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Monday 9 January 2006

All I want for Xmas was an iriver H10 [Shedir]

Santa was very good to me this year. A lovely slate grey iriver H10, 20gb of music on the move.
It's a stupendous little piece of kit, plays mp3 and wma unlike the ipod which was vying for my dosh. Very sleek physially and nicely laid out with the buttons. USB2 as well for fast transfer.
The only downside was that iriver expect you to use windows media player 10 with it, which is awful. Fortunately there's a cracking wee app called "easyH10", this re-indexes the files on your iriver and updates the player.
Needless to say dumping music via copy n paste is far quicker than using WMP10. As a bonus this lets you store stuff in directories of your choosing. The H10 lets you browse through the files to play them or do it via the tags.
If your tags aren't right, cough, then being able to browse through your own structure (blues / comedy / rock / indie etc...) is a godsend.
There's also an inbuilt FM radio which I have to say I've not played with yet, but looks like it'll do the job nicely. Handy for the news on the way home.
A nice colour screen which resizes photos on the fly for you to look at, nice added feature but no benefit to me. I can see how it could well be useful if you're on the move coupled with the voice recorder to take notes.
Also lets you read text files via the screen, though I'd imagine that'd be a battery draining PITA.
All in all I'm in awe of the H10, fantastic bit of kit and came in at around £160 from ebuyer.
As a side bonus my old mp3 CD player is now in the car for the wifey, with the wee tape adapter thing she now has albums on the move.
As for a wee poll, what music player do you prefer / think is the best then?

7 comments:

  1. It's just amazing how something like this can just be built so right and fall down on software. It's baffling to me, iRiver's big boy players previously like the iHP-100 series just used to scan the drive on startup and these things had 40GB and stuff. iRiver first started bundling this extremely extremely shitty application to manage music but gave up and went for WMP 10 since obviously they need an answer to iTunes and MS are at least having a stab and have the marketing behind it.
    But for people who just want to shovel music from their collection, this was a huge step backwards. My H10 had fallen into only occasional use purely because I had to take it to a PC with the very shitty application installed, connect it, and whack the manual update button. Now you can't even find that application on their hopeless web site, instead there's a version 2 thing claiming to be better which, when you download, turns out not to be compatible at all!
    So, as Sheddy says, EasyH10 to the rescue. This is exactly the shit you want. You shovel music yourself but the app builds the DB so there's no startup time scanning etc, the natural upshot of a DB-based player.
    Quite tragic that something this good can be gimped out of the box by making it only compatible with Microsoft's deeply shitty WMP10. No wonder Apple rules the roost market share wise really.

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  2. Had an iPod since the beginning (thanks Brit0r for the help with the 1Gen!) and currently have a Nano on back-order with Amazon. Have the iPod rigged up ninja-style in the car y'see, don't really want to change from that yet :-)

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  3. Don't forget you can turn it over and do your makeup!

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  4. iPod here. I can dump photos onto it from the digicam while on holiday. In this no-print digital age I shovel family photos on to take round mum's where I plug it into her telly so she can go "ahh" at the kids. AAC encoded audiobooks are chapter & bookmarkable, which is nice. I really like iTunes, sure there's a few more things I wish it did, but it works very well. There's also a huuuge accessories market.

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  5. Had my 3rd gen iPod for 2.5 years and I've never had a single problem with it. Battery life isn't massively down on what it was to start with, and I listen to it at least 6 hours every day. I find it very easy to use, to navigate around and to put music on it (using Winamp). It is DB driven, so very fast.
    I don't know, I've never used another HD MP3 player personally, so I don't really have a point of comparison. But I do know that I hear a lot of people using iRivers and Creatives and the like, and they seem to be continually bleating. Apples may not have the wealth of features or formats, but they just work.

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  6. Toyed with the Philips player... not sure the name. Black and blue thing.
    It has a vertical scroller which is basically an Apple scrollwheel and nifty backlighting... but Dave makes a good point about speed, because the Philips doesn't appear to have a db as it seems to take yonks to seek and load the tunes.

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  7. My son has an Iriver H10 which I like but it's been a pain to have all music in Itunes (for our othe 2 ipods) but also have their cr@p software. Thanks for the heads up on that utility (I have everything in folders)
    Got iRiver cos of problems with v3 Ipod I have (which I now just use to pump music into various hifi via docking station primarily). This ipod battery is crap and it has a habit of just waking up 4-5 hours after being switched off - quite a suprise when hifi kicks off in the middle of the night!!!
    Ipod mini is lovelly tho.

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