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.
The lack of a recording meter is a whole other rant. The whole recording process is an excercise in futility if you’re having to work blind like this. The internal microphone works like a champ for voice recording, but for that I can get a $30 cassette recorder (which probably does a better job of handling recording levels anyhow).
So, for recording, I’ll be sticking with my trusty Sharp minidisc for now, as it handles all this stuff perfectly. I placed high hopes on the iRiver, but it was obviously rushed out the door, which is a real shame.
As far as its capabilities as a player, well…the anemic database is simply inadequate for managing 300+ albums, and the lack of onboard playlist creation and editing is just too glaring at this point. I simply stopped using the database, as it couldn’t recognize or incorrectly catalogued half of my files correctly for one reason or another, even though they were all properly tagged (a personal obsession of mine). With or without it, navigation is frustrating and laborious, and I finally gave up.
I feel like I’m constantly either fighting with the player or trying to live with its shortcomings, so it’s going back. It’s a real shame, because it’s a wonderful piece of hardware, but the firmware is no more sophisticated than a bargain flash-player, which is sad to say the least.