Marked for Dearth

A few weeks ago, I bought an iRiver iHP-120.

Pros:

1. Supports lots of different codecs (mp3, ogg, wma, wav, asf). A significant fraction of my music is in Ogg Vorbis format, so this feature was central to my buying decision.
2. A long battery life. Sixteen hours is four more than the latest iPod.
3. A big honking eight-line, back-lit LCD.
4. Built in radio tuner and voice recorder. I’ll barely use the former and probably never use the latter, but it’s still nice to know that I can.

Cons:

1. Nothing beats the iPod’s UI. The iRiver only lets you scroll through your music at a constant speed, which really gets annoying when going from Aha to, say, Machinae Supremacy.
2. If you want to browse music by artist/title/genre, you first need to build an index. This takes a little while but is manageable. The really sucky part is that the iRiver needs to reload the index each time you turn it on. As a result, about 45 seconds will pass after you press the “on” button but before you can play music.
3. Building an index requires installing custom software. The iRiver’s bundled music management software is technically unnecessary because the player really just looks like an external hard drive to the operating system. Unfortunately, you need to install the (Windows-only) software in order to browse by song attribute.