Hi, I am new to this forum. Hope my post isn't irrelevant or against any regulations.

I recently bought iRiver's iFP-190TC and became addicted to it instantly. I am just wondering why there is no news or discussion of iRiver products in this forum. Anyone heard of this brand? Here's a brief introduction for all those who haven't heard of it:

iRiver offers products that are cutting-edge while customer-friendly. They have produced the award-winning iMP-350 SlimX and many other digital music players which are all Firmware Upgradeable, allowing us customers to get updates that we request. They really do listen to consumer feedback and implement popular modifications where possible. This type of support has become their trademark for developing new, free updates.

Coming back from that short introduction, I would like to share my experience with iRiver. Not too long ago, many users flooded the iRiver user forum, requesting for the players to double as removable drives. Immediately, iRiver went about working out the firmware upgrades, and now we are able to use the iFP-19x and iFP-39x series as USB mass storage (UMS) devices with the UMS version firmware.

They have just released the 1.0c version, which is also the third version. This version has fixed quite a number of the bugs in the previous versions which users reflected on the forum, and it is evident that iRiver really is a company which listens to its users.

Being able to use an MP3 player as a UMS device is really wonderful! No more diskettes and CD-Rs, just an MP3 player which you can listen to all day long and at the same time, transfer files conveniently from one computer to another.

For those who own the iRiver iFP-19x and iFP-39x series, don't hesitate to upgrade to the new firmware version 1.0c at the iRiver website - just click on the link here! And for those who don't own an iRiver product yet, I really hope my post offered you an viable alternative to Creative and Sony players.

I am open to comments from other iRiver users. Hope to hear from all of you soon!

Cheers!

I use that player... no one talks about iRiver cause I think most of us are waiting for firmware support for Ogg Vorbis...

BTW that player rocks... looks so techno geeky to wear that around your neck!!

iRiver has its own forums for the players, you know.

Maybe thats what it takes to get Ogg support at last.

I believe they only took advantage of Vorbis for the marketing value. IMHO most of their players will never get this support, my IMP-400 included. More likely AAC will be supported by all their products in the future and Ogg forgotten.
But these are just my guesses.

Btw: I'm very happy with my player, but the international iRiver forum I gave up on a long time ago.

first. iriver products have been discussed on these boards dozens of times.

second. people have been flooding irivers boards with requests for ogg support for a long long time.

I am really sorry if this seems repetitive. Didn't really know it has been brought up so many times since I am new and I haven't seen any active related threads. Just thought I would revive the iRiver thread and get some opinions from iRiver users, esp. with the release of various new players (iFP-39x, iMP-550, iHP-100) and firmware.

Yup, it's a real pity OGG has yet to be supported. It's one of those things iRiver hasn't really addressed after so long. There has been a lot of speculation about hardware inadequacies but no one really knows. Let's hope we see OGG support in the near future.

But for now, I am happy with my player, and jubilant for I can use it as a removable drive too!

Cheers!

You should have posted this in the 'Audio Hardware' sub-forum .

iRiver is pretty much the unofficial audio hardware company of Hydrogen Audio Seriously, most people on the forums have an iRiver player of some kind. Just wait until there is a firmware release (especially one supporting OGG Vorbis), there is always a lot of discussion that accompanies that.

I use an iRiver IMP-250 mp3 cdplayer. Works mostly flawless, any bitrate including VBR.
Only drawback is that it has a cheap/fragile plastic look&feel.
Afaik Later models are made of metal (IMP-400/IMP-550)

Use the search function and search for iRiver and you'll find many pages of jibba jabba.

I like my IMP-350 very much and my wife's IMP-450. But I am very dissapointed with iRiver's customer care position. Realy, we asked for Vorbis support dozens of times. And maybe it isn't possible. May be hardware can't carry Vorbis Ogg decoder. But we never get the answer. iRiver position is very very dissapointing. And now I will think twice before going to buy a new (flash based) portable.

IMHO, iRiver products are "a bit" overpriced. Their solutions are not useful for good quality audio, and the only real choice would be flash players with CF, which is cheap and has more room than any iriver player to date. Unfortunately selection of CF players is not that great
As far as I remember you should not even expect Ogg on flash players since they use some sort of DSP to decode MP3/WMA stuff and not RISC cpus like iMP-350+ line of players and no-one in the universe is working on porting Ogg Vorbis to that particular DSP chip as far as I know.
As I stated on iRiver forums many times iRiver proved that "upgradable firmware" is just a nice line to have in the advertisements, which basically does not bring any real usability. If you buy some audio player base your purchase on existing features not what is "possible" with firmware upgrade which manufacturer may or may not implement.
I only hope that my iMP-350 CL RISC chip will be compatible with the firmware Monty is working on right now, if not - there will never be Ogg Vorbis in iRiver products. (I even remember they had a page in Korean where they explained that Ogg Vorbis is totally useless when you have mp3 and wma)....

I think AAC/MP4 support for iRiver will come sooner than Vorbis. iHP-100 is supposed to come with AAC support for instance. And the rest of the players will probably get it with a firmware upgrade.

Vorbis' position is dubitable at the moment. Because AAC moved in stronger and better. Ok it's not open source but that's not too much of a problem for many. Now that iPod comes with AAC support, in a couple of years every player will be able to play MP4 and probably even WMA. And there would be no point qualitywise pushing iRiver towards Ogg. And I don't even think they care at the moment.

However Vorbis based players will be a reality sometime, although not as soon as AAC probably. I know at the moment there are some
Vorbis players already but they are neither attractive nor cheap. There is also a Sharp Zaurus player developed by The Kompany (link). As the player devices get complicated, I'm sure we'd have the opportunity to code our own players for them...

4 Singaporeans on this board! Cheerios!


Yeah, I own an iRiver too, the imp-400. Sadly, its been aeons since iRiver has come up with a new firmware.. I wished they put much more effort into doing the Vorbis firmware implementation... either that or at least support cuesheets ...

Well, I'd second the idea for CUE-sheet support (in fact, I've tried to explain it to a few folks via e-mail, but either the idea isn't as great as I thought, or I've just done a lousy job of explaining it!). Ideally this could be handled in a similar fashion to the old MP3Cue Winamp-plugin: use the CUE-sheet to create any number of index points within a single, large file, and store any/all tag information within the CUE rather than in the audio files. And since these CUE-sheets need not be burner-compatible, they could also be used to break up multi-hour streams for indexed playback. At any rate, it would be a quick, effective solution for gapless playback, bypassing any format limitations imposed by storing songs as separate files.

- M.

Edit: Although MP3Cue allowed for storing such CUE-sheets within an ID3v2 tag, and despite my own fondness for ID3v2 when tagging MP3s - regardless of what anyone else here might think of such tags! - I'd recommend keeping CUE-sheets as separate files, and binding them to streams with the same filename (so that "Random Artist - Album Number One.mp3" would be indexed by "Random Artist - Album Number One.cue").

Although they never delivered on the promised new codecs, There have been firmware updates to
fix/improve existing function. The biggest 2 that come to mind are pre-fetching the start of the next song, and supporting packet format on CD-RW's.

Packet CD-RWs were supported since day 0! My SP-100 by SonicBlue which I ordered Jan 29, 2001 had supported Adaptec DirectCD created discs, and I used it for a while until realised that this feature totally kills any shock protection and/hence drains my batteries a few times faster, no more CD-RWs in the last 1 year... (on iMP-350)...
The only really good feature of all added with new firmware was direct order disk reading.. which improved shocked protection (for me) and also seems to drain batteries a bit slower, which is always great.

However, yet again, I can state that iRiver is not trustworthy company, on page 2 of imp-350 manual they list codecs unconditionally implying support of MP3-Pro, Ogg Vorbis in the future..... well, we all know the outcome. I would buy iRiver player again only if they release portable DVD-MP3 player, for any other purpose I would not go with iRiver anymore. For HDD players they offer pathetic size of hdd for the highest price around.

> ...DirectCD created discs, and I used it for a while until realised that this feature totally kills any shock protection and/hence drains my batteries a few times faster, no more CD-RWs in the last 1 year...

How did you arrive at this...by trial? I have never heard of this before. There should be no difference between a fragment free packet written RW and a plain R data CD as far as battery life is concerned. In both cases the player will read ahead until the buffer is filled then the disk will momentarily stop spinning. UDF is just another disk format like ISO9660. One is not intrinsically more energy efficient to a portable than the other.

xen-uno

Everything is overpriced in canada ( /me bought iMP-150 for 160 CAN bucks and now amazon sell iMP-350 for 99USD :'(


--> actually it creates more RMAs since I (and a lot others) accidently flash "wrong" firmware, and the player just don't play


I hopes that iRiver will support AAC and Ogg Vorbis in the next firmware upgrade, but I doubt about ACC because iRiver may pay a huge $$$4 royalty, so why bother to support it on old device

No, no trial That's was one of the reasons I bought SP-100 in the first place he-he... I just read specs before I ordered the unit... Jan 29, 2001 was the day it was announced - I was waiting for device for a long time... Ordered directly from EggHead and got dead unit and then for another 3 month was exchanging directly from SonicBlue god knows how I hate SonicBlue... They (Diamond MM) was one of the reasons Aureal went bankrupt - so I hate them even more (Diamond didn't pay for their Vortex 2 chips as far as I read)...

UDF is not same as ISO 9660... files are located in the matter similar to FAT/FAT32... and files can be "fragmented" this fragmentation created additional seeks Since my average bitrate was something like 192 at that point of time, it was seeking almost constantly => battery died too fast each time.

Don't tell me... I'm trying to get a digital camera now... it seems that canadian companies want more profit than god earns...
And "bad" people @ eBay want 60$ USD for shipping... I don't know where such prices come from but probably they check the price of shipping to the Moon and then announce it to me... only a few people aked for a good shipping cost of 15$ for USPS Express (4 day). Other guys located in Detroit ship to Florida but don't ship to Toronto, which is like 5 times closer...

Surge,

That's why I said "fragment free packet written RW". Assuming that it is, then there would be no difference in battery life. You can even write the UDF format to R's (which is guaranteed to have no file fragmentation). If you only write to an RW (no deletions or overwrites of existing files), then it will stay frag free, too.

xen-uno

Am I the only one that doesn't quite understand the frustration and hand-wringing over the lack of Ogg Vorbis support for iRiver players?

I have an imp-400 and I admit to looking at the firmware update page from time to time just to check, but can you guys really ABX the difference between an -APS encoded MP3 file and a similarly encoded ogg (-q6)? I know I can't for typical music files.

Now I do understand if you have a 128 MB flash player and want to cram a few extra low bitrate songs in memory. But for those with CD based players, isn't it enough to put ~9 full albums on a CD using Lame -APS?

Am I missing something?

PS: Please don't take offense if you _really_ love ogg vorbis. I really want to know what the big deal is for someone who says, "I'll never buy a player without ogg support."

One nice advantage of Ogg Vorbis support - and for me, this is a big consideration - is truly "gapless" playback. The same would hold for MPC... save that MPC seems even less likely to gain hardware support from a major manufacturer, at the moment.

- M.

IMHO, its not the audio quality of MP3 that's the problem here... quite honestly, I would be hardpressed to tell the difference between a 160 kbps mp3 and the original on a portable even in quiet conditions, and unless you've trained yourself, differentiating APS from the original in most conditions is hard.

Rather, two things suck for Mp3 - lack of both proper replaygain support and gapless playback.. and for both, Vorbis has the solution.

It also helps that in general, Vorbis requires less bitrate for the same quality as a comparable MP3 file.

Well, if this doesn't sound like one of those so-called reviews (ahem..plugs) on Amazon I don't know what does! The whole post seems a little off...maybe too descriptive. It shamelessly but subtley praises IRiver products in a manner conducive to dragging uninformed members to check out said products; and it's really quite cheery. Thick like syrup on waffles kinda cheery.

If you are truly a newbie, I sincerely apologize...I just shudder when I think of the ways ads are becoming more and more subtle...I fear that soon there won't be any bona-fide truth left! It really irks me to read something supposedly innocent, like a true personal opinion, that sets off alarm bells. Again, apologies if I'm mistaken, and enjoy the board.

I for one am getting pretty frustrated about the fact that it takes so long until a Vorbis-compatible hardware player comes out.

I want gapless playback on a portable, damnit.

Discmans have gapless

Sorry really needed to reply to that previous comment...

Laters

AgentMil

I am waiting in great anticipation for the forthcoming Rio Pearl. Now that SonicBlue has been purchased by D&M Holdings (Denon & Marantz), the uncertainty regarding the future of this player appears to be resolved.

I purposely put off buying the IPod 2.0 when I heard about this player. Some wonderfully geeky features that get my jollies off:

• 20 or 40 gig 1.8 inch drive (about as small as the IPod)
• MP3, WMA, Vorbis and FLAC support.
• Crossfader( )
• Built in web server
• Built in Ethernet connectivity

This player is being developed by the people that brought you the Empeg Linux car player. For more information, see below:

Pearl Info Links

http://www.dapreview.com

This thread I started on MP3.com

IGN Article

Size comparison of Pearl vs iPod

Pic 1

Pic 2

Pic 3

More comments from Hugo (and more stupid questions from me)

Sorry if I gave you or any uninformed members that impression. Haha, didn't know I make such a great advertiser! I could actually "shamelessly but subtley praise IRiver products in a manner conducive to dragging uninformed members to check out said products..." without putting in much effort. I hope iRiver would pay me to put up such advertisements on other boards, or perhaps a commission for every player sold, someday.

Actually I was just trying to generate discussion on iRiver products and I'm really glad so many responded and gave me an insight to the flaws and problems with iRiver. Nothing is really perfect, so criticise by all means, but don't overlook the strengths. And I do scream along with other iRiver enthusiasts, "When are we getting OGG Vorbis support?"

Cheers!

hinius:

I checked out the links you posted, and this Rio Pearl indeed looks *very* impressive - thanks a lot for sharing that!

Your post made my day ! (w00t)

Thanks !

Honestly I in most of times when listening (not ABXing samples) music I can't feel difference between LAME 160 (ABR) and LAME APS but...
Vorbis has:
1. Gaples playback
2. Peeling
3. Open source
4. The only competitor to AAC (nothing against AAC, simply don't want to get AAC monopoly (hardware and software) in 1-2 years.
5. Has room to be developed.

I think it is enough.

What is gapless playback and what makes it so important

(sorry if I sound dumb , but I never quit understood it)

The Sonicblue Pearl look awesome.
Will the name of the product change ?

Gapless playback is when you have tracks that meld into one another. This is used extensively on mixes made by DJs (eg. DJ Tiesto In Search of Sunrise 3 etc) by doing this gapless there is no pause in between tracks. MP3s cannot do gapless per se thus you will hear an audible pause between tracks. This is especially important for user like myself who encode lots of dance mixes as many are made to sound like one large track but broken down into their individual tracks/song title.

Laters

AgentMil

I just think that it is natural that we will see more "unbelievable newbie posts" as HA gets more popular.
And remember, iRiver is an unknown newcomer compared to household names such as Apple and Sony. Hell, within my close people in Mexico, only my sister knows iRiver.
So let's try to cut this guy some slack.

Thanks for clarifying, excuse the acid tone.

I wasn't trying to troll, just trying to create awareness (not cynicism!!!) of the fact that subliminal advertising has crept onto the Internet in the form of postings on forums and blogs such as this. So watch what you jump at, readers! B)

On a more semi-on-topic note (heh. right.), that WAS quite the description. Keep it up for other companies/products you are interested to learn about, and we'll do our best to help you out. Things like this always generate discussion.

Again, my sincerest apologies. You will find this board a valuable resource.

Thanks !

Someone on another forum emailed iRis, the iRiver.com webmaster, recently regarding AAC/MP4 and OGG Vorbis support:

I hope iRiver would continue to bring us great firmware upgrades. I believe many users are looking forward to AAC/MP4 as well as OGG Vorbis codec support. Many other companies are working on these and some of these products would be available very soon. I sincerely hope iRiver will support these codecs so as to stay competitive, or I am afraid many other users, like myself, would switch to other companies despite our passion for quality iRiver players. I remember seeing mention of OGG Vorbis support on iRiver.com quite some time ago, so I really hope iRiver would continue working on it.

Here's the response:

About the new codecs,
We are well aware of users high demand.
As you know we are have been working on porting OGG for a long time ago. It takes more time than we expected regarding to technical and non-technical issue.
iRiver keeps promise.

___

Hope it isn't too long before we see OGG support. But it's nevertherless heartening to know they are still working on it!

finally there is support for Ogg for iRiver iFP 3xx & 5xx series sounds great, I have one

Holy thread resurrection, Batman! <-- (Shamelessly copied from rjamorim )

This issue being discussed on its own thread, I really don't see a point in bringing this thread back to life again, but that is just me.