Any particular ones that you like or don’t like. I’d love to have one to take out on the bike ( I’ve got some pretty isolated routes), but I’ve hit some trouble recently with one.
I bought an iRiver iHP-120 with a 20GB HD so that my wife could d/l some music and listen through the car and I could carry it with me on my bike rides. It is big enough to put all of our music on it, so I’m thinking cool and drop the $280 on it.
Now I’ve learned about DRM WMA files, which this thing won’t play and none of the pay-per-download sites that i’ve seen will let you d/l anything but these protected files, except for iTunes, who does it their own way I guess.
Any ideas besides taking it back? Any way around this DRM crap?
There exists software to break the DRM encoding, but I can’t vouch for its effectiveness nor for the legality of using such software. As such, I cannot recommend the following.
I also do not recommend this: The easy workaround is to rip your DRM-crippled tracks to a CD. Then rip them from the CD back to mp3 format. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it works.
I have an iPod. Great for the bike, but skips too much for me when I’m running. So… I bought a Rio Cali 256 to use on the run which works like a champ. Doesn’t hold as much as the iPod, but is flash based and very light with no moving parts.
Don’t know about the iRiver unit. Never used one before.
That Rio looks nice. Do you download music from the internet onto it? Where from? I thought it was funny that in the ad from the link you gave, on the players display is “Public Enemy - Revolverlution”.
Do you guys actually listen to music while you’re on your bike? I’m not trying to sound judgemental so please don’t take it that way, but I have always thought that was extremely dangerous.
I think it depends on where you ride. There’s alot of government roads near home that have controlled access and during the weekends, there is just about zero traffic. I have no problem with one earpiece in for some tunes and one ear open to hear for anything else.
So, been reading alot about these things today and have noticed alot said about the hard drive players (ipod…) compared to the flash memory players (rio cali…). I’ve read that the hard drive players aren’t really made for alot of activity due to the actual hard drive inside being easier to break compared to no moving parts for the flash memory card.
Have any of ya’ll noticed this or heard anything similar?
I use a mini disc player on both my rides and runs. Each mini disc can hold up to about 5.5 hours of music and the battery life is like 56 hours on 1 AA. The music is good quality and I have dropped the dam thing quite a few times and have had no problems at all. It also has never skipped either. I will NEVER but a Rio product again. I have had two of their Mp3 players crap out on me right when the 90 day warranty expired. Their stuff is junk.
I have a IRiver 140 and a Nike 128 psa. I like the Iriver a lot, after I got it to work with my system. It’s better for use at the gym, while the Nike, as a flash player is better for running.
The Iriver, like the Ipod, is a hard drive based player, with some flash memory. However, because it is a HD player, it is fundamentally unsuitable for very active uses, especially those with a lot of sudden accelerations (bumps). Hard drives are just not designed to take that sort of abuse for very long - imagine a rapidly spinning magnetic platter, with a small magnetic reader head floating above it at very narrow tolerances. Now imagine a very sharp jolt. If that head contacts that spinning disk, you’ve got a major fucking problem. The flash memory in the player is only there for minor bumps which might untrack the reading, so you have continuous listening. But basically, if you’re going to jog with an Ipod, you should not expect it to last very long. For comparison, imagine taking your laptop computer, playing music on it, and giving it a sharp bump with your knee every couple of seconds. One might think that the laptop might eventually disagree in catastrophic fashion.
The flash-players are better suited to running and the like. Unfortunately, they don’t hold much, but that’s life - a series of compromises.
Trio_jeepy, everything you said is true - if you jolt the iPod when the head is spinning you can cause a serious problem.
But the flash memory is for more than just minor jolts - the iPod has 32Mb memory so can load about 20 minutes of music. The Hd is only spinning for seconds every 20 minutes. So yes, if you jolt it then you will have a problem, but it isn’t nearly as big a problem as your post suggested.
This is to save power as much as anything else - spinning rust is a power drain.
Having said that, I use a SD memory player (Panasonic SD-80) not the iPod - a fraction of the size, 50 hours of battery life (using a AAA) and with a 256Mb SD card, about 4 hours of music, Highly recommended.
Another vote for the iPod mini. Very cool. And Apple is pretty easy to deal with. My first Mini devloped a problem with the fast forward button. I took it to the Apple Store, and they gave me a new one no problem. Good warranty service.