I have an mp3 player but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. I’ve got some spare change so I’m thinking about buying something more suited to my musical tastes for riding the bus. My DS & SuperCard can do this but the sound quality is crappy and it won’t load modules much bigger than 2 megs.
The choice will probably have to be something like a GP2x/Palm/PocketPC. Which is great because then I can also run Milky or LGPT on it But if there’s a cute portable media player that can read modules (preferably with selectable interpolation) that might be just as good or better.
In the meantime I’ll just keep rendering modules to mp3.
Edit: Oh yeah, it would be really nice if it doubled as USB mass storage and could be charged from USB. The iPod is attractive to me for this reason but I seriously doubt it plays modules…or does it?
I own an i-River H340, a 40gb player which I really doubt can be found new somewhere, but if you find it used,be sure it’s solid stuff.
it normally plays WAV, WMA, OGG, MP3, JPG and XVid (korean firmware only), but I use it with rockbox firmware almost always, because it’s faster and allows me to play even more formats (FLAC, MPC) and other goodies such as last.fm support: it saves a log file of played songs which can then be submitted to last.fm server
i got an ipod video recently and it’s been pretty great since installing rockbox. it’s easy to boot into the original firmware if needed.
flac and ogg playback is the killer feature, plus you don’t need ipod managing software as you can just drag music onto the drive like most mp3 players.
+1 to Rockbox for functionality on your chosen player.
Form-factor wise tho, I picked up a Sansa Express (thumbdrive style) and it has totally replaced my iRiver and Creative hard-disk players (20 and 40 G respectively). The portability, no need for any cables at all, and battery life can’t be beat. I also find that having “only” 2G of space at a time makes me choose my albums better and I end up getting a lot more enjoyment out of the music I take with me. Having your entire collection with you at all times sounds good but I found that I got to lazy to look thru it all and just listened to a few albums in any given time period.
From now on I’m going for this general type of player:
Hiya. I haven’t yet found any device that can natively play module formats or even import input plugins outside of a PDA using some software with mikmod lib or un4seen bass plugin. Then I broke that.
Rather than trying to find a player that can do the impossible I created mirrored archives of my music organized into different formats. This way any player is going to work and I just grab the album from the appropriate root directory: e.g.
/lossless/xm/artist/album
/lossy/mp3/artist/album
/lossy/ogg/artist/album
This is how I set it up: using xmplay* with every kind of input plugin (nsf, xm, it, vgz, spc, et cetera) set the output to oggenc** with appropriate switches (for example, I used oggenc -t %1 -a %2 -l %3 -d %4 -N %5 -G %6 -c %7 -q 8 -o %o -). but be sure to rename it to oggenc.exe as xmplay calls that by default. Let me know if you need more clarification. I like to write tutorials and am handy with a mediawiki.
If you’re looking for a nice portable media player I recommend something from COWON***. I purchased the iAudio7 and absolutely love it. It plays ogg and flac among all the other standard formats and can switch between DRM and MTS modes on the fly. The Cowon S9 was recently released and heavily praised, but it is more video oriented.
I love rockbox on my ipod nano. Don’t think the interface is clunky at all and my battery life is pretty decent as well. It’s ESSENTIAL to me because it actually uses a directory tree instead of the (senseless to me) apple id3 format of sorting your songs by artist/genre/etc. I’m like WTF, I can’t find my files!!! License, what kind of player do you already have? You should search and see if it supports rockbox
But if there’s a cute portable media player that can read modules (preferably with selectable interpolation) that might be just as good or better.
