[dundee] Media/MP3 Player Recommendations

[Rick Moynihan]

2008/10/12 Gordon <gicoupar at googlemail.com>:
> Hello Rick,
>
> I just purchased a Cowon iaudio D2 (the DAB version) for about £130 a couple
> of days ago , I'm impressed so far , the only down side in your case is that
> the storage is flash based and therefore the sizes are
> 2gb,4gb(mine),8gb,16gb however this can be expanded using the sd card slot
> on the player. I'll just quickly list out the pros and cons for you that I
> have observed so far.
>
> Pros
> -----------
> + Excellent Sound Quality
> + Good Video Quality (I know you don't care but anyhow..)
> + Supports a substantial range of formats for music ( MP3 , OGG , FLAC , WAV
> , APE )
> + Compatible with Linux , Windows and Mac OSX due to it acting as a USB Mass
> storage device , software for video encoding is windows only however I have
> managed to get a full film ripped and encoded using linux.
> + 52 hours battery life for music. 10 hours for videos.
> + Good build quality (in my opinion)
> + 2.5 inch touch screen. (the device measures about 3.5" across , slightly
> smaller than a pack of cards.
> + FM Radio
> + DAB Radio (with the DAB version, usually about  £20-£30 more)
> + Regular Firmware Upgrades from Cowon.
>
>
> Cons
> ----------
> - Premium price compared to players of similair size.
> - Most likely far too small a storage capacity for what you are looking for.
> (however if you are willing to expand with sd cards then you can increase
> this by up to 32gb {I believe that is the highest capacity of SD cards right
> now..}
> - Blind navigation isn't brilliant as their are only 2 buttons that can be
> set to change the volume or the track , the rest is on the touch screen.
>
> As said I am very impressed by this little player, however the major
> downside for you is the storage space as unlike me , you have a large music
> collection. Just thought I'd put it out there though.
>
> Gordon.

Thanks for the recommendation Gordon, it looks like quite a piece of
kit, but it's not really the type of device I'm after, as I'm sure I'd
be swapping SD cards all the time.  I think what I'm after is
essentially a device that can compete against the iPod Classic (2nd
Gen).  If Rockbox was supported on this device, (allowing me simple
USB Mass Storage access) I'd consider it - but as I said I wasn't very
impressed with the hardware's reliability either...