Martin, the H340 is flash memory and has only 64MB, if I were them I would not bother putting a line-in, we’re talking about 1 hour of music here…
OK Az, you sold me. I ordered an iRiver IHP140 yesterday! Should be with me for the weekend, and an upload festival will begin.
cheers guys!
I don’t know what you are confusing it with, but the H340 I am looking at now has a 40gb harddisk, and looks extremely yummy.
http://www.iriver.com/product/info.asp?p_name=H340
Cheers,
Jens
Oops yeah you’re right, I got confused because it’s not on their North American website, confused it with their iFp 340 or something. That model looks yummy for sure!
Wow…
As the H300 supports the USB host function, data from other UMS devices can be directly transferred to the player through a single cable without having to use a desktop computer.
Awesome…
Martin, please please post your thoughts on it after using it for a while. I’m considering getting one myself after giving up on Sony and MD’s.
thanks.
I got an iHP-120 and more or less love it, however it is NOT perfect by any means.
Recording Problems:
- It is well documented that the iHP-120 routinely drops bits leaving clicks and blank spaces in recordings. That’s unnacceptable and extremely annoying.
- Mic recording levels can not be adjusted while recording, nor is there any visual indicator allowing one to monitor levels. This makes recording less than easy and often very, very frustrating. It’s one heck of a pain in the arse to record a beautiful session and have it way too loud and overloading the mic or way too quiet.
- The internal mic pics up all sorts of hard-drive noises.
- One cannot adjust recording levels at all on the internal mic, and the defaults are set way to high so, if I play my flute at full volume five feet away from the it and record with the internal mic it totally overloads the mic.
- Recordings can’t be named within the unit without connecting to a computer (minor issue).
Navigations:
You figure it out eventualy, but it’s far from intuitive. Nobody I’ve let try out the unit has been able to figure it out without a lot of help.
Battery life:
Much better than iPod but not the 16 hours advertised.
Ergonomics -
The buttons are in wierd places (and do different things in different modes) and the front panel control button is very awkward.
There are some other things I don’t like about it, but they’re pretty minor.
On the other hand:
- It’s awesome to have a 20 GB music player.
- Very good volume levels, much louder than iPod.
- Records (albeit not-so-well)
-line in/out
-digital line in/out
-mic-in
-internal mic - driver free operation (works perfectly as an external USB 2.0 harddrive)
i like it, but it’s not what it should be. The most frustrating thing is iRiver’s pathetic firmware support. The unit is supposed to be firmware upgradable and iRiver has been promising firmware updates to address recording, navigation and interface problems for a long, long time now, but they keep breaking their dates for firmware release and are starting to look like pathological liars.
I do have to say, and this is important, buy the iHP-120 or 140, not the new H series with the color screen. The new H series is flimsier, they are breaking after a week or so, have removed many of the recording features, are much bigger, and basically seem to be much worse than the iHPs except for the nifty color screen.
Folks looking for more info about iRiver’s players should check out:
http://www.misticriver.net and the iRiver international site at http://www.iriver.com (look in the forums).
Overall, I’m quite happy with my purchase, but it’s clear there is a lot of improvement to be made.
Chris
Chris, it’s always good to have an objective review, and I like your pros and cons… but I personally don’t have the same issues you have regarding recordings. I mean, I know for sure you need to avoid using the internal microphone unless the device is kinda far from the music. I’m always using an external microphone, I set the recording level to maximum and it’s never too loud. The CD I sent to 6-7 persons (including Chris) has all been recorded with the iRiver and external microphone and all of the sessions in my opinion have been recorded with good quality. Some at different volume but then it’s just a matter of adjusting the volume on your side, really no big deal for me. Also, the bit drop, I really don’t notice this. Maybe I would if I were using the iRiver for some commercial recorings or music production, but for session recordings who really cares about bit drops?
For sure you could improve the iRiver (you could improve anything) but it’s 10 times better than the iPod for recordings and having owned a MD player for a while, an MD doesnt compare to the iRiver either.
Well, as someone who’s sticking with minidisc for now, I would say a few things in defense of minidisc (and even cassettes):
-
Minidiscs and cassettes are removable. If I were traveling with an iRiver, I think I’d be paranoid that someone might spill a pint of Guinness on it and I’d lose 20 hours of great music that I’d recorded but hadn’t had a chance to transfer to my computer yet.
-
Any good-quality minidisc and cassette recorders lets you monitor the sound level and adjust it on the fly, something you apparently can’t do with the iRiver.
A few of the other points I would bring up are covered in this excellent comparison of the iPod versus the cassette:
I’m completely with Azalin on this one.
Except on recording levels, where my reading of the instruction manual and experimentation pretty much completely contradicts what everyone in this thread has said. If I read the manual correctly, you can only control the recording level on the internal microphone, not the external mic nor line out. My experimentation with recording levels seemed to bear that out – they didn’t make a difference when using the external mic as far as I could tell.
That said, the only time I’ve had a real level problem recording session on the external mic was when the room was quiet and I suddenly start playing loud second octave whistle notes near the mic. That causes clipping. On the other hand, the one time I tried recording a session in a really noisy pub it worked great all around – really, it worked stunningly well. My theory is that when using the external mic, the iRiver tries to automatically set the level, and sudden spasms of noisy whistle upset it. (The 340 link definitely suggests that it does something like that when recording.)
As I said, I took the iRiver to Goderich, and you’ll never ever get me to switch back to cassettes. Every evening I plugged it in to recharge; every morning I backed up the previous day’s recordings to the laptop, and moved them into nicely labeled folders on the iRiver. Though there are clipping issues (mostly in noisy concert situations) the recordings are all good enough to learn tunes from. Many recordings came out very well. The overall sound quality is quite noticably better than the crappy cassette deck. And at the end of it, instead of a huge stack of cassettes that need to be sorted and digitized, I’ve got MP3 files on the computer, nicely sorted, and with a little more work (already done), labeled.
It’s hardly perfect, but it is easily the best tool I’ve ever seen for this job. Plus when we’re not out grabbing tunes, my wife can put it to good use as an MP3 player.
Colomon,
Copy/pasted from their online manual is this:
EXT. MIC VOLUME
You can control sound level recorded by using
the external microphone.
Did you actually run some tests and noticed the recording level was used for the internal microphone? You’re sure about this? If it’s the case, then they made a mistake in their manuals…
PS: Their online manual is a PDF of the printed manual that comes with the unit
Where did you find that? Maybe I just wasn’t doing it correctly – the user interface is complicated enough I might have completely screwed up my tests.
The only quote I can find in the manual about recording levels is
“NOTE: Volume level can not be controlled on the iHP while recording from an external device.” I guess this can be read as “you cannot change volume during the recording process” but then it would seem to imply that you could change the volume during recording on the internal mic. (As far as that goes, maybe the external mic is not an external device?)
I didn’t try changing recording levels on the internal mic – I pretty much instantly concluded that the internal mic was only suitable for voice recordings, and never gave it a second thought.
Colomon,
I’m not sure if we’ve got the same manual, but in mine, when you look at the end where they explain every menu feature, there’s a menu for recording, and it says “recording level for external microphone”. I even think that when you change the level using your iRiver you can read the caption “ext. microphone” on the LCD but I’m not sure.
Ah. It never occurred to me that a bunch of useful recording info would be left out of the “recording” section of the manual, but in a completely different section.
So there is an automatic recording level feature – bet it’s turned on by default and that’s what I’ve been implicitly relying on.
Guess there’s more experimenting to do…
Okay, more confusing – the auto level correction flag is off on my iRiver. So I’ve made a bunch of successful recordings (and some not-so-successful ones) without ever adjusting the recording level. Wacky.
So, does the bit-drop-while-recording noise always manifest itself as a tiny click/pop, like at the 42 s. mark in Azalin’s MP3, or is it sometimes louder/longer and in general more noticable?
/Jens
Okay, more confusing – the auto level correction flag is off on my iRiver. So I’ve made a bunch of successful recordings (and some not-so-successful ones) without ever adjusting the recording level. Wacky.
Goodness Colomon, you’re confusing me, too… I didnt there was a auto recording-level feature, will have to go through my menu. I thought I was recording fine so far, now I might screw up the settings thanks to you 
Well, to be honnest, I never noticed the drops before Chris told us about them. Now I can notice when you tell me where it is, but I really doubt there are longer drops, I would have noticed. I listen to some session recordings I made with the iRiver almost every day, and enjoy listening, I think some long drops would be bothering my ears.
How odd, just as I’m catching up on this thread, up pops an email to tell me my unit has been despatched! Should be here in the next few days.
Regarding minidiscs, the reason for my new toy is that my Minidisc has renectly stopped recording cleanly in the last month. Still fine for playback, but it spoilt some recordings I was doing. I always just used a small tie-clip mike with it, no possible adjustment to recording levels, and never had any problems.
I notice that there are new even higher storage minidisc type devices around now, but MP3 seemed the best way to go. At about double the cost of an MD player (of the sort I want), but able to store a lot more, and create my own playlists etc.
I’m sure my minidisc player will still get used, but the MP3 player will be edging it out for convenience.
Hiya,
Back when I had money, I got one of these things for my friend J.J. to use at Irish Arts Week.
She likes it a lot, but I thought it did have some problems. She also noticed that internal noise when recording off the internal mic — it came as an occasional high-pitched reedy buzz, presumably whenever data was dumped to the hard drive.
This might explain different impressions: if you make a quick clip off the internal mic, you may never notice this problem. But recording a 90 minute lesson she definitely got that annoying screeeeeeeeeeee. She used the ext. mic from that point on.
But I don’t consider that a major problem, as we are going to use ext. mics anyway. The other problems were:
o For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to DELETE a track after recording it. That was a colossal pain in the keisteroo: even a cheapo tape recorder lets you tape OVER something. And of course, an MD recorder lets you slice & dice tracks, rename and reorder them, etc.
When you’re at a festival for a whole week, recording every little thing from lessons to concerts, not being able to delete or rename makes navigation a real pain. The designers probably assumed you’d sync up with a computer every day; but if I could sync up with a computer every day, I’d save money and buy one of those dandy Sony tune-grabber gadgets Eskin told us about.
o The iRiver interface was OK, tho it really shows how far MP3 players have to go before coming close to other consumer electronics. Call me old fashioned, but I am used to recording devices being “instant-on,” or as instant as possible, so I can capture the moment, rather than some other moment 10 seconds afterwards. Unfotunately these big MP3 gizmos are very complex, and have to boot up like computers before you can record; it may be some years hence before a $200 digital jukebox includes the basic functionality of a 60’s era tape recorder.
I do like that the iRiver has a recording standby mode, so that after power-off and power-on, it’s ready to go with all your settings. But in general the iRiver suffers from computeritis: it was designed by computer people rather than consumer electronics people, and so it has an interface that requires a written manual to describe it.
Caj
Well, there again some problems for others are not problems for me, but it’s true that a delete function would be great. I personally have my WHOLE collection of CDs on my iRiver and it takes about 3GIG. I’ve got 17 GIG left to record live stuff, this means about 600 hours of recording. Believe, with 600 hours of theorical recording, I really don’t bother with a delete function, even if I had one, 'cause at the end of the day if I want to delete stuff I’ll use my mouse and Windows file explorer on the iRiver, not some menu function. With 600 hours I can leave for three months and tape everything I need without any need for transfer.
PS: Yes, booting up is a pain, but I remember having to boot up with the MD too, so it’s not a big deal. no boot-up = flash memory based driver, which doesnt have more than 1GIG at the moment.
For those who like instant gratification, there is the voice recorder option. My Sony ICD ST10 is always on, letting me record my thoughts on a whim. Other pluses are lower cost, and smaller size. The downside is that it records in Sony DVF format with limited recording time (2 hours, 4 hours for the ST25). I have to convert files to WAV then to MP3 for upload. There is a patch for Windows Media Player to play DVFs so what I am doing mostly is storing DVFs.
Another negative for the Sony is that the bit resolution is a lot lower than the IRiver. However, I find recording quality usually is limited by the acoustics and background noise on location rather than the bit resolution.
- Bill