MP3 Players

So probably about a year ago my iPod screen cracked. I've replaced the battery in my iPod before so I thought I could just buy a screen and replace it. Well it did not turn out so well. I would try doing it again if I had to but in the process of trying to replace the screen I broke a piece off of the logic board which connects to the screen. So now I have a broken screen and a broken logic board. I figure it is probably not worth saving. So I started shopping for something new. I ended up deciding on an iRiver E100 depicted to the left. I have really enjoyed this mp3 player and it was cheap.

Pros
The player plays ogg, mp3 and I think some others but I do not really use the others. It also can display videos, and pictures. The model I got is the 4GB version, but also has a slot for a microSD card which supports up to 32GB. It has an FM radio and a rechargeable battery. It supports drag and drop music management so it works very well with Linux and it integrates very well with Banshee. One of my most favorite features is the stereo speakers on the back of the player. I don't even need headphones to listen to music and it makes it very easy to listen to music with a friend. Also the overall quality of music is very good.

Cons
It is a little slow, or unresponsive. You have to wait a second to click your next action. The FM radio requires that headphones be connected to listen, because they act as the antenna. I have not figured out how to create playlists using linux. The SD card storage and the internal storage do not get treated as continuous storage and are always separate. The screen resolution does not seem to be great, but I do not really use it for pictures or videos so that doesn't bother me.

Overall though I love it and would buy another one. I love the fact that I got a 4GB mp3 player with more features than an iPod nano for $70 instead of the nano that would have cost me about twice that. The only thing the nano does better is have a better screen, but I will give that up easily for the ogg support, speakers, FM radio, and drag and drop management.

hpodder

I wanted to post here about the podcast catching client that I use. First of all I am a banshee user and my mp3 player is an iRiver E100, which I love, but will hopefully go over that another time. My iRiver only has 4GB of storage and a microSD slot, but the two are treated seperately by the iRiver. So I do not have enough storage on my mp3 player to just sync up all of my music. I had was finding it difficult to keep my podcasts and music seperate in Banshee, so I just decided to have another program manage my podcasts, enter hpodder. I am not a command line guy by any means. I have a GUI and like using it, but I am not afraid of the terminal. So when I found hpodder I decided to give it a try and it works great. After installing if you go to a terminal and type

hpodder

it will update all of your podcasts. To add podcasts you find out the feed address and type in

hpodder add [url]

you can also tell it to only get a certain number of the most recent podcasts, you can only update certain podcasts. There are a good number of simple commands that give good functionality to the program, if you ever forget what the commands are typing

hpodder lscommands

will show you all of the commands. I think hpodder is in the debian repos, it can be installed by typing

sudo apt-get install hpodder

Give hpodder a try if you are in need of a podcatcher it is simple and very fast.

Thanks and God Bless,
Aaron