Well, i decided to cut my losses on the MD thang and go with a HD portable player. I mainly would use it in the car via cassette adapter. I mainly have MP3s but would love to have the OGG option as well, though not married to it if it would increase price of unit by 15-20%. If there are links to info on comparisons of different units or any other pertinent info i would appreciate it immensly. I know, i'll get around to doing a search on here but i am trying to get real-time info on an ever-changing market of products.
Info about quirks/shortcomings/unique qualities of any particular unit are also welcome.


thanks

Take a look on Rio Karma (by the way it supports gapless playback-which rare player supports)

I second that. Gapless is definitely the bonus.

I have had a Fourth Generation iPod for 6 months.

I am extremely pleased with the unit. The ease of use is astonishing. I can perform all the basic functions whilst in the dark.

I can not comment on the ease of use of other players but I have heard that the Karma is not the easiest player to use.

In terms of gapelss playback and the Ipod, I found that the playback was very smooth, almost gapeless when the cd tracks were ripped with Plextools Pro as opposed to EAC. Encoded with LAME 3.90.3 modified using the presets.

OGG is a great codec but so is AAC, with development by Nero and Apple, it is sure to improve.

The ipod is much more widely avalaible, you can get an amazing deal online. Have a look around and reconsider.

One thing is for sure, if for whatever reason my iPod is decommisioned I would buy another one that very day.

I have just deserted my Hi-MD for a Creative Zen Touch, and am rather pleased after approx 5 days of ownership.

They were being offered here quite cheap compared to a 20 Gb iPod, and I could never consider an iPod after an MD due to the poor battery life for playback. The advertised 24 hours of playback for the Zen Touch caught my attention, and my experience matches this claim. Creative claim 24 hours of continuous playback with 128 kbit mp3s. My first run lasted just on 22 hours with some minor control fiddling during playback with a mix of LAME preset medium and standard tracks. Can't complain about that.

The touch pad also makes navigation a breeze, but the interface is not quite as slick as the iPod's. A reasonably close second...

Negatives? Not many so far. It froze on me once in the early stages, but I haven't been able to repeat it, and a quick reset fixed it without data loss. You can use it for data storage, but it doesn't just appear as a drive in XP which is a shame. At least you can just drag and drop to it using the bundled Nomad Explorer, which is still quick and painless after Sonicstage. The other media library software included is OK for basic ripping etc, but I'm sticking with EAC/foobar for my ripping/encoding/tagging requirements.

All in all, a very welcome relief from MD. I've enjoyed my 2 different Sony MDs, but it is now time to move on.

Hope this helps,

Den.

Now that you guys have recomended your player, I'll have to recomend mine Myself I'm using the iRiver H120. Picked it over the iPod for it's longer battery life (16h vs 12h on the iPod), OGG support, optical in and out, recording functions and FM-radio (okay, I couldn't care less, but it's a wanted feature by many ). Not to mention that it works as a removable drive, just drag your entire music library to it.
I've been using it since October and I really like it. But I would recommend you to try a few players out yourself. That way you learn something that no specs or reviews can tell you: The actual feel of the player, and the feel of the UI. That will be more important to you in the end than some features you never use.
I hope I have been of any help!

You've been misinformed. The menu system on the Karma is superbly thought out; in some ways better organised than the iPod, especially if you have a large number of artists from which you wish to select. On the other hand, the physical controls you use to navigate the menus are rather more elegant on the iPod. The scroll wheel really is "just right". The Karma is by no means difficult; you can easily operate one in the dark, too.


Well, I've only played with a 3G iPod, so things may have changed. But unless the firmware has been updated to improve matters, I'd say that the inter-track gaps on an iPod are just about the *biggest* I've heard from any MP3 player. Absolutely unacceptable if you listen to music that needs seamless transitions (eg. Beethoven 5th: movement 4 must follow on from movement 3 without so much as a millisecond's pause).

Have to agree with the iRiver as it has very long battery life, supports OGG, WMA, MP3 and WAV.

Using the file tree for sorting our albums is a breeze as is pluging into any PC without the need for interfacing software.

The H1XX Series will be able to have Rockbox ported into it soon and the H3XX is due to be next on the list.

Overall a great little player.

rs

Go with a 30GB iPod photo, you won't regret it. For just $50 more than the regular 4G version, you get much better battery life and a beautiful color screen to view cover art and photos.

link

I've got an iRiver H120 and love it (as has already been said). Plus when the Rockbox team release their firmware it's just gonna be so much better.

Anyway, looking at the new products out there, I particularly like the iAudio X5 (see here for specs: http://www.iaudiophile.net/news.php)

Karma is available pretty cheap these days as it seems to be discontinued.
I would suggest cruising over to Yahoo groups. There are dedicated message boards for many brands and you can read what bothers the owners either when starting up or after the honeymoon.

edit: I am pretty happy with my Neuros. Sizewise it is kind of a brick, but I like the built in FM transmit, and the developers seem to share pretty well with the open source firmware developers. The schematic is also open source.

The folks at DAPReview.net, who have played with and reviewed almost every MP3 player out there still say that the Rio karma is one of their most favourite players. This article from that site gives you a 1000 reasons to pick up the Karma.

I have used both a Rio Karma and a 4th gen iPod and then bought a Karma. IMHO, the Karma is infinitely better. It is upto you to buy the right DAP for you. None of them are perfect and almost all of them have reliability issues-including the iPod. You must decide if better sound quality, more features, gapless playback and lower price are more important compared to a color screen, the ability to play games and to synch your outlook inbox.

IMHO, a DAP is supposed to play music, not games. I hope this helped you make up your mind.

I don't think those are the main selling points for the iPods anyways

Yeah. It is supposed to be "cool" and it is suposed to be a fashion statement. With everyone I know using one everywhere they go, I don't understand how this is so. Plus there is also bull-shit like this. .

This is simply not possible, unless you are doing something seriously wrong. The output of Plextools and EAC should be identical.

Is the Karma's Ogg/Vorbis support limited in any way like the iRiver players' is? I seem to remember from iRiver's early press releases about Vorbis support that at least certain players would only support between 96 and 192kbps and I'm wondering if the Rio Karma's support is limite by bitrate like that too.

Not that I've heard of. I don't have one, but have a Palm with the same processor (ARM). Most of my tracks are Q0 through Q5 and I haven't had any problem.

From what I've read, Iriver's problem on the low end is that low rate vorbis files need more memory, which is in short supply with a DSP configured to the requirements of mp3.

ARM is more of a real CPU.. I believe the Karma is actually running linux. It was designed by the same team that did Empeg and Rio Reciever. I have the receiver and it is linux for sure.

Is that review for real? This must be some kind of joke, right?

"People can get really jealous of you if they don’t have an iPod and they see that you have one. One way you can really tell that people are listening to music on their iPod’s is their ear buds. They are white, and that just automatically makes it unique"
Seriously!

I've been using a Karma for more than a year, and I can confirm that:

- its battery life is as good as advertised,
- the playback is very smooth, gapless, and the sound quality is great (EQ's are good enough to be usable),
- it runs a real os (probably linux) with a solid journaling filesystem (probably reiserfs),
- my girlfriend fell in love with its user interface.

Only thing is, I think the Karma is more for "HydrogenAudio"-type people, who like to tag their files well. The advantage is that the music can be searched on the device, like in a database. The only drawback is, it will look a bit messy if people just throw badly tagged, random mp3 files onto the device.

The player is not a usb "mass storage device", but there is an official Java application that works under linux too, and can be used for everything. I haven't even opened the shrink-wrapped software and driver cd

The Karma has full support for Vorbis/mp3 and FLAC.

and Vorbis is round, no doubt

Anyway, I recently got tired of waiting for Rio to release the Karma's successor, and bought an iRiver H340. The lack of gapless isn't good, but I have hopes that when the Rockbox firmware is released, it will be the first DAP to support MPC playback.

The H120 and H140 ogg support is not limited, the only issue to take into account when using ogg is that it eats battery quicker than mp3.

Could you post a link to this java app? I cannot find it and would like to evaluate it...

thanks

Sure !

It's there

thanks!! hmmmm.... It works only through the ethernet karma port.... damn, i guess i'll have to get a crossover cable or a small hub

I read the 30GB ipod Photo uses the same chipset (Portal Player PP5022) the 2ndGen iPod Mini does. Supposed to greatly extend battery life, but I've read the 2G ipod Mini is stuttering on some VBR mp3s. Have you had any of this problem with yours?

We can infer from this KB article that the Rio Karma can play vorbis files with bitrates from 48 kbps – 256 kbps.



. That review is real. But it is written by a 13-year old.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that - sorry.

Yeah, a crossover cable is fine :-)

The iRiver H1xx and H3xx players have no OGG bitrate limitations!!! It can play full range Ogg Vorbis VBR files! (up to Q10)
The 192 or 256kbps max bitrate and 96 min bitrate limits are for iFP (flash players) and iMP (CD Mp3 Players)

Hi. I'm an IPod 20Gb 3G and an iAudio M3 owner. I've also tried the Rio Karma for 15 days and these are my (particular) conclusions:

iPod: Uses AAC, which is an advantage for the future. Very good sound with the docking station connection, but poor with headphones. Battery life in my unit is indeed short. If you use it for running (for example), the 20 min buffer is exactly 20 min so, if you pass 4 or 5 songs during running, the buffer ends. In Europe the iPod maximal output is limited, so some songs sound low at 100% volume. In my opinion, the best for the iPod is iTunes, a great idea indeed. Very good connectivity (USB and Firewire) under windows XP and Linux (Gentoo, Ubuntu). There are several linux utilities like gtkpod to connect with the iPod.

iAudio M3: Uses OGG, my favourite codec. Very good sound both docking and headphones, with 20 mW output power, which is enough for me. 15 hours battery life, even playing ogg. Good connectivity under XP and Linux; you only have to transfer the files from the Explorer or Nautilus to the unit, although under Win you can install the JetAudio program to convert songs and connect to the unit. You can setup easily the sound because of its many controls (Eq, bass enhanced, etc). Its main unit size is iPod exactly, so you can use many iPod accessories with the M3. I've tried FLAC and OGG from q0 to q10 without problems. Recommended.

Rio Karma: Indeed the audiophiles DAP, with its almost 55 mW output power and endless sound setup. Uses OGG. I´ve tried also q0 to q10 perfectly. Uses a java connection program so you can easily use the docking station as another network unit. Runs under win and linux with no problems. Not very easy to carry so I returned it, but if your preference is the sound quality, this is your DAP indeed.

Hope this helps.

It is just a software setting in its database. There are lots of apps that can fix this for you, at the risk of hearing damage

btw. the new iPods have better battery life than before. The standard 4G ones have some 12 hours, while the mini plays for over 25.

Exactly.

Why is it that...? Are there any regulations regarding that for every manufacturer selling in EU? What RMS power output is allowed then..?

The limitation is something like 100 dB with stock head phones.

Hmm.. I think I read something about an EU Directive, but I'm not sure.

Pick up a Karma and an extended warranty when you buy it. It's a great player with amazing sound, but the 90 day warranty needs to be supplemented with something more.

Yes I get stuttering with an early release 60G Photo using Lame AltNorm and AltExtr mp3s, it's mostly on tracks with modulated sweeps (I guess sudden high VBR rate peeks kills the decoder) like The Crystal Method - Busy Child.

I could re-encode all affected tracks as Apple Lossless (I don't like the sound of lossy AAC) but it's a pain in the arse identifing which tracks and micro managing my library just for the iPod.

I'm looking for a replacement but it needs at least 30GB so Karma is out, tempted by the iAudio or maybe back to a new Zen.