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Archive: iRiver

Thumbs up for iRiver

20 March 2007 13:11

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Personal, Technology

My iRiver is two years old today. It was a birthday present a couple of years ago (yes, today I am now officially, unfortunately, in the grip of adulthood… gah).

Recently, the MP3 player started totally acting up. It did so on the same day I got my new PC, so that put a dampener on the whole day. I felt as though I was being punished for having the audacity to buy a PC.

Anyway, as you can imagine — I am a huge music lover — I was pretty upset about it. Eventually, I convinced myself that there was a silver lining. It provided the perfect opportunity to buy an iPod.

Yes, today I would probably buy an iPod. I would still feel like a bit of a posing prick with one, in much the same way as I wouldn’t suit driving a Porsche.

Most people are evil and superficial, and many point out the alleged “enormous” size of my iRiver. I don’t think it’s that big — I would say it’s chunky. But I really like its shape — roughly the dimensions of a cassette case. Fits very nicely in my pocket.

Somebody called outta stace left a comment recently explaining why they would “never get an iPod”. I wouldn’t say that I’d never get an iPod. But it explains well part of the reason why I like my iRiver.

But the iPod is tempting for two major reasons. One: gapless playback. I’ve picked up that you can get this for your iRiver, but only with an unofficial firmware upgrade, which I’m too much of a wuss to do. Two, and even more importantly: it Scrobbles.

(This is even more important at the moment because iTunes for Vista is buggy as shit, and the Last.fm software doesn’t play very well with it either — so most of my tracks are never Scrobbled.)

Still, as tempting as an iPod is, the price tag heading towards £300 pounds (I’d need to get the 80GB iPod as I have roughly 35GB of music) is a hefty hit on the wallet. I realised after a while that my iRiver was still under warranty, almost two years after I’d bought it (If my iRiver had died a month later, it wouldn’t have been — I was lucky).

I sent the player back to iRiver in Germany, who very promptly worked out the problem (HDD failure), fixed it and sent it straight back free of charge. I was impressed with the good service.

So now I have been reunited with my iRiver, complete with new HDD, but with all of the same external scrapes and bruises that have been inflicted on it thanks to two years’ worth of my usage. There’s a bit of life in my iRiver yet. Who needs an iPod?

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Don’t you see I have important things to do like listen to music?

18 March 2006 14:35

Categories: General, Technology

Somebody has designed a smart little sticker for the iPod Shuffle that signifies whether or not you’re prepared to have a conversation!

This design is a visual interpretation of one aspect from my current study about Acoustical Privacy: the iPod as a potential indicator for “non-communication”. Through a playful approach the sticker either strengthens the wish for privacy but also offers the opportunity to break up the silence with the direct demand for conversation.

Via Boing Boing.

It is a bit of a dilemma for me. I have to confess that one of the reasons I bought an iRiver was so that weird people wouldn’t talk to me. One time on the train back from Edinburgh this weirdo next to me kept on going on about how the conductor screwed him out of 5p for his ticket, and how the conductor must have a Porsche because it all adds up. He kept doing this at random points of the whole journey. I thought, “If you really care that much about your five bloody pence, why didn’t you tell the conductor?”

If I remember correctly, I was trying to do some fairly important reading at the time. Or maybe it was just the Student newspaper. But whatever, it was a whole lot preferable to listening to this freak going on about his five pence. That was the moment that I decided to buy an MP3 player.

Part of the intention was to get more reading done on the train, but I don’t think it works. I usually just end up staring out the window like a complete idiot, or just thinking about things, dreaming up some awesome blog posts, working out the meaning of life, the universe and everything, or just sleeping.

The trouble with being plugged into your MP3 player all the time is that, although you avoid conversations with weirdos, you could also miss out on having cool conversations with cool people. Or maybe you look like you aren’t prepared to help somebody who’s looking for directions or doesn’t know if they’re on the right train (even though I am happy to help). Or if somebody sees you in the street and they shout at you, but you can’t hear them. Or if somebody wants you to taste some organic porridge.

It’s pretty anti-social. But then again, I love listening to music, and most of my listening time is probably when I’m commuting these days. Plus, if you’re spending about three hours just travelling, listening to music is probably the easiest way to stop you from going completely insane.

I’m not sure about the sticker approach though. To make it so explicit that you really don’t want to talk to anybody would just be down-right rude and, well, anti-social. To display a message saying you want people to talk to you would just look desperate.

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Phones: they make great phones!

4 January 2006 00:48

Categories: Games, Technology

Here is iRiver’s “PSP killer”, the G10 (via New Links). Looks nice, but the PSP is bound to win for two reasons:

  1. WipEout Pure (a return to form for the WipEout series!)
  2. Lumines (the most addictive puzzle game I’ve played in ages)

While we’re on fancy new-fangled gadgets, I’ve been hearing one or two people predicting that 2006 will herald the end of mobile phones, MP3 players and hand-held games consoles being separate. I doubt this. It’s been tried several times before. As far as I’m concerned, phones are only ever successful as phones.

Sure, camera phones took off, but only as a novelty as far as I’m concerned. If you really want to take a photograph, you are going to reach for the digital camera every time, not the piece of crap that was appended onto your phone as an afterthought.

As for gaming, remember the N-gage? It didn’t kill anything apart from itself. Then there’s the music. Rokr anyone? Here’s a neat article I found via Wikipedia:

What [the Rokr] seems to lack, is any realisation of the fact that actually, it is difficult to make a device which is both a great phone and a great iPod.

The problem is that power limitations mean you don’t want to play too many tunes before your phone goes dead; that you don’t want to have too many calls before your MP3 player goes quiet; and that the controls are a compromise.

I’m sure this time last year Sony were banging on about their “iPod killer” — did it kill the iPod? I bet nobody can even remember what it is now (I certainly can’t). I have a friend who has a Sony Ericsson phone with Walkman branding on it. Another friend asked him if he actually listens to music on it, and he just laughed — of course he uses his iPod to listen to music.

My iRiver can play music (obviously), but you can also view images and text files on it. Have I used either of the latter two functions? Of course not. The images do look quite nice, but why would I need to look at images when I’m on the move? The text function, meanwhile, is really fiddly, and I don’t know what on earth I could use it for. As one entertaining iRiver fanboy told me in the comments once:

your [sic] a twat… the [iRiver] h340 now plays videos aswell (full length movies to watch) … hmm why would you want that you will probably say… and you dont even deserve to know why it has picture and text capabilities, READ YOUR MANUAL!

Translation: “I don’t have the foggiest either!”

If there ever is a decent device that can be used as an MP3 player, a games console and a mobile phone all in one, I’d love to see it — but I’ll have to see it to believe it. In the meantime, I’d use an iRiver for listening to music, a PSP for playing games and, er, my phone to use as a phone.

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iRiver H340

26 March 2005 17:40

Categories: Commuting, Edinburgh, Fife, Music, Reviews, Technology, Television, University

I’ve not mentioned what I got for my birthday last week. It was only an iRiver. An iRiver H340 to be precise.

For those who don’t know, an iRiver is (apparently) a kind of spoddy iPod. Well it’s an MP3 player anyway. It’s supposed to be better than an iPod. It certainly sounds worse though doesn’t it? I wish Apple would have just trademarked having the letter ‘i’ at the start of product names just to stop all these embarassing companies trying to hop onto Apple’s kudos bandwagon.

Anyway, back to the player itself. I’m amazed at how great MP3s sound these days. I have totally missed this. Five years ago listening to an MP3 was like listening to music down the phone — now I can’t tell the difference! That partly put me off buying an MP3 player, but the long journeys made this too tempting for me to put it off any longer.

I did buy a portable CD player, but I had to head out with a selection of CDs with no way of knowing what I would be in the mood to listen to in eight hours’ time. And I had to carry them about, aswell as the CD player itself. I couldn’t take my bag off if I had to stand up in the train, and if I was sitting it had to go on the floor reducing that much-needed leg room.

My brother got an iRiver for Christmas and I’ve been salivating over it ever since. Imagine being able to carry my whole music collection about with me! Enough was enough and now I’ve got an MP3 player, just in time for university to end! Genius thinking there, but there’s always next year and whatever summer exploits I may get up to…

I can finally join the podcasting lot. Perhaps I can finally listen to those episodes of Blue Jam that I downloaded last summer. It would be perfect for those hazy early mornings. That’s not really podcasting is it? Well, it is, except with ten-year-old radio programmes…

Music collection

For the past week I’ve been ripping my music collection. As you can possibly tell from the picture above, my music collection is large (possibly about 400 records at the moment, but I’ve given up ever counting) — I’m still on ‘J’ (yes, my music collection is arranged alphabetically — what of it?).

It’s been very interesting going through it all. I’ve rediscovered BabyBird — I was shocked at how much I could remember of it actually. I’ve had to ask myself, “Do I really need to rip Now 32 (one of my very first CDs, bought on the same day as my first CD player)?”, and “Will I ever listen to the Lightning Seeds again?” And I have to come to terms with the fact that my CD collection is now basically redundant. I love those fancy boxes! I’m still using them to play on my CD player though, so it doesn’t feel like one great big waste just yet.

As for the MP3 player itself, I’m impressed. Watch out, I’ve never used an iPod extensively (when I did, all I did was play the games on it) so I can’t compare the two. A major problem with the iRiver for me, though, is the gap between tracks. That can ruin a good album, and sometimes the gap can be three or four seconds long. My brother says there’s an option on his one to get rid of the gap, but I have no such option — perhaps I can get that in a firmware upgrade. Let’s hope so.

The FM radio is a nice bonus. It would be great if you could actually get any reception around here. I specifically got a portable CD player with a radio in it so that I could listen to the Today programme on the train. BBC FM radio reception isn’t too good in this house, but I thought surely reception would be okay for the train journey. But the reception is practically non-existant for just about the entire journey, even in Edinburgh. The only good spot I got was around Haymarket station. I’m always taking the piss out of Dundee for its complete lack of radio / television / mobile phone reception and even internet, but Fife isn’t much better. Pah. The FM radio is a nice addition if you can use it though.

You can also view pictures and text files. I don’t have a clue how I could ever use these though. The pictures look very good on it, but I can’t for the life of me imagine why I’d want to look at a picture on my MP3 player. Answers in the comments please.

The same goes for the text function. I would understand if I could view, say, PDF or Word files, but I can only view .txt files. The only useful .txt files I’ve ever seen are really boring pieces of code which I can’t exactly do much with on the train. Ho hum.

It’s also got recording features, and comes with a microphone aswell as all sorts of confusing leads to hook it up to your PC.

As for the controls, the first time I tried it (without reading the instructions), it seemed intuitive. Now I’m always getting it wrong. Maybe I’ll get used to it though.

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