 hours of battery life, but really Im thinking that running the screen at all times would drop that to at least 10 or even 8 hours if your lucky.
storage (Score:2, Funny)
This thing looks awesome. I might sell my free iPod and buy this.
Chris
How much space do you need? (Score:3, Funny)
For the rest of you, I'm curious
Re:How much space do you need? (Score:2)
640KB should be enough for everyone.
Seriously, there is no such thing as enough space. I've got a 60GB Zen a few month ago and now it's about 80% full. I don't know what I'm gonna do when it's full, deleting songs each time I want to listen to something else which is not there yet would really suck.
Re:How much space do you need? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, unless of course you're using it with a PC.
Re:How much space do you need? (Score:2)
H340 listed on their site, too. (Score:3, Informative)
When I was looking for a 40GB player (yes, my music collection plus use as a portable HDD necessitates 40GB for me), I could find quite a few local places that had the iHP-120, but no one who had the iHP-140. Heck, it was even a pain finding any online store in Canada that had it.
I ended up buying an iPod since I could have it in my hands right when I purchased it, get a student discount and not have to pay any shipping.
Flac files are great... (Score:3, Insightful)
I consider Flac more appropriate for home entertainment systems.
Re:Flac files are great... (Score:2)
Some wierdos like me actually archive their music in lossless formats so that they can enjoy them for years to come. I'm looking to buy a 40Gig player soon myself, and flac would be a nice feature so that I don't have to take the time to encode my music into some other format. To me its
Re:Flac files are great... (Score:2)
microphone input (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:microphone input (Score:2)
Re:microphone input (Score:2)
It would be really nice if I could record concerts, and the like, with near-original sound-quality.
Expect to hear from the RIAA soon. :P
Re:microphone input (Score:2)
I love how much power people give to these weasles. The RIAA stands for the Recording Industry Association of America. They have no interest in concert recordings unless they have already been recorded and distributed by an record company that is a member of the RIAA.
Also there are 692 bands/artists listed here and available for easy download [archive.org] and another 1200 or so listed here [wagnerone.com] that allow noncommercial recording and trading of their concerts.
Re:microphone input (Score:2)
Most of Archos' [archos.com] current product line has a microphone input (via included line-in dongle; you have to provide the mic and preamp yourself).
I bought a MiniDisc recorder for the purpose of recording live music about three years ago, and in retrospect wish I hadn't (or more accurately, wish that portable HD audio devices like today's had existed back then). For one, the mic jack ran extremely hot, even witho
Re:microphone input (Score:4, Informative)
If you need really high quality, just get an amplified mic or external amplifier, or build your own.
Check your facts.
'Plays up to 600 hours of digital music' (Score:3, Funny)
Here it comes... (Score:2, Funny)
Whatever happened to. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to. . . (Score:2)
How many people seriously want to carry digital photos around wherever they go?
Some of these devices have adapters that allow you to transfer digital photos from CompactFlash cards, SmartMedia cards, and the like. Being able to transfer digital photos onto a portable HD directly without a computer involved is useful for digital cameras when they become full. The iPod has adapters, even though it can't display the photos. With a device like this, at least you can see what you have transferred.
Re:Whatever happened to. . . (Score:3)
And you still bought an iPod. Things don't have to do one thing "well" to sell; the iPod does things "not quite as well as you'd like but is kinda slick and people think it's cool" so it sells.
And as long as people compromise and buy iPods, we'll never see a do-it-all fantastic
Non-Windows support? (Score:2)
Does anyone know how easy it is to transfer music to it from Linux? My Nikon digital camera lets me mount it like a USB hard drive and just drag files over in Nautilus or whatever. Does anyone know if this music player can do something like that? I do have Windows, with Media Player. But I don't want to boot over to Windows
Re:Non-Windows support? (Score:2)
The iRiver players use the USB mass storage standard, and work with any OS that recognises that. Just drag and drop with a file manager if you want.
WMP10 has special stuff for synching with remote devices, and transfering secure WMA files, which this also does. Presumably you couldn't just drag and drop the secure WMA files, there has to some sort of authorisation.
Bulky? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not much of a difference that I can see.
Er... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was no mention of it being a preorder - they had 10 in stock, and it's now in packaging and waiting to be shipped to me.
So, how is it that they are only taking preorders on something that I have already purchased?
T.
Storing images (Score:2, Interesting)
Come to think of it, any other player that does support that? I don't need a fancy color screen, just the storage capability.
Re:Storing images (Score:3, Informative)
can I just plug an USB compactflash card reader to it and transfer the pictures?
Come to think of it, any other player that does support that? I don't need a fancy color screen, just the storage capability.
Belkin makes a Media Reader [belkin.com] for the iPod that allows you to transfer images onto an iPod.
cost? (Score:2, Funny)
Interesting observation (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting. What makes .asf and .wmv "usual" formats while .ogg is not? Does "usual" mean industry standard? I didn't know that .asf and .wmv support were de-facto standards yet. Has anybody submitted .ogg to a standards body?
Support hi-rate MP3 encoding without DRM... (Score:3, Informative)
A warning to everyone: their flash players are decent, but intentionally cripple their UMS firmware to limit MP3 recording to lower bitrate (well below 128kbps/44.1kHz -- I don't have my player here right now).
The regular firmware requires their special iRiver Manager program, which tries to prevent MP3 and WAV files being copied back off the device. (Hint: rename your files to
iRiver has always given a totally lame-ass explanation that UMS functionality somehow prevents high-bitrate encoding. Tell me how the USB interface code has *anything* to do with the audio signal path or the A/D convertors used for recording.
And, as others have said, they promise to ugrade their firmware but it always gets pushed back. Nice players if you like the features they offer at time of purchase -- but don't buy one if you are waiting for one of their 'real soon now' promises.
So is there a version of Rockbox for it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or equivalent? http://rockbox.haxx.se/ [rockbox.haxx.se]
If not, I'll pass. If open-source firmware isn't available for it, I'll buy another model that does...
penisbird link (Score:2, Funny)
Re:what rush? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:what rush? (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a link to Archos Gmini 400 [archos.com]. The specs [archos.com] say it works for both PC and Macs. The Archos AV 400 [archos.com] and Gmini 220 [archos.com] look pretty interesting too. The AV 400 looks like it's supposed to be a Portable Media Center for Windows XP Media Center Edition, but it isn't - it doesn't need a computer to record from television. I never heard of these products up until this point, and I think they look like serious competition for the iPod, even for Mac users.
I don't see why they don't just add stylii to these things so th
Re:what rush? (Score:2)
What?!? This device has a completely different market segment than the iPod. Sure, it might cost about the same price as the highest-capacity one, but people interested in a video player wouldn't be looking at an iPod would they? On the other side, this thing is bigger, doesn't have the life-altering scroll wheel, nor the "look-at-me" white headphones.
I like Archos products, and think iPods are nice but overrated. However, in
Re:The beauty of the iPod... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure you can say it's clearly not the best player, for the simple fact that best player means completely different things to different people. Just to illustrate that, which player is clearly the best?
To trot out the same old pony of ipod arguments, it's the complete package that makes it so appealing. Sure you can find one's that are smaller, cheaper, higher storage, possess more features, have decent design, better battery life, etc etc....but I have yet to see one that puts all of them together as well as an ipod. Apple certainly chose to make sacrifices in its design, but IMHO they chose the (so far) best set of choices.
As for the itunes/ipod lockin (aside from the fact that itunes seems pretty well designed, especially for someone espousing WMP10), ipods do *not* only work with itunes. You can get various third-party apps that sync (j river media center, ephpod, xplay) to it. You are only locked into itunes music store if your other store doesn't allow CD burning, or if you don't count real's whole helix situation.
-Ted
I second that - MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Informative)
But then, after I bought t