BeigeJournal

I’ve had an iRock 830 128 megabyte flash memory MP3 player for about two weeks now and I’m quite happy with it. My intent was to listen to IT Conversations and some audio blogs on it. I’ve found it very nice to be able to listen to those while away from the computer and I do also use it for music.

This unit has the dull-but-practical rectangular box form factor. It has a miniature USB connector and acts as a USB mass storage device. I have had no problems using it with Linux with both a 2.6 and 2.4 kernel. It uses a AA cell instead of the more commonly used AAA size, which gives it a slight bulge on the battery side and also very long battery life. I’ve been using 2.2 amp-hour “PowerEx” nickel metal hydride cells from Maha and haven’t actually had the patience to run one down yet. They are good for at least two or thee days of heavy usage.

The unit comes with cheap earbuds, an alkaline AA cell, a detachable neck strap, a CD-ROM that is of no interest to Linux users, a USB cable, and a case made of vaguely leather-like material that has a belt clip and which will serve to protect the unit from scratches. The iRock, with NiMH cell and case, has a mass of 83g. Basically, it’s tiny. It will fit in the watch pocket in a pair of jeans. I paid $95 for mine, including tax.

The iRock has a small but quite readable backlit, three-line LCD. You can set the backlight for always off, always on, or between one and sixty seconds after the last button press in unnecessarily fine one-second increments. Navigation through subdirectories is about as easy as it can be on a device with a three line display and a little up/down/select switch. When playing it scrolls the filename or id3 title tag, shows how many files are in the current directory and which number this is (e.g. “2/9”), shows a battery level indicator, displays the equalizer setting (one of flat, rock, jazz, classic, or pop, whatever that may mean), and the elapsed time. It cannot show file sizes or remaining or total time. If the file is variable bit rate it alternates a not-necessarily-accurate elapsed time with the indication “VBR,” as if the listener cares if the file is VBR or CBR. I suppose it serves as a warning that the time may be wrong. It does play VBR files fine.

It can also play, according to the manual, “WMA” files, and supposedly, if you have the right software, even DRM-encumbered WMA files, though I wouldn’t know. It cannot play OGG Vorbis files, which is unfortunate but common.

It contains an FM radio tuner. It offers 20 presets that are a bit of a pain to set and can scan for the next station on the spectrum. I have an old radio that is bigger than this device….

It will remember which file it was playing when powered off and will offer to start playing it when turned back on but it cannot remember where in the file it left off. It can only be paused for one minute before automatically shutting off. Since my major use is listening to long audioblog postings and IT Conversations interviews, this is a problem. As far as I know, however, it is a problem with just about every devices that plays audio files. I have not even been able to find any software for my desktop machine than can remember where in a file it left off. I understand that iPods can set bookmarks, but only for the AAC files, not MP3s. Furthermore, even if you can remember that you were 43 minutes into the file, fast-forwarding by 43 minutes is rather time consuming on the iRock. The notion that all audio consists of three-minute songs seems to be deeply held by everyone who designs audio players.

My workaround for this is to use mp3splt to split the long files into a directory full of five-minute segments, which makes these issues far more manageable. There is a slight pause as the iRock moves from one segment to the next, which in a spoken-word interview may be unnoticeable if you are lucky and the split falls between words or may be noticeable but not a major problem if it does split a word. The files always seem to show up on the iRock in order, but the first file in the directory listing is not always the first chronologically, for some reason. I just set it for “repeat all” mode and scroll down to the first segment manually and it will play fine. I’m not sure how files get sorted by the iRock.

The sound quality is fine. I’m not going to try to do an audiophile-style evaluation of the thing, but I can say that the sound is certainly free of obvious defects.

Having some experience with it I now have some thoughts on memory size and flash memory verses hard disks. I’d say that 128 megabytes is minimal but usable. That’s good for about two hours of music-quality MP3s and around four hours of the IT Conversations-type low bit rate spoken-word audio. There are days when I might listen for longer than that and wish for more space for more material, but it is a usable amount. I would advise buying a 256 megabyte model if you can, though. Even with 256 megabytes, these sorts of devices are tethered to the computer. You decide what you want to listen to, put that on the device, listen to it, then hook it up to the computer again to delete it and put something else on. With just a few hours worth of space you have to decide in advance what you will be listening to. The hard disk based audio players are bigger, more expensive, and probably more fragile, but have vastly more space. Those you can just put a bunch of stuff on and then go listen independent of the computer for a long time. They can also be used in a fully automated fashion for podcasting.

“Podcasting” is a term currently being used to describe the publishing of RSS feeds with enclosures pointing to audio files with the intent that the audience will use so-called “iPodder” scripts to automatically scan the RSS feed for new material, automatically download it, and, ideally, automatically add it to the iTunes or other software’s playlist, from where it can be, yes, automatically, “synced” with the user’s iPod or similar device. In effect, it’s TiVo for Internet audio. New stuff just shows up magically on the iPod, to be listened to whenever the user feels like it. I’m currently using the “iPodder based on the iSpider engine” script to fetch audio from IT Conversations, Adam Curry, Dave Slusher (iSpider downloads the bittorrents automatically), Rasterweb, and Scripting News. The transfer to the iRock, though, has to stay manual given the need to decide what to delete and what to add at any one time.

The iRock 830 is not especially cheap but is apparently reasonably well made and is quite usable. I’m inclined to recommend 256 megabytes, though. I suspect that I will be buying a hard disk based player at some point, quite possibly an iPod, but it’s nice to have this in the meantime. Being very small and light as well as less expensive and thus requiring a bit less paranoia about loss or damage, the iRock may still be of use.