Shameless product endorsement No. 5

Behind the scenes in this little morality play I call My Blog, I had an itch that needed scratching (to paraphrase some of my American friends).

For personal reasons, and ones that are a little off-topic for this blog, I needed a portable music player. I could have relied on a portable CD player or perhaps even a small, small laptop, but the purpose didn’t warrant something on either of those scales. I just needed something for sound playback.

And being conscious of the limitations of proprietary codecs, I decided I wanted ogg support. Video playback is for YouTube weenies, so I don’t give a hoot about that. Of course, it had to be something Linux-friendly. Coolness didn’t really rate on the grand scale of things … or I guess I should say, coolness took a back seat to portability, function, price, Linux compatibility and freedom from proprietary formats.

And I’m proud to say that I did my homework this time, and came up with a music player that I am personally thrilled with. I had quite a few options available, but the winner for me was the iRiver T7 (which I see labeled as the ‘Volcano‘ elsewhere but was just a ‘T7’ here in Japan).

This satisfied all my requirements without skipping a beat.

• Price was exceptionally cheap, at less than US$50 locally. (Support your local electronics retailer.)
• It’s light as a feather. Some people require a gizmo to have some weight; I prefer one that doesn’t weigh me down.
• It plays ogg files.
• It’s no bigger than a pack of chewing gum.
• It has an easy-to-figure-out key arrangement, and a graphical display available in two dozen languages, give or take.
• It behaves like a mass storage device.
• Ubuntu found, configured, mounted and opened it in the time it took me to turn around and look for the instruction booklet.
• It plays ogg files.
• The on-drive arrangement for music and playlists and whatnot is just basically a series of folders named as such. That means its easy to figure out where things go.
• It has a lot of options that are adjustable through the player itself, so you don’t need some sort of bricking-prone firmware update. 😯
• It plays ogg files.
• It recharges through the USB interface, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t require USB2.0 as a power source. So it likes my old computers.

And as bonuses, it has a radio and can record sound, although to be honest, I doubt I’ll ever look into those options. Radio maybe, but sound recording I just don’t see a need for. Oh, and it plays ogg files.

About the only negative comment I can make at this point is that the black model — which I preferred, just as a matter of aesthetics — has play and selection buttons that are only marked as a difference between the matte finish of the player and a mirrored finish of the button. In other words, in the low light you can’t really see them, and if you’re just feeling for the button, you can’t really feel them either.

However, that’s such a superficial point of appearance that I can say it wouldn’t keep me from buying one again. If I had been thinking ahead, I might have picked a color with a stronger contrast between the body and the buttons. (Sheesh, talk about digging for something bad to say. … 🙄 )

And I suppose the storage space — I opted for 2Gb, because the price difference between 2Gb and 4Gb was a bit high for my taste — isn’t going to be enough for some people. (Insert shrugging gesture here.)

All that aside, in an age where everybody and their Mom has — and has to have — an iPod (yes, my Mom has one too), I’m rather proud to be swimming against the current. For a Linux-friendly, ogg-friendly low-cost music player, I am comfortable recommending this one. A gold smilie for the iRiver people: 😀