Purchased an iPod, questions.

Hey cat, I have absolutely no problems with recommending the IHP-120 to you. I say this because even though I own it, my opinions of it on the whole, are not biased in the slightest way. I've finally finished my review of it over here :

My review of the IHP-120 over at mIsticRiver

My review is broken up into about 4 parts. I did them 2 parts at a time. The first 2 were done a couple weeks ago, and the reason for there being 2 on the same date, is because I exceeded the character posting limitation. This was also done the second time around, which was earlier this evening.

Just for now though, let me say this..The IHP is a beautiful sounding device, is built like a brick shishkabob house but is sitll light and not bulky, is extremely easy to use, stable as all hell, sexier than Dolamite, (though he might beg to differ) and transfering songs, is easier than Paris Hilton. (NOW THAT'S EASY !!!)

I have NOT installed any of the bundled software (database stuff and driver stuff) and everything is extremely Kosher. It's been nothing but a joy to own and use even with its flaws. Yes....flaws.

The IHP, much like EVERY DAP on the market today, has its flaws. Only one of these flaws though, truely bothers me, because I know that the other ones will be fixed via firmware updates. And if they're not...I'll never buy another Iriver product again, and I imagine lots of people would feel the same because we're all expecting these things to be fixed. You can see what I'm talking about in my review(s). The NON-fixable one, is the remote issue I have. Others have expressed different feelings about the remote, which is natural, and you may disagree with me as well. The only thing I'll say about that now is this...The only way to comfortably use the remote is if you have the IHP on your hip, attached by your belt buckle. This postition allows you to clip the remote either on a button down shirt, or on your pants.

Read my review for the other side ....

EDIT: By the way, my name is the same over there...SweetSpot

The first thing to do is get rid of that iPod.

The battery life is terrible and there is no EQ worth listening to there...it sounds nice but not near nice enough AFAIK.

I had the iPod and Karma - retained the Karma...

I am waiting for the iRiver and Creative offerings to ship to my hands...aah...try em all out and keep the one that sounds the best...

sounds like a plan!!

If you end up keeping the iPod and want to use Explorer see this.

I like using this one to drop music ont the iPod using Explorer. With either Anapod or Xplay, you can just store the installation executable on the iPod and load them onto the computer you are using. You don't have such flexibility with a non-FAT HD player.

James, from what you've said, it would seem that X Play makes any PC see the iPod as a hard drive without any software installation...is that what you meant ? Because otherwise, you'd have to install X Play on any PC you wanted to use the pod with. That's the beauty of the IHP. (and the only other dap I know of that can do this is the Xclef), It is seen as a HD automatically. No driver installation...notin'. And...if we really want file syncing...there's a program called "filesync" which will do it. And considering that the IHP is seen automatically, you can just store filesync in it, and upload it to whatever pc you want. It's a small program that adds nothing to the registry, probably alot less intrusive than Xplay, but that's just a guess.

Sweet Spot,

Oh no, that's not what blessingx or I meant at all! As is generally well-known, the iPod can be FAT-formatted for use with Windows machines. As such it is automatically recognized as an external Firewire/USB 2.0 drive by Windows, no drivers needed, just like with the IHP.

Getting music into the iPod is somewhat more complicated because the iPod needs to glean enough info about the files to set up the browsing process. The two programs blessingx and I mentioned are basically glorified batch files that parse the ID3 tags of music and place them in particular folders that the iPod uses to organize itself. Usually, one uses the iTunes software to do this, however XPlay is more transparent and Anapod has more features.

...and the big advanced for the ipod is that it is a database, so you can sort you files album, artist, composer, etc etc (dont remeber them all). As far as i know there's only one sorting option for the iHP.

I don't use the IHP's DB feature, but I do know that there is more than one sorting feature. It's Artist, album, genre and song actually. And I think that they added one more in the latest fw upgrade....not sure though.