Some great records just slip through the cracks. It can happen for any number of reasons, but the most common comes down to marketing, or the lack thereof. Often, labels blanch at something that can't be easily categorized and targeted at a specific audience, and as a result, the music ends up on an excruciatingly limited press-run, or it gets delegated to a tiny label with little or no distribution reach.

Other times, it's the fault of the artist, who for one reason or another, chooses to release a record in relative obscurity. Gescom and alot of the …

I've been using the ihp-120 for a month now, and enough is enough.For such a great piece of hardware, the firmware is just abysmal. I'd stick with it if I thought that some of its issues would be fixed, but in the last six months, iRiver has issued one major firmware fix, and that was only to add one insignificant feature (study mode) and slightly improve another (shuffle play). The major problems still persist, and no end seems to be in sight.

The excessive gaps in playback have become very distracting, and their root cause, constant hard-drive spin-up, continues to eat …

Well, it's been awhile, but here are two new WindowMaker themes. Winter-Xfce is based off the default color scheme for Xfce, and Windspan2 is a rework with better background art.

Winter-Xfce

Windspan2

NP: Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie, Sufjan Stevens

As much as I love the ihp-120, it's not without fault. On the hardware front, I've certainly got no complaints, but the firmware certainly needs work. The following is a list of fixable features that I'd petition iRiver to add to their product.

1) On-the-fly playlists. I'll get alot of "amens" on this one. iPod does them. Creative's players do them. Even Samsung's Yepp flash players do them. So why is the ihp, which is the most advanced player on the market, the only one that doesn't? The player already has a "track reserve" feature, so this shouldn't be such a …

This player runs easily enough with no software. Provided you're running a somewhat recent kernel with USB support compiled in, the device should be recognized as soon as you plug it in.The first step is to find out where your system thinks it is. Right after plugging in the unit, open a terminal and type dmesg. The output should say something like this:
hub.c: new USB device 00:0b.2-5, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0×1006/0×3002) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: …

After my many tribulations with the Nomad Jukebox 3, I've thrown in the towel. The new firmware allows the player to boot, however the volume has the annoying tendency to jump to 17 every time the player changes tracks. In a player like the NJB3, that's alot of sound, and it's quite jarring. On top of that, the player seems to be over-heating on me, which is certainly not an encouraging sign. Sending it back to Creative to wait three months and pay $200US for an unguaranteed repair just isn't an option, so come New Year, I decided to jump …