Portable HD MP3 Player

It's all about the equipment

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dana
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#16 Post by dana » Mon Apr 12, 2004 11:51 am

Ok..

If you make a playlist for it, like from winamp or something, it gets put on the iRiver as a text file and played as-is. No editing on the fly. (note: Ipod does not support playlists at all afaik)

If you're playing a song, however, and you want to search through and find the next song to play, you can do that. So that's kinda like modding playlists on the fly.

Just to be fair, there's some stuff the ipod can do that the iriver can't:
- through itunes, play songs by rating (ie, play all songs rated 4/5)
- play songs by last-played-date (only play music I haven't heard in the last month)

Those things'd be cool, but unfortunately there's no "rating" on the ID tags for oggs and any other formats than mp3 and AAC, so the iRiver can't do it. Maybe someday Ogg will change their ID tag formats.. I can dream :)

d.

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platt
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#17 Post by platt » Tue Apr 27, 2004 6:34 pm

I have read some seriously cool things about the Rio Karma. 20gigs for about $200. Sure its not the sleekest thing, and its not white and metal but hey for that price and the reviews i have seen...

http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_ ... 220&cat=53


cnet review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Rio_Karma__20GB ... g=topprods

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Bob the Builder
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#18 Post by Bob the Builder » Thu Sep 23, 2004 9:01 pm

Ok I'm looking at buying an MP3 player.
I want to see what is outside the iPod world.

Apple 40 GB iPod M9268LL/A - $399.00

Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 40 GB MP3 Player - $244.14

Why should I spend an extra $150 just to get an iPod.
The Nomad has had some great reviews.
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Nate Dogg
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#19 Post by Nate Dogg » Thu Sep 23, 2004 10:23 pm

I bought a Nomad last month, actually I bought two. Both turned defective within a week and had to be returned.

Hopefully, it was just a bad batch.

Oh well,
Nathan

JohnDyer
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#20 Post by JohnDyer » Thu Sep 23, 2004 11:17 pm

Bob the Builder wrote:Ok I'm looking at buying an MP3 player.
I want to see what is outside the iPod world.

Apple 40 GB iPod M9268LL/A - $399.00

Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 40 GB MP3 Player - $244.14

Why should I spend an extra $150 just to get an iPod.
The Nomad has had some great reviews.
iRiver HP-140 (40GB drive). It's formatted in FAT32, probably so that all computers can read it. USB2 connection. FM Tuner. Plays MP3, OGG, WMA, ASF, and WAVE formats. Battery life long enough for any gig. Price was $380 on walmart.com of all places. I've had it for several months and have been using it for about a month for laptop djing. Hasn't let me down yet. The downside is if you want to reformat to say NTFS, the firmware "player" will become unusable, and you'll just have a small external harddrive. Look here for more info:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/products/H140.aspx
John Dyer, Denver CO

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scowl
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#21 Post by scowl » Tue Sep 28, 2004 12:28 pm

I have a Nomad Jukebox 2. I wouldn't recommend DJing with it for people you don't know. You have to use a klutzy wheel on the side of it to select things. It's not easy to use.

Occasionally a song will start with horrible crunching noise in one channel. The noise will disappear if you quickly restart the song but that could sound almost as bad as the noise.

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Yakov
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#22 Post by Yakov » Sat Oct 23, 2004 11:46 pm

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i just pimped the Pogo RipDrive... not bad. found it for $300 + $20 shipping (grr). (See www.shopping.com). Not the best DJing device (not why I bought it) but it can work in a pinch, better than the others because it PLAYLISTS.

loaded with the right features:

Pros:
- 40 gig @ $300 = bonus
- internal mic and line in (i need one of those battery-powered mics for bootlegging my own gigs... first i should test the internal mic though) + radio recording capability
- recordings automatically go to MP3 @ 128 kbps max (down to 64kbps). I haven't found a way to record to uncompressed WAV. Probably the quality of these recordings doesn't warrant more than that, but my LAMEyness makes me cringe at this limitation. (I'm emailing Pogo about this.)
- usb 2.0
- MP3 and WMA, no DRM
- digital FM tuner, 20 presets, seems to be a good receiver.
- external hard drive functionality
- includes carrying case, earbuds, and male-male stereo 1/8" plug
- 10 hr. battery life [untested], outlet-friendly charger (AC adaptor away from the outlet)
- displays text files
- folder layout (not ID3-based browsing) - i like this
- pogo seems to be very very good at email communication
- and for DJs, the best feature: PLAYLISTS CAN BE UPDATED ON THE FLY! the implementation is somewhat clunky -- before taking the booth you have to start playing a song and add it to a playlist. then stop playback and switch to the playlist you just started, then start playing that song again, now from within the playlist. now you can select a song and add it to the playlist... it will be played next! now you can go dance or hit the bathroom without worries! :)
:( HOWEVER: I haven't yet figured out how to make this work with LONG FILE NAMES -- if you have "Artist - Title" format, you will not be able to read the whole file name as it scrolls by because the timer will make that screen disappear and replace it with the now-playing screen. I emailed Pogo about that, maybe they'll get back to me.
- Human replaceable batteries. If your battery is dead, you can buy a new one for $20 and install it yourself. (If the same thing happens on an iPod, you send it along with $100 to Apple for battery replacement.) I think there's only one other player that allows this (Creative?).

Cons:
- Big, heavy & unstylish (not tragically so, but... it sure ain't no iPod.)
- obviously, no preview feature.
- Odd interface, it includes a clumsy wheel thing on the side that you hardly ever have to use it because of the big buttons on the front. Read the manual to find the features.
- My thumb hurts after using it a while, but probably my muscles will adjust the way they did when I got my cell phone. Like I said, it's no iPod...
- Very poorly written manual. The facts are there but buried under bad prose and terrible organization.

the Win98 driver CD doesn't work for me, but it can use the driver from the SanDisk Titanium (which I bought at the same time). (It should work 100% "PNP" with Win2000+ and OSX 10.1+, although I haven't tried that yet.)

http://www.pogoproducts.com/products_2.html

they also sell a mini keychain USB flash drive that has a screen and a headphone jack... might come in handy if you get to a dance and they turn to you and say "oh, we have no music, did you bring your CDs?"... i think Creative makes a similar product. I was looking at these but then I went with the SanDisk Titanium for the durability.

I'll post updates on the RipDrive as I live and deal with this device.

-yakov.

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Lawrence
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#23 Post by Lawrence » Wed Oct 27, 2004 5:30 pm

The Wall Street Journal today had an article reviewing three competitors of the IPOD Mini: one from Dell, one from Rio, and one from Creative. The gist of the review was that, although these three offered more battery life and about one Gig more storage space, they did not recommend them over the IPOD Mini because they were more difficult to use. The "lock" control is hidden inside a menu; some of the dial-button manuevers were clumsy... small stuff like that, but that affect your day-to-day enjoyment of it. I suspect that has something to do with the reviewers being too accustomed to the IPOD controls, but perhaps not.

They also noted that IPODS will likely decline in popularity once they come down in price, except for ardent music fans. Most ordinary folks have no use for anything more than the 1000 song capacity of the IPOD minis. The added bulk and expense won't be worth it to them.
Lawrence Page
Austin Lindy Hop
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Yakov
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#24 Post by Yakov » Wed Oct 27, 2004 7:46 pm

maybe i've been spending too much time on Mac discussion boards, but: it's iPod, not IPOD

fwiw, my new ripdrive has a hold switch on the outside like a CD player.
and that menu thing, there's no fix, you can increase the scroll speed but you still feel like a jackrabbit on the run when looking through the directory tree during playback. owell, it's not for DJing anyway.

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lindyholic
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#25 Post by lindyholic » Sun Jan 16, 2005 2:07 am

I just got a 20 GB iPod. This thing is amazing!! I love it. Not only is it great for backing up all my music, but I can see using it when DJing. I am currently in the process of categorizing my music into various types of playlists, so if someone requests a song, I can just go to the necessary playlist and grab a song from there. They really are an awesome piece of work, I highly recommend one. I listen to it non-stop and it's helped me discover different things from within my collecting that I never would have done with all my CDs. It's nice to have all my music in on 8 ounce mp3 player.

Harrison
www.lindyhopper.ca, Canada's Swing Site.

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GemZombie
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#26 Post by GemZombie » Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:28 am

So i'm told that you can't use an iPod as an external hard drive on a PC. In that you can't use it to play from while using a laptop because it doesn't store in mp3, and has a unique file structure in order to support it's playlist feature.

To me this is a deal breaker, so how much of that is true?

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lindyholic
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#27 Post by lindyholic » Sun Jan 16, 2005 2:49 pm

Do you mean you can't listen to it while it's connected to your laptop? Like I can't listen to it from the iPod while connected? If that's what you mean then it's kinda yes and no.

Yes, you can't play off the actual iPod while it's connected to your computer. But, while it's connected to the computer, you can play any of the songs that are on your iPod on the computer. iTunes has it set up so that all the songs that are on your iPod are accessible to play through iTunes while it's connected.

Harrison
www.lindyhopper.ca, Canada's Swing Site.

Campus Five
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#28 Post by Campus Five » Sun Jan 16, 2005 4:10 pm

My ipod is really the best thing to happen for me musically in a while. The random access to my entire collection at all times is unbeatable. The ability to make purpose playlists - like "wedding/background music", "1939", or "130-140bpm", or "Lester Young" - has helped me listen to and use my collection in a much more effective way. Like Harrison, I've stumbled upon things I'd originally overlooked. Also, being able to listening to just one artist, like pres for example, across different albums is so inspiring musically.

As for DJing with it, its been incredibly helpful atleast twice. At the Saturday night at Rhythmic Arts, no dj or dj equipment was there to start the night, so I just plugged in my ipod and started on my sample dance set playlist. Also HiLx, I hurt my hand one night and couldn't dance, so I asked to Dj a set. I didn't have CD's, since I wasn't planning to DJ, but there was my ipod to save the day. I did an hour and a half with out even having scroll through too much.

That being said, the choices can be daunting. But I'd rather have to many options than just a few.
"I don''t dig that two beat jive the New Orleans cats play.
My boys and I have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating!
--Count Basie
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Bob the Builder
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#29 Post by Bob the Builder » Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:27 pm

I ended up getting a 40GB iPod, and it is fantastic as a listening device.
And that is what I use it as. I preview with it, when DJing from my Laptop.

The biggest downfall in my opinion is it needs some kind of search facility on it.
I've got 18GB of songs on it and at this stage finding exact songs is difficult.
Can you imagine if you had one of the new 60GB iPods full of songs how difficult it would be to find stuff.
I think is would be also beneficial if in iTunes you could create extra fields. eg - Label, Vocalist, Rhythm Section, Arranger, Horn Section, Reed Section, Strings ect ect
On a big band there is not enough space in the "Comments" section to put the entire band.
It would also be nice if you could put the full date into the “year” section.
I like to have all the information at my fingertips.

Brian :D
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Campus Five
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#30 Post by Campus Five » Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:42 pm

You could always make your genre descriptions much much more specific.
"I don''t dig that two beat jive the New Orleans cats play.
My boys and I have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating!
--Count Basie
www.campusfive.com
www.myspace.com/campusfive
www.swingguitar.blogspot.com

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