iFP-899 -- actually great player, but...

[JaZZ]

I'm a passionate random-play listener and like to be surprised what title comes next. Well, the great surprise I got with my new iHP-899 was that it seemed to have a much smaller music-title variety than my former iFP-395-T with half the storage space. And indeed: it turned out that the shuffle play is fake! Why the hell? It was o.k. with the iFP-395T. Like with the iHP series, the order of the played songs is arbitrary, but the same each time you turn the player on. Without exceptions.

Well, after all with activated resume function the whole content of the memory should be played in a foreseeable time... But that's not the case. After playing from the correct position, the player repeats a well-known scheme from some time ago. Now that I don't listen much longer than 40 minutes in one piece, the consequence is that only 10 or 20% of the music on the player is played at all, regardless of how long I use it. So I can't prevent that I've become a little bored with time, despite all the joy about this technical marvel.

I can't remember having experienced this phenomenon with the iFP-395T. I think its shuffle play was real. A funny detail: To prevent that even with activated SFL-A always the first title is played after switching it on, I've placed one, two or three files with one second of silence each in front of the list (all my music files are in the root directory). This causes the player to reproduce a well-known, only slightly shifted start-up pattern. Hence not really exciting...

It's hard to understand how iRiver could make such a regression. Add to this that the iFP-899 shows some crashes from time to time -- which the iFP-395T didn't show. In such cases it constantly switches off and on and can't be controlled anymore. With activated resume function even removing the battery doesn't help anymore. The only cure is to hook it up to a USB connection with the computer to break the closed loop.

So I'm quite ambivalent. One the one hand really decent sound quality (with a good headphone such as the Etymotic ER-4P) for such an ultra-compact player, good sound controls (I'm talking about the graphic EQ, not the other toys), absolute insensitivity to shocks and nevertheless a lot of memory space. On the other hand an unacceptable «shuffle play» and not 100% reliability. Unfortunately there's no newer firmware (than 1.14) available, and even if it were, I doubt that iRiver would have taken care for the shuffle function -- the iHP family is waiting for this promised feature since quite some time. If I had known of the fake shuffle play, I would have chosen another player (as a guarantee exchange), maybe again the iFP-395T.

(I've already posted this in the iRiver forum.)