iriver T60 music player - my experience

[David Fletcher]

Hi everybody.

A couple of months ago I bought a portable music player, and I just wanted to 
let everybody who's interested know what I bought, who I bought it from, and 
how well it works with Linux in my meagre experience.

The player is an iriver T60 4GB, bought from Advanced MP3 Players in the UK. 
This shop (I'm not in any way associated with them, just giving credit where 
it's due) gave me excellent service, including testing a couple of my Ogg 
Vorbis files on a T60 before I bought it. Goods are dispatched via City Link.

The downsides of the player are that AFAICT it's only possible to do the 
firmware update using $soft, and it does no sorting of the order of the 
tracks before playing them. Therefore if you just use Konqueror to drag files 
onto the player, the track order of all the albums will be scrambled.

The upsides are, it plays Ogg Vorbis files, produces decent quality sound, has 
a nice user interface for navigating to the tracks you want to play and uses 
a proper battery, with a user setting to tell it what you are using - 
alkaline or rechargeable. Also has a digital clock and a radio, but I find I 
don't bother with the radio. The clock is useful though, as I leave my watch 
in the locker at the gym.

I can't do anything about the firmware update, but I have solved the track 
order problem by the use of rsync to load the tracks onto the player:-

rsync -rvtW --delay-updates --modify-window=1 /MiscUsersFiles/Music/Dave/T60/ /media/T60/Music/

The --delay-updates option did the magic for me, causing, I think, all tracks 
to be physically transferred to the player in alphabetical order. The T60 
players appear to play files in the chronological order in which they were 
transferred, so use of this rsync command gives it what it needs. I would 
guess that new artists and albums would appear out of order if transferred in 
later sessions, but the out of order tracks was the biggest PITA for me.

USB transfer seems to hammer the battery, so it's best to use a freshly 
charged 1000mAh NiMH cell, then charge it again afterwards, I find.

Ripping was done using grip, with the encoder set to oggenc and the encoder 
command-line parameter set to
-a %a -b %b -d %y -G %g -N %t -l %d -o %m -t %n %w --quality=4
and the encode file format parameter set to
/MiscUsersFiles/Music/Dave/T60/%!A/%!d/t%t%n.%x
which makes each file name start with a t for track, followed by the track 
number and the track title.

I did find that sometimes a track seemed to get skipped or only part played. 
Under the Advanced settings is something called Scan Speed which is set to 1x 
by default. Changing it to 4x seems to have fixed the problem, AFAICT, for 
me. I've not consulted the manual about this, just fiddled around with the 
settings menu.

Conclusion - I'm happy with this player. The only improvement I would really 
like to see is a Linux firmware update facility.

I'm still using Feisty, but plan to build a new system before long, which will 
get Gutsy.

-- 
Registered Linux user number 393408

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