A few days ago I decided to buy an MP3/OGG-player. Yes, you read right, it had to support ogg! I don't want a player that just plays proprietary/patented crap.
After some googling, a visit in the local saturn (btw, are there any other stores out there where you can buy stuff like this?), it seemed that the only possible solution was an iRiver.
Looking around, it seemed that the
iFP-795 was right for me. 512 MB, not too expensive, so I ordered it (in a well-known online-store I won't link/support here, because they have an ugly patent, but I saw no alternative to that).
Today it arrived! I happily opened it, ignored the CDs with windows-software and attached it to
my laptop. There is a nice
command-line-tool called ifp-line for linux that'll do everything you need. For the gentoo-guys out there, just emerge ifp-line. There are also other things, like a fs-driver, graphical frontends etc., but I saw no need for that.
Well, didn't work, ifp just hanged and even didn't exit after a killall -9. It seemed that the version was buggy, so I bumped the gentoo-ebuild to 0.2.4.5. Voila, everything was okay (ebuild is already commited to portage).
Now, I wanted to try out the ogg-support, as that was the reason I bought it. Uploaded
Scamps nice Poison-Remix, and shock! "NOT SUPPORTED!" It just didn't play it. PANIC! Did I accidently buy a device without ogg?
Okay, first thing was a firmware-update. No problem at all, ifp-line can do that.
After the firmware-update it still, didn't play the file. Well, then I tried out another ogg-file, and hey, it played it. Seems that scamp created somehow a buggy ogg-file. After an oggdec and oggenc I also could play the Poison-Remix.
Things to come:
- As the iRiver-people told me, there is also a so-called UMS-firmware, which will make the device an USB mass storage, which would avoid the need for a special-tool and the device could also be used for data-transfer. But they didn't give me a download-link (and I couldn't find it on their hp), so I'll have to wait for that.
- I WANT FLAC! Sadly, it seems that not enough people urge iRiver to implement that. Maybe I should try to decode and hack the firmware. There should be enough space when removing the 100%-useless WMA-support ;)
Update! 26.11.2004
Today I got a mail from iriver with a link to their firmware. You can get it
here. After an ifp firmupdate [filename], the iriver needs some minutes to reformat itself. After that, you can access it as an usb mass storage (unlike other devices, it's /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1 on my pc).
I'm not really happy with it, as it switched some menus to chinese (which I sadly don't understand) and it's quite buggy, files disappear, directories become unreadable. As the original firmware worked okay, I think I'll switch back and wait till the ums-firmware is available in english and non-beta.
Today, I was at a talk held by Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and ideological father of the free software movement, at the Lightwerk GmbH in Stuttgart.