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