Movable Tunes
July 16th, 2007[ Audibles ]
I’ve been meaning to get a decent music player that supports Ogg format for a while now. Apparently Apple doesn’t have a need to include support for a free and open format like this, hmmmm…. Had they done that I wouldn’t have looked further than my local Apple store.
Alas I had to go out and see if anyone in the world makes digital music players besides Apple. In the end I’m thankful of Apple’s decision not to support an open format because it forced me to look for alternatives which in the end landed me a player I like a ton more than the apple options available. It’s a bit scary that I wouldn’t have looked further than the Apple hype if not for this.
In the end I landed on the S10 from iRiver. I had to buy it through Amazon, who actually provided it through a 3rd party vendor, who wouldn’t ship it to Canada so I had to have it shipped to my sister’s place in LA.
It’s not much bigger than a postage stamp, almost weightless(17.5g) yet features a full colour screen with their slick squeeze the edges navigation system. It’s 2GB, which is plenty for me, and includes some surprisingly useful features such as an FM tuner, alarm, and a voice recorder.
One the damn cool ways they achieved this is with the hardware interface. There’s no USB interface on the actual player. The only plug-in thingy is for your headphones. How did they pull that off? Technically I have no clue but I do have a guess.
My first thought was can an old school headphone jack do everything usb can, including move data etc? I think not.
iriver includes a usb adapter that goes from usb to headphone jack. If you look closely at the headphone plug you’ll see there’s a few extra rings on it. A standard headphone jack has two plastic rings, 3 metal portions. The included iriver one has 3 plastic rings, 4 metal.
So my guess? They’ve expanded and created they’re own headphone jack by adding another conductor. Come on now, that’s just plain old clever isn’t it? They own both ends, the female in the player, the male in the adaper, so why not? As long as their female continues to function with older, more dumbed down, male headphone jacks then why not spruce it up? (wow, that’s an interesting sentence out of context).
Caveat, I have no idea what I’m talking about and clearly had too much time to sit and stair at the provided adapter on a recent train ride. If my wife ever reads this I will be called names.