What Possesses some coders?

[Shadow Skill]

I just got an Iriver H340 as a christmas gift to myself last week and while it is technically superior to the Ipod players and has more features built in for a player of its price range; the firmware coders seem to suffer from the same disease that is infecting many Linux multimedia app developers. I come to find that though I can make a playlist on my pc [I use the Iriver equivalent of the Anapod explorer I mentioned in another thread. Irivium is just as great as Anapod and I got a discount since I own Anapod already. :) ]and then store it on the player for use later, I cannot select a playlist while a song is playing, (WTF) I cannot browse inside my playlists at all, (WTH) I cannot by extention jump directly to a given track in a playlist....(WTFH!!) My question to all of the coders out there is what can posses the makers of this player to actually release this product without these features? I don't see how they can have a section dedicated to playlist creation that features winamp yet apparently forget to allow the user to do on the player what virtually EVERY media player in existence! [IE jump to tracks in a playlist while a song is playing even.] What is worse is that they thought it was a good idea to create a primary interface that uses press time based alt functions......Apparently they don't know about root menus..sigh. What is worse still is that their main competitor the Ipod allows you to jump between tracks in a playlist like virtually every conventional software player known to mankind.

I am definetly glad there is an active modding community planning to port their firmware for the Archos players to the Iriver H100 series then the H300 series which I own...

[foolish]

I just got an jetaudio iAudio M3 from my parents for christmas, it's the best alternative to the ipod if you ask me. It's simple to use, it's fairly linux-friendly as it's acts as any USB-disk and there's just the folders and files to deal with on the player itself, and it has a remote. I'm happy.

[Shadow Skill]

Looks like a good deal Foolish, let me ask you does it handle playlists at all? I use those alot and this playlist thing is probably the second worst part of the Iriver. I think it is tied this inexplicable 52 character limit for ID3 tag file name data. It also seems to half ass the loading of tag data these is a more than noticeable pause between tracks as it finds the files in the tree then loads the tag data. I suspect it is a side effect of relying on the file tree, and not loading all of tag data at boot time. The more I use alternative players the more I recognize the benefits of the Ipod's method of handling things. Yet you can't dare say such a thing to the fanatical Iiver owners they will accuse you of lying etc.

[PhilD]

I have this player too... i love it, but it drives me insane that i can't setup and manoeuvrer around playlists on the move.

I am very excited about the rockbox firmware being developed though, which should change all that.

I have to ask though, why are you using software to move your music? It's just a usb drive... you can do that with the default file system, or at least, i do.

[Shadow Skill]

Because I have everything set up using the metadata, quite frankly the file tree is totally useless to me and does nothing but add unnecessary overhead, I wouldn't mind the file tree so much if it didn't end up meaning I would be left with a psuedo relational database that doesn't even load song tag data on boot. Try fast forwarding through the psuedo playlists [real playlists are just virtual directories as far as software is concerned so I do not consider what Iriver calls a playlist a playlist. :)] there is going to be some seek time as the OS finds the file then loads the metadata. Its so annoying the lag time because of the psuedo db, I do the same thing in a playlist on my Ipod and there is not nearly as much seek time as there is with the H340. [Sound quality is not even comparable imo with certain songs, Iriver usually comes out on top.] The use of the metadata also allows for the folder structure on the drive to be entirely arbitrary, if I have a large folder of music and I want to move it over to the H340, I can just plop it in there in any old directory and then have the software build a virtual file tree based on the info I already put inside the files. With Irivium I can have it build a conventional file tree based on the file metadata anyway. Just wish they would give me a real DB mode..sigh. Maybe with Rockbox I will finally get what I want, I hope.