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.
3) The ability of the player to actually think in terms of album, genre and artist rather than just by single files. I can’t select an album in the database and have it play in its entirety. I have to drill down into the folder, then cue up the first track to do this. The same goes for artists and genres. I’d like to be able to choose an artist and genre and have the player cue up the whole thing. Additionally, choosing “select all” in a folder should play the songs in some sort of logical order (either alphabetically or by id3 tag) rather than the unpredictable list mode it uses now.
4) Better hard-drive performance. The drive spends far too much time spinning and buffering. Not only does this eat the battery, it slows track-skipping and prevents gapless playback. I know that true gapless mp3 is impossible, but ogg encodes gapless natively, and there’s no reason for the slight gap the player inserts. The Creative players do this excellently, and with far less hard-drive spin.
5) Auto-sync for digital recording. MiniDisc players do this automatically and insert the track marks in the right places. Certainly the iRiver should be able to do this as well. While we’re at it, have the unit output the right marks for digital out.
6) On-the-fly record-level adjustment. ‘Nuff said. While we’re at it, we need VU meters as well.. It’s the difference between this being a professional-level recorder or just a player with token recording options. Given the effort put into this on the hardware side, it makes no sense that the software should be so weak.
7) The ability to customize start-up and shutdown screens. Again, other players have this, and frankly, I hate that my sleek and sinister unit has to display a goofy icon of itself when powering up or down. A bit of personalization would be a welcome touch.
8) The ability to customize the “Now Playing” screen. I’d love to be able to design a few custom skins ala Winamp or Xmms for the iRiver. Look what it’s done for the cool quotient of those players.
These are all software fixes, and they’re all perfectly feasible. What’s more, it’s reasonable to expect that at the very least, the playlist and navigation options be addressed soon, especially considering that cheaper players do these things just fine. Better recording controls and interface would put the unit far above the competition, and catering to the semi-pro market certainly couldn’t hurt sales.