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for a 10/10 rating see the iriver IHP-100 series. Still the best mp3 player ever made. ogg/mp3/wma/wav supported out of the box, and with Rockbox installed it becomes the best unit out there. Includes OPTICAL Line in and out, built in microphone, and external lapel mic. As well as a builtin FM radio which 7 revisions later Apple have still not added to their players.
I still regret breaking mine and getting an ipod classic 160gb.
If iRiver added a colour screen and modern hdd capacity of 160-320gb (rather than 20-40gb) I would drop the ipod in a second and buy one.
Edited 2009-10-15 13:42 UTC
I don't understand the purpose of fm tuners on mp3 players. FM Radio sucks, which is why I have an mp3 player to listen to music that doesn't suck. Is it perhaps better music outside of the US? Or is it for the kind of people who like fm music, but would buy an expensive mp3 player just for the status symbol?
My iRiver Spinn does have a color touch screen (and Ogg Vorbis support, and I think it even has flac support). My biggest complaint is that there are a lot of video formats it doesn't support (it won't play any of my MST3K AVIs unless I run them through the included transcoding software -- although, to iRiver's credit, the transcoder will take those AVIs and generate something that the Spinn will play). The thing does only have a... 4G, I think, hard-drive, tho, so it does fail that second requirement you mentioned.
It does not play FLAC either. One of the main reasons for having a big-capacity hard-drive player is the ability to squeeze-in lossless audio files.
FLAC support is available with Rockbox but, as I understand, Rockbox cannot be installed on the new iPod Classic devices (Apple took care of that).
Well, it does support Apple Lossless, and you know how Apple is about "duplicate functionality." They probably wouldn't support MP3 if they didn't half to. Not sure what it'll take to finally get Apple to embrace the open audio formats, if it will ever happen at all.







Member since:
2005-08-31
Why oh why don't these devices support ogg/vorbis?
I'll happily continue to run Rockbox on my iPod Video.