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Why are there still so few portable players that play gaplessly? Is it just that most people are ignorant about gapless playback and thus it's not a selling point? Seems to me that a company could make a gapless player and then advertise the hell out of it.

I'm just glad that they ported Rockbox to my iriver H120. I know there're a lot of people who aren't as fortunate.

As good Slashdot and Digg readers, we know that word on the street is to expect an iPod Video model to debut sometime perfect for the Christmas 2005 holiday buying season.

I was actually pretty unhappy with Archos's Gmini 220, but their portable video recorders look great. And their Jukebox Recorder beats the pants off of the iPod, once you install Rockbox on it. If only these guys would release a similar OS for the Gmini... it would become the best mp3 player evar.

Oh, the reasons I went with the iRiver were OGG support and the ability to record to either WAV or MP3, including optical line-in. But iRiver has disappointed me with some of its choices, particularly in the things it promised to deliver with firmware updates but never did

The open-source mp3 player OS Rockbox includes a "Talking Menu" option that will read back commands, playlists, and song/file information. It's very useful for blind users, as well as sighted hands-free/driving use.

No built in support for turning MP3 to bookmarkable AAC's

Rockbox implements unlimited user-configurable bookmarks with plain simple mp3s on Archos and iRiver. It's not that difficult and doesn't require AAC. You just need to append a meta-file with timestamps or byte offsets. And be able to take control of your device's firmware/OS for playback, of course. Maybe ipodlinux can do the same for iPods?

Have *you* ever owned an iPod? How about a competitor? Well,I have...
I've owned an Archos Jukebox 20 GB and a Rio can'trememberthenameofitbutitwasfuckinghuge 20 GB player and am now the proud and very happy owner of a 60 GB iPod. I wish I had just bought an iPod to begin with. Why?
* BATTERY LIFE - I get 12 hours + *minimum* from the iPod vs. 3-4 with the others
* it's small and relatively light. Compared to either of my old players it's downright tiny.
* UI - using the iPod is just a delight - it truly just works. The Archos "OS" was utter crap - if it wasn't for RockBox) the Archos would have been totally unusable.
* Sound Quality - the iPod just sounds better - you can really tell Apple gave a shit about the way the iPod sounds - and that the others didn't...

There is a reason Apple has 85%+ of the HD player market and it's not just marketing. As an owner of several HD and Flash MP3 players, IMHO its because they have a superior product in just about all respects. It's not perfect (I *really* want the ability to shuffle playlists on the player) but its damnned close.

Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendly rivalry.

Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendly rivalry.

Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendly rivalry.

The gapless playback is perfect btw, when using ogg vorbis.

FM radio complicates nothing. My iRivier H340 has FM radio, microphone recording, a full color screen, video playback, and USB on the Go which is handy when the camera gets full and I don't have a laptop around. It has a picture viewer, text viewer, and better audio format support than the iPod. It was cheaper, too, and comes without any software requirements beyond USB2/FAT32 support. Toss a linux image on there so I can use it to USB boot and it makes a decent digital swiss army knife. Apple's iPod is hardly the only thing (or the most feature rich) on the market.

While it is true that Clearchannel programming is universally worthless, I live in an area with a couple college stations and an extraordinarily good NPR affiliate (WXXI). Being able to tune them in is a bonus, especially when I'm using the iRivier for more computer-related tasks and haven't got any tunes loaded. Radio also has a lot of applications in other areas that are useful for some people (traffic, wilderness, etc).

I can think of only three features I'd like to see added... better video playback with video-out, record from radio, and Sirius support. Good to see the next model will almost certainly have the latter. Apple can keep their iPods, especially if they remain shortsighted enough to keep thinking of them as file-only devices. (Frankly, Jobs is not that foolish, so I don't think that'll be an issue.)

I can assure you that my tiny antennaless device gets exceptional broadcast clarity from all of the local radio stations. It bookmarks my stations, and the interface is a breeze. I'm also sure this feature cost them all of about 50 cents per unit to include. Radio is so easy it's a goddamn afterthought.

So, for anyone who's looking for an MP3 player with a radio tuner with video playback that's in the same price range as Apple's little toy, check out iRiver and the Mistic River user community for more information. Btw, their peripherals are exceptional, especially the docking stations.

If you're familiar with the open source mp3 player software called Rockbox, which was originally developed for the old Archos MP3 players, the Rockbox team is porting Rockbox to the iRiver. It's a far better MP3 player OS than any commercial ones I've used.

the rockbox project are porting to iriver (cf5249) and have done some work getting gcc to properly support it. i know they have emac macros, dont know what it would take to get them working in the gcc backend.

Apple never intended for them to be used as audio recorders, and they have no control over the quality of third party dongles.

Your analogy is flawed or, rather, you are too passive. These are not "third party dongles", these are licensed and manufactured in partnership with Apple (that provides the firmware support and allows access to the iPod's innards). You don't get Apple's blessing, you don't get very far. Look at the incredibly slow progress the iPod Linux has made relative to, say, RockBox. This is because Apple actively works to lock out unauthorised development.

The iPod's hardware seems well capable of supporting high-fidelity recording, both analog and digital. The PortalPlayer PP5002B chipset (and derivatives on current models) used in all the big iPods since the early days is capable, according to PortalPlayer itself, of encoding MP3, WAV, AIFF, WMA, and ATRAC3 at up to 320Kbit/s.

A little over a year ago iPods switched to the Wolfson WM8731L ADC/DAC ($5 each in small lots!), which can sample at 44.1kHz, 48kHz or 96kHz. I haven't kept up with current iPod offerings because they are of little interest to me but I would assume Apple has not regressed on the ADC capabilities. It's hard these days to spend more than $3 on a signal chip and *not* get high-quality ADC. I note that most of the other players based on a similar PortalPlayer/Wolfson platform (eg Samsung, Philips, iRiver) offer high-fidelity recording.

So you see you are wrong. The iPod's lack of high-fidelity sound recording is not the fault of "third party dongles", it is not a limitation of iPod hardware, it is simply that Apple has chosen to intentionally limit the available quality of the recording function. As to why Apple would choose to cripple the iPod this way, many people probably have different opinions on that. personally, I feel that it's Apple's way of making nice with the RIAA.

If it has a 20GB capacity, its using a small harddrive...almost certainly a standard laptop drive. This means you can easily slip in any other laptop drive, presuming they don't use goofy partitoining schemes. Seems as if the older players aren't as bad about this.

I have an old Archos that came with a 6GB drive which i've since upgraded to a 40GB one. In this case its just one large FAT partition. Heck, From what i understand I could even make an ext3/xfs/reiser/whatever partition for data as well, as long as the first partition is FAT...but FAT is overall more convenient, even if its a horribly lossy filesystem.

It also helps that theres a cool open source firmware for the Archos's called rockbox which adds some nice features. I found alternate firmware for my old Rio500 which breathed new life into it as well...perhaps theres a project out there for the Karma?

The random fill thing does sound useful then. If you have the opportunity to control it to some extent. As for the iRiver (or an Archos - meant that not a Zen), I'd buy them over the iPod because there is already a project out that has created an alternative firmware for them - Rockbox.org. Adds a lot more power to the things.

Archos music players satisfy these requirements for the most part. The only one I'm not totally sure about is number 4, though I'd probably still buy from Archos again. Some Archos MP3 players even have open source firmware which you can use instead.

Here is a website that shows how to unlock it, and you don't even have to be a professional!

http://www.rockbox.org/lock.html

Free Software is not Open Source. Do I want an Open Source system? Hell no! I want an entirely Free system from software down to the hardware! I use GNU/Linux because I support the idea of Free Software, not because it doesn't cost me money to use. In fact, it does cost me to not use non-Free software; some of it isn't as usable as the proprietary counterpart and may require me to work on the code itself to make it do what I need.

But I have the freedom to modify the code if I want to. I'd like this with my firmware too. OpenBIOS is promising for the firmware replacement. The Open Graphics Card project is progressing and will finally give me a decent graphics card that is well supported and documented (I have a Radeon 9100; it is the last ATi card I will purchase since they to have gone down the path of not even providing specs to the DRI developers...so no more Matrox, ATi, nVidia, ...).

The graphics card thing is a really good example of why we should demand Free Hardware. Unless you give up your Freedom and use proprietary drivers, you no longer can use a modern graphics card and get 3d acceleration under X. Printers are another good example; look at how many printers have no Ghostscript backend because the manufacturers refuse to provide specifications for their proprietary protocols. Specs are nice but open hardware documentation would be nicer since we could then e.g. reprogram the printer's firmware to support PostScript (or if it is too slow for that, something like PPA that we have decent drivers for).

The Neuros has had its firmware and even full hardware specs released! Neuros Audio isn't going out of business; not even close to it. The hardware schematics release may not be immediately useful but the firmware release is; things are progressive with FLAC support and soon MPC, things that never would have happened if the firmware had remain non-free software. Look at Rockbox too. The Rockbox firmware is far superior to the stock firmware.

Free Software needs to run on a system that is Free down to its lowest level. We live in a world now where everyone is trying to kill us with things like hardware-based Digital Restrictions Management. We must demand at the very least Free firmware for the hardware and good enough hardware interface specs to actually do something with the firmware (stuff like e.g. the Verilog for the ASIC doesn't matter so much when you have that, but it would be nice to have).

Rockbox for the iRiver isn't finished yet, but it's coming on nicely.

The status page for the porting effort is here.

Site works over here. You can see their progress here.

I could see buying the $599 model to get the 60GB drive, though.

That's a bit rich for me! I spend $80 to add 80GB to my Archos.

What's much simpler to implement, possibly more practical, and almost as nice is speaking mp3 players so you can operate it without looking at the screen. Rockbox firmware supports this to some extent.

I am delighted that there is no screen, nor even an LCD display. The LEDs bother me a little, but they are probably redundant. Why you ask? I have several friends and collegues that are blind. Short of reloading the OS, no MP3 player has support for speaking menus.

Actually, This says that the iRiver supports OGG out of the box.

So iRiver does.

iRiver seem to make great players in any case. When I get a new MP3 player, I'll get an iRiver. Especially if Rockbox is ported to it!

The rockbox people are now working on firmware for the iriver H series. It looks like it's still quite a way off.
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverI nfo

Here's a thread started by a novice blind user of the Rockbox mp3 player.

We are not looking at the iPod or Rio Karma since they contain a chip made by Portalplayer that you have to sign away your firstborn to see the docs for. That is a silly practice we do not wish to encourage. The iRiver contains hardware with published docs.

• How extensive is Rockbox's support for blind users?
  
  The Archos Jukebox is an embedded device and as such there are space limitations to what can be done to support blind accessibility within Rockbox. All of the configuration options have voice prompts, and Rockbox can speak directory and file names, but in general informational messages displayed on the screen and detailed debugging information are not available to blind users. For the Recorder, specifically, the quick settings menus are not spoken - although they can still be used by memorising what each key does while in these modes. Sorry.
  
  Rockbox is however fully usable and configurable by the blind, and many sighted users are using the voice user interface by preference so they can operate their Jukebox without looking at the screen - while driving, for instance (isn't that reassuring?).

Regarding the MP3 player, make sure he checks out Rockbox.

Rockbox is an open source (GPL) firmware project for the Archos Recorder MP3 player (among others). They've done great work, which included Talkbox - extra code which can allow the MP3 player to 'talk' to the users.

Now the problem is that the actual hardware itself is terrible - that is not the Rockbox teams fault, of course, though.

I've seen on the mailing list some blind users who've written in just to comment about how helpful and useful the Talkbox features of Rockbox are. So it seriously does help people. It is an amazing project, and I really wish I had worked on it myself.

Anyway, check out the manual or something to check that it is suitable.

The Archos really had the right idea in a lot of ways: It's just one big FAT partition, and to change the firmware, all you have to do is put it in a folder in the top level directory with the right name. It shows up like any other USB drive in windows and linux...formatting and moving files to it in linux was as easy as mounting it. I've even considered making a 10GB or so Reiser partition strictly for data storage ;) Even better, because the thing is so hackable, there are several great pieces of 3rd party software out there. My favorite so far has been Rockboxhttp://www.rockbox.org/, which as a lot of tweaks, like extra battery life, resume, larger play list and battery support, etc. And of course, it is incredibly easy to swap the drive out of this thing...newer players it seems like they really go out of their way to prevent anyone from upgrading...which stops me from even buying them!

Why not just get them all iPods?

Can an iPod do talking menus or run an audio feedback UI?

Even though the Archos mp3 players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

The last time I wrote about this it was marked down as Troll, probably by some iPod-happy blind-person-hating fanboi. If you're reading this then you are a grade A wanker.

Even though the Archos mp3 players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

The last time I wrote about this it was marked down as Troll, probably by some iPod-happy blind-person-hating fanboi. If you're reading this then you are a grade A wanker.

Even though the Archos mp3 players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

The last time I wrote about this it was marked down as Troll, probably by some iPod-happy blind-person-hating fanboi. If you're reading this then you are a grade A wanker.

when you slow down enough, it would tell you what album you're on (voice synth from ID3 tags)

You're right that computer-generated audio directory listings can be done easily. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

when you slow down enough, it would tell you what album you're on (voice synth from ID3 tags)

You're right that computer-generated audio directory listings can be done easily. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

when you slow down enough, it would tell you what album you're on (voice synth from ID3 tags)

You're right that computer-generated audio directory listings can be done easily. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

For an idea of how this could be accomplished on a lightweight portable player

Or you could look at an already-existing system that works pretty well... Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

For an idea of how this could be accomplished on a lightweight portable player

Or you could look at an already-existing system that works pretty well... Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

For an idea of how this could be accomplished on a lightweight portable player

Or you could look at an already-existing system that works pretty well... Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

You're right that computer-generate audio directory listings can be good. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

You're right that computer-generate audio directory listings can be good. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

You're right that computer-generate audio directory listings can be good. Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

I don't see how you're supposed to navigate through 1 GB of music/etc. with no screen.

Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

I don't see how you're supposed to navigate through 1 GB of music/etc. with no screen.

Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

I don't see how you're supposed to navigate through 1 GB of music/etc. with no screen.

Even though the Archos players have screens, the open-source personal jukebox software Rockbox recently implemented a Talking Menu system that can announce directories and playlists. It's useful for non-visual operation, and it proving to be a hit with blind users. Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver players...

RockBox already has a system sort of like this (as a Open source drop in replacement for some Archos HD based players, though they are working on flash as well). The problem is that it isn't perfect. Not even close. It is vital for blind and vissualy impaired users, but it is not something you are going to use often.

Big problems with voice based menus are:
How should a small embedded device speak Sk8r Boi, or any number of odd ID3 tags?

Even the best Text to Speech systems sound fake, and they have a full computer to store samples and crunch data with.

An interface like the one you proposed would be nice for about half of the first time, a proper script would only tersey notate state changes, and certainly wouldn't give information on what button to press. (As for "Thank You Enjoy your music" Are you nuts?)

The Current prototype given doesn't seem to have the ability to do that (Though you could do a hold down play/pause thing to enter menu mode).

That doesn't mean a simple Auditory Interface might not be posible, (SOmething like [center hold press] "By artist" [center press] "A 2 artists " [Left press] "C 3 artists" [center press] "Cranberies - Zombie" [Center Press] |Playback Start|, with other options being By Title, By Album, etc. Of course if you let it sit on "A 2 artists" it should list the artists, and if there is only one artist it should either just say the artist or (prefferably) group it.

Indeed any large player (1 gig certainly) would require something better then just blind clicking. a 1 gig player would probably have an Apple listed capacity of 250 songs. So 124 max clicks if you know the sort 249 if you don't just to pick out one song. Also would it be in shuffle mode all the time or what, for a small player it doesn't really matter but with a large player it becomes quite important. If it has selectable shuffle mode, how would you enable shuffle mode.

As it stands though this is one device that Apple should shelve if the this is the best they can do. It is not innovative, and even with a voice interface it would still be annoying. The need for external cabling and the sheer stupidity of having firewire in a device that will have no need of it, make this rumor an unexciting one, but then again maybe it is time for Apple to do one of their slow suicide things again.

In fact, this has been possible for a while with the open source Rockbox replacement firmware for Archos units. It is very popular with blind users, and also helpful if you use your player while driving.

Anyone have any links to articles that might have a more broad history of the MP3 player in general?

Try this:

http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/

http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/

It may surprise some people to see that the iPod was announced a full two years after the first harddisk-based mp3 player.