[Davie]

I'm considering these as a replacement for my busted Karma. One nice feature of the Karma is that it was easy to position yourself at any point within a track. I have some mp3 mixes that are 1hr+ and it was really nice to be able to jump to 30 or 45 minutes through easily. Some other players I've seen only allow you to "fast forward" from the beginning at a painfully slow speed. Does anybody know if any of the above mentioned players can handle this?

Thanks.

 

[Flasken]

When a song is playing on an ipod, pressing select will toggle the touchwheel between volume control and track progress scrolling. It works very well - you can even hear audio as you scroll through a track - unlike when you move the slider in eg. foobar.

 

[Davie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flasken When a song is playing on an ipod, pressing select will toggle the touchwheel between volume control and track progress scrolling. It works very well - you can even hear audio as you scroll through a track - unlike when you move the slider in eg. foobar.

Flasken,

How responsive is it? The Karma worked pretty well but if, say, I wanted to advance 1 hr into a 2 hr mp3 the player would stall quite a bit.

 

[Flasken]

i've just been fiddling a bit with my ipod and I must admit that I was wrong when I said that you can hear the track as you scroll through a song as it's only when the slider is still that the track advances to that point and starts playing from there. When I am scrolling slowly, the slider is apparently often still (I'm not good at scrolling very smoothly with the ipod).

When scrolling into longer tracks, the ipod as well as the karma will need to refill it's buffer. IIRC they have the same buffer size. When playing songs on the ipod that aren't already saved in the buffer, the ipod usually takes 2-3 seconds to load before it starts playing. The pause is the same when scrolling through songs that don't fit in the buffer. I don't really see the problem with this, though, as it is very easy to pinpoint a known location in a track - in part due to graphical representation of track progress and in part due to the usual total track time/track progress clock - the latter of which will tick with speeds in accordance with the speed of the scrolling motion.

 

[davidd]

the iriver can do that, I don't have any files that are 1hr+ long so I don;t know how long it would take to scroll throught that much, but it seems like it goes at a decent speed

 

[terrymx]

for iriver you get to choose different scrolling speed; 1x - 6x. at 6x it goes quite fast and wouldnt take long for even 1hours mp3. pausing the song while scrolling it make it faster too. (edit: not sure if its 4x or 6x, my iriver cd player can do 6x, but the ihp120 might be limited to 4x. i dont have it anymore to verify.)

it also has the study mode where you can skip a specific amount of time through the song, just by a press of a button. i'm not sure what's the max, but it can probably do from 1 second to up to atleast 10minutes.

 

[bangraman]

I work frequently with multi-hour low-bitrate MP3's. The iAudio and iRiver were terrible for this usage. The Creative has a nice proportional speed adjuster, which gets faster the more you press down fast forward. The best system I've used by far is on the iPod, where as Flasken explained you simply click and twirl until you get to exactly where you want.

 

[Oddball]

Playing with my Carbon, I don't believe there's a jump ahead feature, but the fast forward does accelerate. I don't have any audiobooks or long mp3s, so I can't really see how hard it is to skip ahead to a specific point. I think it would be pretty easy to get to a certain time area (30 min-ish), but it would be difficult to get to a specific point (30:00).

 

[pkasting]

The iPod handles scrolling quite nicely and accurately, giving you a constant readout of both elapsed and remaining time as you move the scroller (which, like all the other thumbwheel-controlled actions on the pod, accelerates exponentially as you do it faster and longer). It doesn't give you an audible preview as you go, though, unlike iTunes.

 

[bangraman]

I forgot to add that although the Creative does this well using a standard >> interface, but if you fast forward to a certain point in a long track it can sometimes continuously 'click' in that track until you move on to another track.