[vox] Linux-compatible MP3 player recommendations wanted!

[David Hummel]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 04:26:40PM -0700, Shwaine wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 31 May 2005, David Hummel wrote:
> 
> >I assume from this that you would prefer a flash player, as opposed
> >to a "jukebox" hard drive player.  Either way I'd recommend one of
> >the iRiver players.  I think they're all USB mass storage devices,
> >and more importantly, many of them play Ogg Vorbis files.  The sound
> >quality is also the best I've heard from any portable MP3 player.
> >
> > http://iriveramerica.com/prod/ultra/
> 
> I have an iRiver iFP795 that does not play well as a USB mass storage
> device under Linux. After copying about 200MB of files, it corrupts
> the file system and I have to reformat the player. This leads me to
> believe the USB mass storage firmware for this device has issues.
> There's also more severe restrictions for things like audio recording
> quality on the UMS firmware. Under Windows, one can transfer via USB,
> but it slows to a crawl and takes about a half hour to fill the half
> gig device. The Ogg Vorbis support is also a bit constrained as you
> have to keep the average rate between two values, which runs a bit
> counter to the oggenc concept of quality values. The default (-q 3)
> works for most files, but I've had to push up to -q 5 with a few of my
> rips as using the -m and -M options was not sufficient to produce a
> file the iRiver firmware was happy with.
> 
> I got the player because of the Ogg Vorbis and USB mass storage
> support, so running against these issues was somewhat discouraging.
> There is a open source project to access the device via the iFP
> firmware:
> 
> http://ifp-driver.sourceforge.net/
> 
> There are others who have run across the iRiver UMS issue and have
> come up with kernel patches to work around it:
> 
> http://www.misticriver.net/boards/archive/index.php/t-3750.html
> 
> This may also be a problem centric to the iFP line of players, but I
> haven't looked into their other higher-end products.

Interesting, thanks for the report.  I can only speak to the iHP-140
hard drive player, since that's the one I have.  It doesn't seem to be
affected by any of these issues.  I shouldn't assume that the flash
players would be the same ;-)

I suppose if you want good Linux support, the Neuros is probably the
best bet with the open firmware and all:

  http://www.neurosaudio.com/prod_neuros_main.asp

As I'm sure Brian Richter would also tell you ;-)

-David