iRiver

8 posts
Audio Technology

Rockbox: new life for the iRiver ihp-120

I’ve talked about my experiences with the ihp-120 previously. It’s a great piece of hardware, but iRiver really fumbled the software, and though they promised updates to rectify some of the more glaring omissions, nothing was ever released, and the product line has since been eclipsed by newer models. This left many users (myself included) feeling burned.

I ended up returning mine for a Rio Karma, which is a wonderful player, but Rio’s closed up shop, and their promised next-generation players have gone from vaporware to ghostware.

A few months ago, a friend of mine decided to ditch his ihp-120 for one of the new Iaudio players, so I bought it off him for $40. At the very least, it comes in handy as a 20GB portable drive. I never expected to use it as a music player.

Enter Rockbox, the folks who wrote a wonderful open-source firmware for the old Archos series.

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Audio Technology

iRiver is dead, long live the Karma

When my old NJB3 died, I realized just what a gap I had in my life without one of these little gizmos. If you’ve read anything on this site, you know what a geek I am for music. I ran a record store for several years, and I’ve been in and around the industry for about 15 years. I’ve been exposed to so much over that time, that I’ve got the Alexandrian Library of Pop music in my head, and almost as much in my closet.

When I was a kid, the Walkman was the greatest invention since movable type. The idea of being able to carry around music and shut out the outside world for it was something immensely gratifying and liberating. There’s been much said lately about the “iPod effect,” but really, it’s just a successor to a mentality fostered by the old handheld tape deck. It’s nice that the iPod’s popularity makes me look like a little less of a dork walking down the street with a pair of headphones over my ears, but hey, I’ve been doing that for years.

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Audio Technology

iRiver updates

It’s been almost three months without a firmware update, with no new one in sight. The only update since January has been a Korean firmware update (1.40 K), which doesn’t add anything useful, though some users claim a slight improvement in sound quality.iRiver has responded to email from a forum user stating that the recording features were only ever intended for voice and casual recording uses, and that they are unlikely to improve. Add this to the fact that iRiver is now introducing subsequent models, it seems unlikely that ihp-120 and 140 owners will see any real improvement in functionality.

Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Recant and Retreat

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 battery life. As I’ve found, this renders live recording on the unit virtually useless. As the hard drive caches to memory, it causes audible pops and “hitches” in the signal. What’s more, the microphone input is woefully under-powered, and without on-the-fly recording level adjustments, you’re stuck with distortion during sudden dynamic changes.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: A wishlist of features

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 big deal. Even the ability to cue up and save a single “Now Playing” list would be welcome.

2) Better navigation. I currently have 323 albums on my player, totaling some 2800 songs. It’s a pain to have to navigate through all that using an alphabetical drill-down method. The DB should have some sort of “jump-to-letter” function at the very least.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Linux Usage and Notes

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 0x1006/0x3002) 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: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JA02
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
sdb: sdb1

This tells you that the device lives at /dev/sdb1. Next step is to give it a mount point.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Initial Impressions

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 ship to the competition.After doing alot of research, I narrowed my choices down to two players: the Rio Karma and the iRiver ihp-120. Both support Ogg Vorbis, which is a big plus, and the Karma has the nifty capability to function as a network device, but it doesn’t have any recording capability and lacks a remote.

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