Portable device with greatest format support?

[Liver]

Gents,

I am looking for a portable player that supports MP3, OGG (definately), other formats would be nice, but not essential.

I have looked at the iRiver offering and am seriously considering the the H120. My concern is that I had the SlimX 550 and it stopped functioning within 2 weeks. I had no issues getting a refund, but it did leave a reliability after taste.

I would love a portable with OGG support, a line out (external amp), a decent battery life, and drop and drag interface.

I am not concerned with the physical size of the unit or looks in general. It will mainly hide in my backpack. Any CD based unit (like the SlimX) is ok, a hard drive unit is preferred.

Hacked versions are fine with me. If anyone knows if the Dell DJ has a firmware hack, let me know.

Thanks,

Liver

 

[bangraman]

Try the iAudio M3 or M3L. It's got Ogg, MP3 and recently it has support for FLAC. I have no idea if iRiver have plans to offer FLAC, but I would postulate that FLAC is definitely less effective on the H when compared to the iPod, and slightly less effective compared to iAudio (due to the somewhat deficient outputs).


The M3L has a claimed 35-hour battery life. It has a line out (through a possibly fragile minidock). It is like the 550 totally dependent on a remote to work. In your mode of use that shouldn't bother you, but it needs to be said.

 

[hugz]

rio karma plays mp3, ogg, flac, wav

i have a feeling the rest of the rio line does too, but i'm not sure

 

[stigweard]

The h120 is a nice player but it has a couple of drawbacks. It has a limitation on filenames and directories of 52 characters, so you might need to shorten the names of your mp3s. It has full drag and drop support, but no synching software (last I checked). The battery is not replacable, there are complaints on the iriver forum about their being no official repair shops, or third party sellers of batteries so if things don't change within a year, you might be out of luck if your battery dies. The record feature also leaves a distinct hdd noise every time the buffer is written and from what I have read there is a limit on the maximum filesize before you need to stop and start recording again. There are also reported issues with playback of vbr files greater than 30 megs.

I have listened to the h120 and it sounds great with decent headphones, and has no problem driving 32 and 60ohm headphones that I have. I did own their ifp-790t flash player for a time but I ended up returning it because of white noise issues when using better headphones than the ones supplied. I was really keen on getting one of these players to replace my returned flash player, but after reading about known issues and hanging out in their official forum for a while, I decided against it. If you aren't concerned with recording features, or filesize limitations, it is still a great player well worth the money, just not for me.

I am sitting on the fence right now trying to decide on what to do for a replacement player as I really want vorbis support in a player. I prefer the sound of their codec with lower bitrate files. I also have several gigs ripped, tagged, and ready to load onto a player and I don't want to go to that effort to re-encode into mp3 format.

 

[blessingx]

Not to get nickpicky, but the player with the greatest format support may not be the same as what your requesting (specific features).

Out of the major players, for format support I'd give it to the iPod (WAV, AIFF, ALAC, AAC, MP3 and AA). Next would be the iRivers (WAV, ASF, Ogg, MP3 and WMA), then Karma (FLAC, Ogg, MP3 and WMA), then a bunch of players (let me know if I've missed something). All depends on what specific format you want (and it's limiting saying it has to be Ogg). For uncompressed, lossless and lossly there's only the iPod at the moment.

 

[Head Creep]

The iAudio M3 and Rio Karma support most of the formats you seem to be interested in. As far as iRiver goes, there's currently a group called RockBox working on 3rd party firmware for the H series. They're working on lossless support, and Ogg Vorbis is almost necessary, so given quite a bit of time the iRiver could be the best player format-wise.

Edit: The RockBox project just got started, so don't expect anything for a couple months.

 

[sammy w]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hugz rio karma plays mp3, ogg, flac, wav i have a feeling the rest of the rio line does too, but i'm not sure

WMA, too. I'm pretty sure Karma plays the most. Iriver plays mp3, wma, wav, ogg, and aac. Oh, that's 5 each.

 

[Achtunghoy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx Not to get nickpicky, but the player with the greatest format support may not be the same as what your requesting (specific features). Out of the major players, for format support I'd give it to the iPod (WAV, AIFF, ALAC, AAC, MP3 and AA). Next would be the iRivers (WAV, ASF, Ogg, MP3 and WMA), then Karma (FLAC, Ogg, MP3 and WMA), then a bunch of players (let me know if I've missed something). All depends on what specific format you want (and it's limiting saying it has to be Ogg). For uncompressed, lossless and lossly there's only the iPod at the moment.

Dude, the iPod is the only player with lossless, uncompressed, and lossy? Yeah right. The Karma plays WAV, FLAC, OGG, MP3, and WMA. Thats uncompressed, lossless, lossy, lossy, lossy.

 

[blessingx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Achtunghoy Dude, the iPod is the only player with lossless, uncompressed, and lossy? Yeah right. The Karma plays WAV, FLAC, OGG, MP3, and WMA. Thats uncompressed, lossless, lossy, lossy, lossy.

Okay, I was wrong. Two reviews I read said the Karma supported FLAC instead of WAV and the DigitalNetworks/Rio page had no mention so I didn't think the Karma supported uncompressed files. Though if I wanted to make a case for the iPod, that's still uncompressed, uncompressed (w/tag support), lossless, lossy, lossy, lossy.

Also while admitting errors, even though I made the original thread about it, I forgot the iAudio M3 supports at least limited FLAC playback (compression settings 0-2, of which I know of no one using, but it's easy enough to convert lossless).

So for the original poster of this thread, it looks like the Karma (or future Chroma) and M3 are the best choices.

 

[austonia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sammy w WMA, too. I'm pretty sure Karma plays the most. Iriver plays mp3, wma, wav, ogg, and aac. Oh, that's 5 each.

iRiver does not support aac, that's an apple thang.

edit:
by the way you can compare supported Formats among players at DAPdB.com

 

[Latexxx]

Rio Karma is gapless. The others aren't.

 

[Liver]

Currently I have (and love) a SuperDual so that is why I would like a line out. I have them paired with Shure E2 (modded) or E3's. Hey I like the isolation.

I ripped all my music to OGG and I am quite satisfied with it. I don't want to re do anything. Just lazy I suppose, but that is the driving force behind getting a player that supports OGG.

I checked out RockBox earlier this week and I love what they are doing.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Liver

 

[ninethirty]

One problem you'll run into, btw, is that OGG playback still takes more processing than mp3, so you'll have less battery life. A while back, the Karma would last roughly half as long playing OGGs...it's just a more complex format to decode, apparently, and mp3 can be done in hardware.
You might check the forums at www.riovolution.com to see if that is still the case. I assume the same restriction holds true for other players.

I know you said you didn't want to re-rip (and I completely understand that)...but just a thought.

 

[enzoferrari650]

The ihp battery is said to be very easily replaced by the user. 3rd party manufactures do produces replacements I believe and do offer to replace it for you if you ship it in.

 

[Edvard_Grieg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ninethirty One problem you'll run into, btw, is that OGG playback still takes more processing than mp3, so you'll have less battery life. A while back, the Karma would last roughly half as long playing OGGs...it's just a more complex format to decode, apparently, and mp3 can be done in hardware. You might check the forums at www.riovolution.com to see if that is still the case. I assume the same restriction holds true for other players. I know you said you didn't want to re-rip (and I completely understand that)...but just a thought.

Not quite true, Karma gets 15+ hours playing MP3/WMA, 11 hours playing FLAC and 10 hours playing OGG....on average, these were the results of polls conducted at Riovolution.


While the iPod may technically have more acronyms under it's belt, keep in mind that none of those are truley open-source, and based on the OPs original request for OGG, I'm guessing that is where he is leaning. Additionally, as other posters have mentioned, the Karma is the only one listed which does gapless playback of all formats (to the best of the abilities in some cases, re: WMA....blame M$ on that one), meaning that while the iAudio and the iHP do support OGG, and FLAC on the iAudio, neither does gapless playback.

One thing to make sure of though, the Karma is strictly a tag based player (it does it very well too I might add), but that means you need to have all your music tagged properly or tag all of it properly. If it isn't, but the filenames are uniform, look at programs like "The Godfather" which offer mass-tagging based on file/folder structure.

I do like the iHP and the iAudio, but I have reservations with each. With the iHP it is that from what I have seen it only does file/folder navigation sufficiently (I have heard the database method is unbearable if you have a large collection). My concern with the iAudio is that if you lose the remote you're kinda hosed and have to shell out for a new one at $50 a pop. Additionally, IIRC, the iAudio does not even have an a 'tag-mode' option.

Obviously I own a Karma, and as such I'm biased, so as always take the preceding with however much salt you want