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(More customer reviews)You see them everywhere: iPod users. Those tell-tale white headphones give them away as soon as you see them. I used to envy them, with their slick little box of tricks pumping music through their heads for up to ten hours at a time. I wanted one, too, but I thought they were way too expensive for what they were. For one thing, they could only handle a single codec, namely MP3. When, oh when would someone bite the bullet and produce a decent, high capacity OGG-based player for the rest of us?
Alternatives to the iPod have come and gone, but none has really stuck. Apple really cornered the market with what was arguably the first good-looking and well-performing player. Nevertheless, its shortcomings were painfully evident. What the market has been missing ever since is a player that does all that the iPod can, whilst providing features absolutely essential in a truly high-end player, such as an integrated FM radio, voice recorder, support for multiple codecs, and longer battery life.
Such a player seemed like it was still some time away, until iRiver recently came out with the iHP-140. At last, we are offered a 40 Gb player that can handle the MP3, OGG, ASF and WMA codecs, has an FM radio tunable to the band of whichever continent you happen to be on, a voice recorder that works with either the internal or an external microphone, and a respectable 16 hour battery (assuming 128 Kbps MP3 listening at normal volume and no flashy EQ settings). The battery is also Lithium Ion, so there are no battery memory issues to worry about.
After a couple of weeks with my iHP-140, I have to say that it has lived up to the hours of review reading and research I did before purchasing it. As a Linux user, I needed a player that did not depend on my computer operating system. I should not need any proprietary software to index the files, transfer them to the device, flash the firmware or manage the device in any other way.
The iRiver caters to all of those demands and more. The unit supports the USB mass storage standard, so connect it to your computer and a 40 Gb drive immediately appears on the system. Use standard utilities to copy your music files over, dump some playlists via XMMS or a few quickly hacked together Ruby or Perl scripts and away you go. Flashing the firmware is as simple as dumping a file in the root of the unit's file-system and selecting the relevant option from its menu.
The sound quality is excellent, although you'll probably want to replace the supplied ear-buds with something better. The Sony MDREX71SL ear-buds are providing me with adequate service during my bicycle commute to the office. The remote control is very handy for safe control of the device while biking. Just clip it to your T-shirt and lift a hand off the handlebars to change songs or flip to the next directory full of music. You never have to take your eyes off the road.
The FM receiver is of high quality and voice recordings work well, even with the internal microphone.
iPod users at work peruse this device with some suspicion. How could it be better than an iPod, when they haven't even heard of it? Besides, it's a lot cheaper than an iPod, so it must be inferior, right? Think again.
The personal jukebox is finally mature. Whether or not iRiver has the clout to go up against the Apple marketing machine and win the PR battle remains to be seen, but if you're a technically-minded person who wants the most fully featured player on the market today, there's really no contest.
Do I have anything bad to say about it? Yeah, the brown case. What were they thinking? Still, like I said, I'll take features over something that superficial every time.
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iHP-140 is one of the first MP3 players that supports the new upcoming, and very popular, music file format Ogg Vorbis. Another new feature of iHP-140 is the ability to plug-in an external mic, using the players mic-in.You now have the ability to encode MP3 files directly in the player, or if you like you can record to a high quality WAV file. Use the iHP-140's optical line-in and get those crisp and ultra clear recordings, either by hooking up your player to your portable CD player or your home sound system. The iHP-140 will give you 100% quality each time and of course you can set the bit rate on your recordings just as you want it to be.Absolutely packed with superb and powerful features that with no doubt will satisfy even the most fastidious hi-fi enthusiast. It's nothing less then a phenomenon that this small and extremely portable HDD MP3 player can present such a powerful list of features.
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