My Rio Karma was looking a bit worse for wear and its battery was a shadow of its former self, so I was already considering replacing it... but the other day it was stolen, so I'm most definitely in the market for a new player.
so what i'm looking for is something like:-
i'm not averse to installing rockbox or something if that's what it takes.
oh and i don't care about video playback or games, i only want music.
I use the the creative zen 20 gig. It works well for me.
nintendo DS + m3 simply/r4 + moonshell
Video ipod + Rockbox = win.
>>4
you're joking, right?
i have one of those. the software isn't bad, but the DS's audo quality is piss-poor, even through headphones.
I can't believe how shitty the software on most DAPs is. I was looking for something similar to >>1, but in the end i just caved in and bought a video iPod. and it... well it's not bad, but when you think about it it's unbelievably shite.
First off the ability to create and edit playlists "on the go" as it were is absolutely piss-poor when compared to the Rio Karma, which like >>1 I had the pleasure of owning until it broke. It'd be incredibly easy to improve this feature - hell, give me access to the source code and I could probably do it - but Apple seem to be more concerned with adding things like Coverflow that look nice but add absolutely nothing to the functionality.
Then there's the lack of support for file formats - OGG, FLAC, WMA anyone? I realise WMA is a Microsoft format but it'd be really nice if Apple could just suck it up and license the bloody thing, yknow actually do something for the benefit of their customers even if it does mean acknowledging one of their competitors has a very popular music format.
And bugs! Fucking bugs in the fucking thing that really should not be there after all this time. This for example - I have one album and one non-album track by a certain artist. The non-album track does not have anything filled in the "album" field of its ID3 tag, because it's not on one. And I can't access it via the artist, at all! If I select the artist, it just goes straight to the album listing. I have to play it going in via "songs" and scrolling through the massive bloody list until I find it. On the Karma, non-album tracks just appeared under "(no album)", which is surely the way it should be, rather than them NOT SHOWING UP AT ALL argh.
Rockbox then. Rockbox is alright, but it has limitations of its own - reduced battery life for one, not exactly perfect music playback on some formats, especially at higher bitrates. Its not compatible with accessories which I make occasional use of, and it doesn't play iTunes DRM shite (unavoidably i suppose) which is kind of annoying. I suppose it still beats the stock firmwaer though.
in summary: for fucks sake why is nothing as good as the Karma
I recently bought a Cowon D2 and it's an awesome piece of work. It's a flash memory based player because I wanted the benefits of that. But they also sell hard drive based players, maybe you can find one that meets your requirements on their homepage.
Could a cheap PDA achieve this task? I'm not sure how many can take hard drives -- perhaps that's something the market should consider.
I'd certainly entertain the idea of a PDA that can act as USB storage and music player with decent capacity. (Perhaps with the OS stored in flash and some songs, and the ability to fire it up without the HDD enabled to save batteries.)
>>8-9
If you're going for a flash-based player, you may as well get the Karma's spiritual successor:
http://www.trekstor.de/en/products/detail_mp3.php?pid=66
>>11
that player actually lacks most of the Karma's playlist editing functions for no apparent reason. just like the iPod, in fact. funny that.
>>9
Well it plays all the formats mentioned. Additionally it plays mpeg4 movies in avi containers at 30fps but those have to be converted to 320x240 pixels or less (the display's resolution) first. It also has experimental support for Macromedia Flash files but those don't work too well for me so far. Maybe with the next firmware. As a gimmick you can view images and text files as well. All versions have FM radio and it seems that there are also newer versions with DAB instead of FM radio.
It can use playlists but I haven't toyed much with those yet. My guess is that it can handle standard m3u and/or pls playlists but no guarantees. There's also a dynamic playlist that you can edit rapidly.
It is claimed that the battery lasts for ~50 hours of music play time. Couldn't confirm that so far because I haven't had to recharge it yet since I bought it and I have listened about 2-3 hours each day for the past two weeks. Of course the battery won't last as long for a hard drive based player.
According to the reviews I've read the audio quality is supposed to be superb and my subjective impression is the same. Sometimes I listen with it rather than with my stereo because I like it so much.
It has a touch screen and only 3 normal buttons at the top, so if you want to control it via buttons rather than the touch screen, maybe it isn't for you.
So yes, all in all I think it would meet the requirements of OP, provided the touch screen and lack of remote control aren't knock-out criteria. But my point was that maybe the company also sells hard disc players with similar capabilities/quality. That might be a good alternative to iPod. Research is needed.