Older Portable MP3 Players - A biography…

Recently, I went down this path of wanting to find hard disk mp3 players which would offer a few uses that would not require some dedicated program to install.  Here are a few of the finalists and some disclosures:

1. Iriver H340 – This is the 40g model and its really hard to find.  I happened to find a “used one” on Amazon Marketplace so I snagged it.  I also saw one on Ebay recently here. I have never actually used one of these so I am pretty excited.  I am going to replace the battery and hard disk in it.  If you want a forum site and resource, consider either Rockbox or Mysticriver.  Both other great advice and use.
2. Iaudio X5 – A nice, clean unit with characteristic good looks and easy to use controls.  The sound quality is a cut above.  Support, updates, seeing what the community is doing is at Iaudiophile.  A very nice and popular forum site.  Again, great advice, builds, themes, etc can be found at Rockbox as well.
3. Ipod Video 60/80g and Classic Models – I am not particularly fond of iPods.  Without Rockbox on them, you are stuck using an application which reads and writes to its stupid little database.  That beng said, once you rockbox the thing, it becomes useful and you can simply copy music to any old folder on it you want.  Lets be serious here though… The iPods are not quality; but they are consumerish and available and Apple has cornered the “size in GB” ratio and offers a monster 160gb.  The Touch and iPHone are not even cntenders.  The phone is a wannabe convergence device which does not offer alternatives besides the equally wannabe iTunes interface.  Apple, if you wanna be open as in use why not stop using the stupid database and reliance on hard to decipher codes for use on other OS’es.  Now without the wondrous Rockbox, you have to either use a later version of libgod and gtkpod or other applications.  On the videos, you can remove all that cr-apple stuff and just rockbox it totally.  There are some things you will not be able to do like play DRM files.
4. Creative Zen Vision M -This could be a finalist IF one could simply copy music tracks to its hard drive and not futz with Gnomad2 or other applications to read its obfuscated system.  But I like its quality and it works on Ubuntu and Debian Lenny easy.  I’m also not sure with Gnomad2 how you add tracks or synchronize against an evolving and growing audio collection.  More experimentation is required.

So the facts about the iPod naturally steers me away from anything Apple unfortunately.  They are silos and everyone knows it; but they become the only small footprint media player game in town these days.  Not so much quality but quantity and presence. 

Now I’m all about finding older players, extending their lives, learning about them, etc.  I replaced the battery in my X5 and it was fun to see it boot again albiet a bit scary doing the soldering deed.