I'm just about to purchase a portable player and was interested in feedback from anyone who has experience with these portables. Pros/Cons please.

Edit: I realize this isn't the "portable player board", but I often refer here because of the depth of knowleged of this boards members.

I realize this isn't the "portable player board", but I often refer here because of the depth of knowleged of this boards members.

'Sok, I condsider this "on-topic" for general discussion.

(well damn... I typed a long response, but the window refreshed and I lost it!)

Really quickly, I bought the Archos 20GB recorder over the Riot. I didn't like the "curvy game boy" form factor of the Riot. The menus and UI of the Riot are more advanced than the Archos, but the Archos can be easily used as a simple hard-drive device. Just plug in, copy, and go... no software necessary.

I'd be glad to answer any specific questions...

I'd be glad to answer any specific questions...

Thanks, I'll get in touch if I come up with any.

I bought an Archos 6gb well over a year ago. Kinda bulky, kinda heavy, but it works well. I didn't like the original Nomad's size - way to huge. The III looks to be similar. I have yet to see and play with a Riot, though it looks cool. The IPod is awesome. Looks great, sounds great, easy to use - though I would be worried about scratching it. It's too pretty.

I used my JB 6000 extensively with a line in plug prior to buying an empeg. Afterward, I used it regularly at work. Battery life was pretty good as long as I refrained from skipping songs constantly.
Playlist size is limited to 999 tracks - and that takes a minute to load one of that size. (Winamp playlists work fine - no need to use the bundled musicmatch jukecrap)

Initially, it had some software quirks. At the time I bought it, they were releasing upgrades fairly rapidly. Now they haven't released anything new for it in a lonnnng time. It basically works as advertised - it just takes some experimenting to figure out some things (documentation is lacking). Email requests for explanations never had a response.

The JB 6000 reads ID3v1 tags only (title only). I found that removing the tags entirely, forcing it to use the filename, gave a few more characters in the scrolling display. But still, not enough characters are displayed. That sucks.

Searching for songs depends entirely on how cleverly you arranged directories.

Occasionally, when playing, a song will "blip". Not sure why. And if you bump it too hard vertically, it will also blip - but I believe that might be due to a momentary loss of battery contact.
I also purchased the accessory kit. Remote, headphones, cassette adaptor, car power adaptor. The remote works well, though it feels rather flimsy and I worry about durability. Headphones were crap. Cassette adaptor works about as expected. Power adaptor causes a lot of noise in the system, so is useful only for recharging the batteries. (note that the remote supposedly only works on the player versions - Not the recorder type)
If the fickle gods of weather send some decent snow this year, I plan on trying it out on the slopes. I found a cool over-the-shoulder bandolero-type gameboy advance case that should work well for skiing.

Overall, the unit is serviceable. And makes a great file-transfer device between computers. I do envy the nifty features of the Nomad, IPod and Riot, though. The Archos line is quite a bit cheaper than the others, but does lack their features.

I'm just about to purchase a portable player and was interested in feedback from anyone who has experience with these portables. Pros/Cons please.

OK, it's not one of the products you listed, but Apple Ipod is very good.

• Pro: tiny form factor
  
• Pro: desirable design
  
• Pro: very fast (IEEE1394) file transfer
  
• Pro: nice hi-res screen, scrolls in all the right places for long track names etc, good backlight
  
• Pro: very easy-to-use UI
  
• Pro: well over 10 hours battery life (I've never run it flat)
  
• Con: no insert or append mode (in car-player terminology)
  
• Con: Linux 1394 support is still iffy and I can only transfer from Windows (or Mac, but I don't have a Mac)
  
• Con: no retrieving music from player
  
• Con: you'll need an IEEE1394 card unless you have a Mac (say £20)
  
• Con: the earphones make my ears hurt (but that may be because they're so good at reproducing bass)
  
• Con: relatively expensive compared to physically larger players
  

The Linux 1394 stuff works for some people; perhaps it's just my particular card that it doesn't get on with.

Peter

Con: no retrieving music from player

Actually, you can very easially. The Music folder is simply a hidden one. Nothing beyond that preventing music from being copied off.

I'm picking up an iPod here soon, due to many of the pros above.

And one other pro, it's a firewire hard drive. I'll probably toss a firewire card in my machine at work, and then have quick file transfers between work, and my home PC and Mac.

Con: you'll need an IEEE1394 card unless you have a Mac (say £20)

Ahhh... makes me kinda glad I bough that creative Audigy card so many months ago. I knew that firewire port would come in handy someday!

Thanks to all for the thorough replies to my request. After reading these, I will definitely check out the iPod now. I was unaware that the iPod could be used with Windows, so I wasn't paying any attention to it. I would be interested in retrieving music from the player from time to time, so I hope it's as easy as Drakino mentioned it was. I'm really looking for something with easy UI and features like our Empegs, but in a hand held version (for snowboarding, mountian biking, motocross, airplanes, etc...). Thanks again for the great responses!!!

I'm picking up an iPod here soon, due to many of the pros above.

Well, I haven't got my iPod yet too, but this is simply because it isn't available at the suplier's. I've been checking his website on a daily basis for a month now, and the release date of the new 20gig model has been postponed three times already now. Next date that is set is sept 6th. Fingers crossed!

Con: no insert or append mode (in car-player terminology)

From all the cons mentioned this one bothers me the most. But I guess I can live with it. It certainly won't stop me from buying the unit. Isn't the iPod's firmware upgradable? Can't this feature be added in the future?

I was unaware that the iPod could be used with Windows...

It hasn't been that long since the windows software was released. In fact, that was also the moment the 20gig model was released. I guess it's been two-three months now. But as said before, my supplier is still waiting for the first shipment of the "new" iPods and because of that so am I. I hope you have better luck.

Peter,

BTW, How "shock proof" is the iPod? I would be using it in occasionally extreme situations that could shake it up quite a bit. Does it have a large buffer?

I personally have an Archos JB20, which definitely has a sloppy UI compared to the iPod, but seems to be developing an active user community around an alternative firmware implementation (http://rockbox.haxx.se/)

I have an Archos Jukebox Recorder. Piece of crap. Sure, I guess it all looks good, but in use it's just plain crap. I don't know how the people here who have it are having different experiences.

I got mine last Christmas, and defended its features over the iPod. Admittedly, I wanted a portable MP3 player that could record, so the ipod was out of the question.

After using the thing, The software is buggy as hell, the display is crap even with the light on, the form factor simply feels cheap, and many of the things the company says you can do on the player is either not actually possible, or it's incredibly hard to do. They say that you can make a playlist without computer access. Well, following the only instructions I could find - an online message board FAQ, I could not get it to work.

The player has inconsistent behavior, such as wierd display errors where the entire display will be shifted down about 3 lines.

Pros- I guess the sound was pretty good, the songs played normally, and the recording quality was pretty good, considering, but that's only if you had a loud enough input. if you had an unamplified input, you'd get about as much hard drive noise as you do source.

My dad recently asked me for ideas on what portable player he should buy. His iPod ships tomorrow.

Good info to hear from a Archos owner. I suspected as much from reading the customer reviews on Amazon. Thanks for the continuing responses.

DiGNAN17,

Why did you recommend the iPod over the Riot to your dad?

Everyone else,

Why, with all the Empeg loyalty on this board, am I seeing only iPod users and Archos users. Is the Riot a POS? I would think that Empeg users would lean towards the Riot based on the features they like about thier Empegs? Am I wrong to assume that the Riot is similar in features, UI and expandability?

The Riot was not developed by the same team of people that developed the empeg car player. Hence, no specific loyalty on our part. (And no specific similarities in software features.)

The biggest difference between the Riot and the iPod is physical size. The Riot uses a laptop hard disk, giving it more potential capacity but a bigger physical footprint. The iPod is quite small by comparison because it uses a smaller PCMCIA-sized hard disk (with less capacity).

The software is buggy as hell, the display is crap even with the light on, the form factor simply feels cheap, and many of the things the company says you can do on the player is either not actually possible, or it's incredibly hard to do. They say that you can make a playlist without computer access. Well, following the only instructions I could find - an online message board FAQ, I could not get it to work. ... The player has inconsistent behavior, such as wierd display errors where the entire display will be shifted down about 3 lines.

Yes, but how do you like the player? Tell us how you really feel about it.

tanstaafl.

I have the riot. I got it over the ipod because of the hdd size at the time now they have 20 gig hdd ipods and because of the clueless sales people at the apple store in the mall of america.

The only thing I don't like about the riot is you have to use real one or real jukebox to load the music onto it. I would rather have something like emplode that isn't an all inclusive music manager / player I just want something to put the songs on the player with. The size has not been an issue it still fits in my pockets fine. The transfer speed isn't really a big issue to me after I do the big initial loading I only upload an album at a time when I get a new one.

The riot is 200.00 less than the ipod with the same size hdd so if I had to buy one today I would still go with the riot just for that reason.

Did that toshiba ipod clone with the removable drive ever come out in the USA.

Yes, but how do you like the player? Tell us how you really feel about it.

I'm sorry, I sometimes have difficulty expressing my emotions

How's this: I do not have an affinity for the Archos player. No good? Oh well, I guess I'll stick to calling it crap

when looking at the archos player I found it to be oddly heavy. Something that small shouldn't be that heavy.

msaeger,

No problems with the Riot? Battery life Ok? Menus easy to use? Customer reviews I read on Amazon were all over the place about quality, UI, durability, etc... Would you have bought the iPod if the HD size was 20gb when you were making your purchase? If price was not a concern, would you buy the iPod over the Riot today?

Do you know if there has been much success in upgrading the capacity of the iPod? This was one thing that made me purchase the Creative Jukebox I ... later I found that this one pro couldn't come close to stacking up against all the con's for that steaming sack of dung.

If I can upgrade the capacity later without use of a soldering iron or microcontroller programming, the iPod will be our next purchase.

Greg

Apparently, the folks over at MacAddict took apart an iPod (I started getting my free subscription a month or two after this, though). They seem to claim you can just pull the metal back off of the plastic body and get to its innards. I have absolutely no idea if it's possible to replace the hard drive, but the AnandTech guys seem to think so.

The battery life is great the longest I have used it one one time is 10 hours. The menus are easy to use it automatically makes playlists like the soup views in emplode. I usually use Artist - Album or use the rio dj feature which plays at random for a specified time.

When I bought the riot I would not have bought the ipod just because of the dorks at the apple store (and the compusa apple section) not knowing what an id3 tag is. I wanted to know it the ipod used the id3v1 or v2 tags to get it's track info well they didn't know what id3 was let alone there are two versions.

I wonder if anyone has tried upgrading the riot. It has a standard 2.5 inch drive and the pin of the drive just plug into a connector on the PCB. That toshiba one has to be upgradable unless all you can do is stick in another drive of the same size

I'm really looking for something with easy UI and features like our Empegs, but in a hand held version

That would be a great product, wouldn't it?

Rob

In reply to:

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That would be a great product, wouldn't it?

Rob

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Why do I get the feeling that I'm going to have to start restocking my 'gadget fund'?

Getting it apart shouldn't be the hard. It's finding the exact size HD that's the hard part.
It used to be that the 5GB iPod was actually cheaper than the 5GB PCMCIA drive that Toshiba sold. Is this true anymore?

Even if you can't upgrade it cheaply the iPod is still a nice piece of gear...

- Trevor