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I agree with you about gapless playback, but then again, the vast majority of mp3 players in the market do not support it. Even the iPod only added it last year.

The new Trekstor Vibez comes with plenty of storage, gapless, rios interface and more, HDD-based thought.

Apparently the "Rio" interface is just the thing that Sigmatel wrote for their chips- which play back MP3 and OGG...

I'm in the market (sort of) for a DAP, but it's tempered by a few things:
* I want to replace my USB flash drive at the same time, so the device must operate as a USB Hard Drive (drag and drop is nice)
* Must have OGG support. I have too many OGGs from too many sources to consider re-ripping them as MP3s.


Basically I thought I had narrowed it down to the Cowon iAudio X5 (60GB) or the Trekstor Vibez, but there are various problems with each of them...

* The iAudio needs a docking connector to power up and connect to a computer
* Old
* Does not sort by internal file tags (not so much of a problem, my music collection is meticulously sorted by file name)

* The Vibez scrollwheel is apparently very touchy, and hard to center-click
* The Vibez only goes up to 12 GB
* The Vibez isn't really any smaller than the iPod or the X5L

I forgot to finish my post...

* The need for a media manager is a more serious problem for the iRiver, as is the non-standard USB port (possibly)
* 6 GB is even SMALLER than the Vibez. I could get a flash player with no potential skipping problems for less than that.

So anyway, if anyone can speak to any of those problems, particularly my worries about the Vibez, which I'd really like to like (since Cowon doesn't seem to care enough about the X5 to upgrade it) please let me know. It's rather hard to decide without trying either of them. If Trekstor would come out with the 15GB model (or if it turns out to be 20GB, as I've been hearing rumors of) it'd be easier, but still...

If I'm buying one it pretty much needs to be awesome.

I current have a X5... so, just as a note. The device has to USB connections, one with the mini-dock thing, and the other on the left side of the device wich is an USB host port, but also supports standard connection. It's sad that it's just USB1.1 speed, but still something (but the device doesn't charge from this USB port, just the standard one with the mini-dock).

I don't have a Vibez, but I've read somewhere that it doesn't support UMS under Windows XP/Vista, just MTP thing... Not sure if there's a setting for this that the reviewer didn't find, or if it's a firmware thing... but...

It's really hard to find a descent Portable Audio Player these days... =[
(how about an Open-Source one? We already have the rockbox firmware, just need some real hardware... =] )

It's apparently lacking in the firmware, and makes transfer of OGGs under Windows much more difficult.

Last I checked, the RockBox port for the iAudio X5 was pretty much the most mature and capable of all the RockBox features (including the C64 Sidplay2 feature!)

If only it had a MOD/XM/S3M/IT replayer... though they'd suck up WAY more computing power and probably not be that accurate.

You might want to take a look here:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/BuyersGuide

All these rockbox targets act like a USB Hard Drive, have
Ogg Vorbis support (and FLAC, MPC, WavPack, MP3, Speex, ...) support gap-less playback and many more nice features:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WhyRockbox

I have a Toshiba Gigabeat F40 with Rockbox on it and am very happy with it.

The H10 is more than a year older than the E10. So it's not a case of "removing" Ogg, but not having implemented it yet at the time. All their new players support OGG.

The H10 is more than a year older than the E10. So it's not a case of "removing" Ogg, but not having implemented it yet at the time. All their new players support OGG.

My iHP-120 is waaaay older than both the H10 and E10, and supports Vorbis without problems...

Maybe then it runs a different OS? Looking the pics, the UI of the H10 does not look very similar to the one on the U10 or E10.

The iHP-120 doesn't do gapless OGG, unless you're running RockBox that is...

And no, removing intentional silence from the last few seconds of a track isn't gapless. Gapless means removing unintentional silence between tracks.

I was so happy when RockBox arrived for the iHP-120 a couple of years ago. Without it my iRiver was all but useless since I only listen to albums with overlapping/blended tracks.

"This sounds great, but I really dislike it when players require some sort of media manager."

I agree. Some of these media managers are ugly as sin, near zero functionality and do not run on standard OSes.

To quote from the posting "On The Benefis of Iriver and Cowon DAPs" by project_2501:

The Iriver and Cowon devices didn't do that. They appear as USB removable storage so you can use any USB compatible OS - including windows, linux, solaris and macos. There's nothing to stop you using the 30Gb and 60Gb models as portable hard disks for your images or spreadsheets. You don't need proprietary software or drivers - just drag and drop your files. In todays market, I don't understand why I should use proprietary software which imposes restrictions on me.

So it seems you can use your favourite file manager, maybe something with clickityclick, drag and drop, or the Midnight Commander or even mount + cp/rm + umount (which is great for automated synchronization). How the files stored on the device are handled by its firmware may be different, of course.

I don't think MTP and PTP can really compare on usage with FAT and NTFS... And I'm sure both are more future-proof then MTP and PTP.

I do use a UMS audio device and there's no lag for browsing at all.
It's all about the implementation.

Kaiwai:
>I don't understand peoples fascination with 'usb mass storage' - there is an opensource and very stable
>version of mtp available - libmtp http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
>If you use iPod, then use gtkpod/libgpod.

>Neither of them have given me any grief.

Because some of us like our OSes and their file managers. BeOS and Open_Tracker in my case, and the programs 'libmtp' & 'gtkpod/libgpod' don't work at present with BeOS/Haiku.

But the most important reason is portability, my present HP camera supports access to the pictures as an USB Drive and that not only I can use it on my BeOS machines without extra software, I can plug it into just about anybody's machine *WITHOUT* installing drivers and still transfer the needed files.

I have used my ex-girlfriend's computer only once in the last two years to transfer pictures to her that she wanted. I have transfered pictures twice in the last year to my brother's computer and the same for my girlfriend.

None of them have HP cameras like me, are you suggesting that it makes sense for me to install HP's CD of software for such little use? Any software? When I can just plug in and use the device as a disk drive?

Our Nano is the 1st Gen, not the second one.

Also, remember that the E10 is a harddrive-based mp3 player, not a flash player. So it is more comparable to the iPod Mini, which is in fact bigger than the E10.

Edited 2007-05-06 19:07

why would anyone make a 6 GB hard drive based player when 6 GB flash is fine and much superior for playback?

Flash is not "superior" for playback, it's just a storage format. Maybe they found it was cheaper to use a microdrive. Battery life is good anyway.

Please read more carefully. I clearly say that coming back from standby is INSTANT. The player NEVER really turns off when you click the power button. The full loading of the OS that takes 15 seconds *only* happens if you manually reset the player. You won't need to do that more than once every 6 months or something, just in case it crashed.

Yes, the player remember where it was for videos and music. So when you come back to a video, it continues playing back from the second you had left it off.

Edited 2007-05-06 19:12

> I clearly say that coming back from standby is INSTANT.

Ah, good. Sorry for missing it... my bad.

Can you bookmark a position in a file? (E.g., if you want to pause your audiobook and listen to something else for a while and then want to go back where you left it.)

Edited 2007-05-06 19:29

Not sure about this because I have no ebooks to test. However, if it works via the main music application, then the answer is yes. Songs "remember" where you stopped them when you exited them, so I guess it could be the same for ebooks.

Can you bookmark a position in a file? (E.g., if you want to pause your audiobook and listen to something else for a while and then want to go back where you left it.)

For me, this is the #1 required feature of any audio player and any reviews of such a device that lacks this information is incomplete. Also, agree with what another reviewer says .. if it can't be read as a UMS drive, then it sucks. I don't need some crappy media manager (*cough* iTunes *cough*) that has to be running just to copy files back and forth.

Finally:
while the up and down keys go/play either the next/previous item or when long-pressed they scan back/forward the currently playing media file.

Which means that if you accidentally press one of these keys instead of 'long-pressing' it, it's going to jump to the previous/next track instead of rewinding/fast forwarding as you wanted. This is a fatal flaw that's present in almost every portal media device on the market. Do makers of these devices assume that nobody uses these things to listen to podcasts or other long spoken-word audio files? At least the iaudio player I own give you the option to disable track skipping, which is the reason why I buy them.

Edited 2007-05-06 19:37

Sorry, but you are overreacting. It is the same for the iPod. And you can't easily long press it by mistake, because the screen is off, and when you press it once, it comes back on but nothing is clicked. And THEN you press or long-press, having your full attention.

I used the player for 5 days now, and I never did something by mistake. You are seriously overreacting here. Besides, more functions mean more buttons and that can also be confusing (and more expensive).

>For me, this is the #1 required feature of any audio player and any reviews of such
> a device that lacks this information is incomplete.

Well, I spent days reviewing this product, and my article has more information than ANY other review of the E10 online. If your pet peeve is not addressed, sorry. I can't see an Audible option in the player (as there is in the T10 model), so I guess this player does not have *proper* support for them.

Edited 2007-05-06 20:17

I'm sorry to say, but I don't want to rain on anyones parade, but given the complete lack of support by iaudio in regards to my iAudio x5 (30gig) constantly crashing, the lack of album art - the lack of an update in over a year - its really pathetic; and around 4 days ago, it died altogether, only had it for 3 months.

The whole reason for moving away from iPod was because of the lack of decent support on *NIX, but given how things have changed today, and the terrible experience I had with iAudio, I'm certainly willing to spend an extra few minutes to download the 'proprietary' codecs later.

RTFA! You DO need to use their software to update the database of new songs. It is not really OS neutral. I cannot understand why any media players require special software these days. The software should allow easier transfers/management, but mass storage mode should be the fall-back.

We have absolutely no contacts at COWON, while the Archos PR team was very, very unhelpful. So, if you would like us to review other products, by all means, send them in.

>PMPLib and EasyPMP works on Windows, Linux and OS X.

Unfortunately they haven't been ported to OSX.