[SLY]

Does anyone else have an intermittent scratch sound during playback? I hear it ~3 times in some songs. The duration of the scratch is ~500ms duration. No, it's not my WMA rips. The scratch is not present when I listen to the source file on the computer. I've played with the applicable iRiver sound settings but no change, the scratch is still here. After spending much time to root cause the scratch issue to the player, I called iRiver support about it. The long and short of the call is that I was told to rip my music at no more than 160Kbps! I told the support rep I had 2700+ songs ripped into 192Kbps WMA's (standard WMA format, not lossless or VBR) and I was not overjoyed about the thought of ripping them again in 160Kbps. Nonetheless, that's the message I was given. Needless to say, I'm not going to re-rip everything to less fidelity. For ~$300.00, this newer player should handle it. I also looked at the User's Manual and confirmed that the WMA format is supported at a bit rate of "8Kbps ~ 320Kbps". See section 6-4. Below is supporting information:
The very same rips that cause the intermittent scratch sound in the IFP-999 do not cause the scratch sound in the following older devices:
=Kenwood KDC-X959 car stereo head unit (reads WMA's; I installed my own headphone jack; unit is 3 years old)
=Dell D600 notebook computer (unit is 2 years old)
=Panasonic SL-CT800 portable CD player (reads WMA's; unit is 1.5 years old)
In summary, I've decided to keep the iFP-999, but iRiver needs to fix this scratch issue in a firmware upgrade. I'd like to know if anyone else experiences this issue.
-Also, I've seen various posts in places about the lack of a belt clip. I totally agree. The iRiver provided neck strap and wrist strap gets in the way in the gym. It last thing I need is to have a heavy bench press set get tangled up in the headphone cord. My solution is the Garmin GPS carrying case (Trex part number 010-10314-00). Leave the iFP-999 in the small gray case and slip it into the Garmin case. It looks pretty good and the gray color on the Garmin case matches the gray color on the iFP-999 case. Also, there is some headphone jack protection the way the Garmin case works. You can still push all the iFP-999 buttons through the Garmin case and for the joystick, I cut a .625" square in the Garmin plastic. X10 had the best price on the Garmin case when I ordered extras (9.99$). I found the original case at Best Buy after much research on belt clip cases that would work with the iFP-999 that also had a plastic view window.