Odds of gapless playback coming to the iHP series?

[saitoh]

I could easily ditch recording, optical in/out whatever if it ment I could get gapless playback of oggs.

It wouldnt bother me if studio stuff was what I listened to with my iHP-120, but 95% of my 15gb of ogg files already on the player are live material.

Now, the majority of the time this isnt bad, but China Cat > Rider, Yar Mar > Antelope, White Summer > Black Mtn > Kashmir all are really kinda harsh with the 1/4 second gap.

Granted all of the software to play oggs on OSX have the same issue so its not like I shouldnt be used to this, but for a format which was designed with this purpose in mind, I guess I had hope.

I knew going into getting one that it didnt play gapless, but it still irks me. I know the hardware requirements would be almost double the processing power that we have now (so we can start the buffer for the new ogg file). Anyway, thoughts, practicallity, etc?

-- Page

[sweetspot]

Well, my thoughts are if Rio can do it with the Karma, and still maintain the excellent battery life they have, why in the hell can't Iriver ? If they can't, and blame it on the hardware used, I'll be pissed because the Karma is even cheaper to buy than the IHP is. Honestly though, with some inginuity, I can't see why this wouldn't be possible. I'm still holding out for it. And if they can't deliver, there's NO WAY IN AUDIO HELL, that I'll be buying the next generation IHP. I figure that by the time the next gen IHP is ready, RIO should hopefully have ironed out all their HD issues and other kinks..so going that route wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

What scares me about the current Iriver marketing techniques, is that they might not even have the current bugs/issuse fixed and yet release the IHP-140 or whatever. That's pretty much what they did between the 100 and 120 ya know. Same bugs and all.
Whatever works ya know ?

S.S.

[coreman]

Don't want to brag about my old Archos 6000 with on-the-fly playlist and 2 MB of memory, but now it has a backlight option that will turn the backlight on for a couple of seconds when tracks change, it already has a sleep timer. It also has mid-song resume or resume for playlists and automounts to Windows as USB hard drive and let me see what else does it have?? Well it has a fade function for when a song is stopped or pause...not exactly a cross-fade feature but hey, this is a 3 year old player...but it does have a real random shuffle mode..oh, that's right, it last sold for about $150 (when they were still available).

The point of this post is not to push Archos but rather the iHP-120 fixes can be done in the firmware with the right attitude by the development team. All the above changes were added by Rockbox and not Archos and it was because the firmware was open.

I nearly forgot to add that the start time was unbelievably reduced by Rockbox by increasing directory load speed to around 300 songs/sec from about 15/sec (sound familiar??) and this was done with firmware only!!

I may be oversimplifying but it would seem gapless playback could be achieved with firmware...after all the song length is tagged and the next song is que'd up, seems reasonable that a gradual fade could be put in the last 5 seconds of a song, followed by immediate streaming of the next...after all the 120 has 32meg of memory on board to work with..

First thing however would be to see some activity from the firmware team and for features requested by some of their western customers.

[sweetspot]

Once again Coreman, you bring some entirely relevant and good points to the table. If these troubles could be solved with a good FW upgrade, then the only thing holding back the Iriver team, IS the Iriver team. As you stated, the IHP has 32 MB to work with internally for firmware. Looking at other players such as your old Archos, and the more recent Karma...which by the way I believe only has 16 MB of mem, it's easy to see that these things are getting done faster and better than with Irivers HW.

The biggest problem that I have with all of this isn't necessarily the fact that we don't have the desired features/functions, but the fact that if it can/can't be done, the Iriver people are at best avoiding speaking to its public (consumers) about what is and isn't being worked on. At the very least, they could get someone internally, to act as a PR guy/gal and gather as much honest information as possible so as to present the issues to US, Joe public with some feasable answers. I've seen some people from the UK saying that (and perhaps Flame Grilled or Trinity would like to clarify or reitirate this) customer service isn't something that the English expect. Nor do they expect companies to offer good service after the sale. But instead, the sale is more of a service which they should be grateful for, no matter what the outcome of the product. I forget who said this, but it disturbed me at my very core.

I personally don't think that expecting service from a company whom you've just given your hard earned money to is out of the ordinary. Especially when a company who'se based outside of my country decides to do their business internationally and includes my country. It's like, if I was to go to Russia or Japan, I'm sure that the people there would expect me to know some of their customs and not behave like a "typical American" when engaged in a professional meeting of sorts. This rule usually applies to foreign countries (globally) when doing business with markets outside their own. Again, it boils down to proper business ediquette. And apparently, the Iriver staff needs a refresher course in global business management.

But hey, what do I know ? I'm ONLY a consumer.

[laz]

basicly, this issue alown is keeping me from purchasing an iHP-120.
I have many albums and recordings that stream together, and would sound hideious if there was a break in the sound.
Not to mention some play list errors that I have read about.
This makes me mad, a great product with poor support. I know they could fix the problems, they seem simple enough, but I guess they are more interested in song lyrics then gapless playback or random playlists.
I may have to just hold off on all of this, and see what product (karma or iHP-1X0) has the best support by next march, then purchas it.

[profingersk8er]

ya...i really dont understand what's stopping iriver from adding gapless playback to iHP, if it's impossible due to hardware, JUST SAY IT IRIVER... dont let us wait for years!

[seadzz]

I can count on one hand and still have a bunch of fingers left the number of companies that do a good job in writing code in-house. The logic of keeping it inside is usually flawed and goes like this:

"they (outside contractor) want how much to write that code for us? Heck, we can do it inside using our people and save a ton of money"

Turns out the inside guys are not that good in writing code (if they were they would not be working at at a mp3 player making company). Project is usually delayed beyond target date and the finished product is usually bug-ridden. Next step is to have someone run around with bandages to stop the bleeding. aka firmware beta's

In particular in Asia where penny pinching is refined into an artform. I never knew you could make sheetmetal parts one molecule thick until I went to Asia.

Part of the problem stems form the education system in Asia which demands learning by rote. You are taught to conform, not to stand out from the crowd. This type of learning process restricts thinking "outside the box" and inhibits creatitivity.

The only and fast way for iRiver to fix these flaws is to benchmark the competition as organic developement is beyond their scope.

jmho

[david8613]

i am not sure but isnt ogg supposed to be able to handle gapless, i read this somewhere but i have not been able to do it....

[sweetspot]

Actually my friend, Ogg Vorbis was designed with this in mind. It's one of its biggest advantages over other formats. Many people (except select geeks) don't know what the advantages of the Ogg format are...they think it's just a matter of a bit of smaller file size with better sound quality at lower bit rates compared to Mp3. Sure, that's all well and good, but the true potential for Ogg Vorbis goes beyond that. Think movies. Think multi-channel surround sound. Embedded somewhere in the Ogg codec lies the solution to native multi channel output. I forget the exact number, but I believe it can support over a thousand independent channels natively. If coupled with the right video codec, Ogg vorbis can be a big step for PC audio/video platforms. I'm supprised that there haven't been more advancements, unless someone has already dropped the ball, or unless some other codec has it beat out already.

But my doubt of that lies in the fact that it's still a non-owned codec...Completely free of all CW laws etc.... I'll try and find that info somewhere.