The 160GB capacity would be the same as my current iPod Classic, which is liveable; but, the lack of physical playback buttons (meaning dependance on on-screen controls) is a much bigger issue for me. I wouldn’t mind having a corded remote that provide some kind of playback control. Heck, some of the portable MiniDisc recorders that I have from a quite a while ago included such a remote and even included a small LCD display! No, I am not planning on going back to MiniDiscs for portable music; partially, because I haven’t charged the Ni-MH batteries in years and, thus not be portable.

The iAudio X7 does have some nice features, including support for stereo output via Bluetooth and FM radio. It also includes a line-in cable so that I can, one day, finish transferring decades-old folk music from tapes to a digital format. Right now, my plan would be to use an old Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 that also has line-in and record each side to a single WAV file. With the Cowon player, I would be limited to a lossy format.

According to Cowon, the player can play audio for up to 103 hours continuously on a full battery. I doubt if that will be the case when playing a large mix of FLAC or MP3 files encoded at 320Kbps. I would be happy if my iPod Classic could last for more than 1.03 minutes on battery! I’m considering sending in my iPod Classic to a company that will swap out the battery with a new one, as it would be cheaper than sending it to Apple for the same procedure.

Will I be running out to get the Cowon iAudio X7 immediately? No, mostly because I can’t find anyone selling one in the United States. I still have reservations about the touch screen interface and not excited with the lack of an increase of capacity. Another concern would be in terms of price. Right now, it is available in the UK for £249 and probably would probably cost north of $300-325 once it reaches these shores.

While it would definitely meet my requirements for capacity and audio format support (MP3, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis), as well as gives me the option to hack around with either the Android OS (version 1.6) or load my own operating system if I really wanted to. Not to mention, I could watch some Doctor Who or Law & Order: CI or UK if I cared to. The reasons why I haven’t jumped at the opportunity include:

• Not quite as pocket-friendly at 5.64 x 3.10 x 0.79 inches, which is about 1.5 x 0.7 x 0.26 inches larger than my current iPod Classic.
• At 10.21 ounces, that is a whole 4.5 ounces more than my iPod Classic. With that difference, I could almost carry another 160GB iPod Classic.
• No physical buttons for playback. It is the key reason why I don’t really use the iPod function of my iPhone, except for briefly listening to a couple of songs. A tiny remote tethered to a pair of craptacular headphones is about as good as not having any physical buttons to begin with.

So, what could have been an easy decision is still muddied by the fact that it is not the form factor or does it have common physical buttons for play/pause/skip back or forward. Another thing I have to consider is that I already carry my iPhone and a work phone, so being straddled with device that is larger and much heavier than the iPod Classic is not worth it.

Sorry Archos. Somewhat close, but no cigar.

Why FLAC and ALAC? I chose FLAC since it is a lossless and open format, in which I can treat each FLAC file as an archive-worthy copy that so happens to contain ReplayGain data. Not to mention, it’s perfect for listening to music in my living room through my Squeezebox or one of my Sennheiser headphones (HD570 and HD580). Now, it may seem redundant to have FLAC and ALAC copies floating around, but it’s necessary because Apple decided to go with ALAC as their sole lossless format for iTunes and their iPods.

All said, in order to carry around a good selection of music and podcasts (including every Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show made available as a podcast, Car Talk, This American Life), I need something has a storage capacity of at least 120GB. My current 160GB iPod Classic does the deed fairly well… except for the fact that I can’t play FLAC files on it (I know about RockBox, but my iPod Classic is not supported). I’m also at the point where I would like to carry around more podcasts and more albums in a lossless format, preferably in FLAC format.

So, I’ve been looking around for a better alternative and one that has a 250GB (or larger) hard drive. Unfortunately, it is slim pickin’s and not many do a good job of handling dynamic or on-the-go playlists. I know there are flash memory based players out there that can take 32GB Micro-SDHC cards and support FLAC, but that would require a lot of card swapping and would lead to long load times and playlist management nightmare. I’m kind of dealing with that right now with two 32GB SDHC cards for my S5, but instead of swapping out cards (as the head unit has two SD/SDHC slots), I have to switch between sources and playlists cannot span across slots.

I have also considered giving up on using a lossless format for portable use, but that’s a compromise that I’m not willing to make right now. I would really like to make good use of my audio setup in my S5 and “dumbing” down to 256kbps MP3 just doesn’t feel quite right.

I know there isn’t a huge market for hard drive based portable media players, particularly ones that support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. Everything is moving towards flash memory (internal or with swappable memory cards), due to form factor, weight and battery life. Unfortunately, that has the side effect of relatively lower capacity, or moderately large capacity at much higher prices (iPod Touch, anyone?).

Until a better iPod Classic or similar device arrives, I’ll have to slog around with my iPod Classic and its waning battery.

I has been two weeks since I got my hands on a 160GB iPod Classic with the intention of replacing my 60GB iPod Photo so that I can carry more music with me, and maybe an occassional video or photo collection.

As reported on my last two review “journals” on the iPod Classic, there are some things about the iPod Classic that are good and some that seem like a step backwards. This journal entry focuses on a significant user experience issue with the iPod Classic and iTunes: music management and sync-ing between iTunes and the iPod Classic is painfully slow.

Each time I add a new song or podcast track to the iPod Classic using iTunes, iTunes will hang for about 10-15 seconds while using 100% of the cycles on one of the two cores on either my laptop or my desktop (both have Core 2 Duo processors running Windows XP SP2). During that time, the status message on the iPod Classic goes between “Connected” and sync-ing. I have tried connecting the iPod Classic to various USB ports and tried three different Apple USB sync cables, each came with the three iPods in the household.

If I drag over several tracks, the hang does not occur until near the end of the bulk transfer. As you can guess, this has made loading up my iPod Classic an adventure of playing with my patience and cursing out loud. The problem does not occur with neither my iPod Photo or an iPod Nano. Both iTunes and the iPod Classic are running the latest software.

After sifting through the Apple Support Discussion forums, it looks like I am not the only one with this problem.

In combination of the painful transfer hangs, the somewhat sluggish user interface of the iPod Classic and the problem of radio station presets when using the Radio Remote, my experience with the iPod Classic has not left me with a good taste in my mouth.

Apple really needs to resolve the user interface performance issues and the iTunes transfer/sync issues that are plaguing the iPod Classic.

This morning, I read that a software update was made available for the iPod Classic to version 1.0.1, so I downloaded the update through iTunes and installed it. After the iPod restarted, the UI felt a bit more responsive when nothing was playing. I still need to test it while playing different songs of varying bitrates and encodings.

Over the weekend, I decided to play with the three included games: Vortex, Klondike and iQuiz. Vortex takes the idea of Breakout or Arkanoid but instead of a horizantal playing field, Vortex uses a circular field which your paddle rides along the edge of a pipe. The game definitely makes better use of the wheel compared to Brick. Klondike is just like any ol’ basic Solitaire game that has received a graphical makeover. iQuiz is an updated version of the original iPod Music Quiz game, but adds in questions about music trivia that can be downloaded or created.

Also over the weekend, I picked up a Radio Remote so that I can use it to control the iPod in the car (a lot better than having to pick up the iPod and look at it just to skip a song or to go back a couple; not to mention, having FM radio is also helpful in places where I do not have access to radio streams. The only part that I don’t like is that it uses the dock connector, so I can’t charge and control the iPod using the remote while in the car.

Lastly, I stopped by one of the local Apple retail stores to look for cases for the iPod Classic; which they did not have any specific for the iPod Classic and the two that I could try for the 5G iPod, the fit was too snug. I guess I’ll have to continue using the loosely fitting case for my iPod Photo. I also checked out the silver iPod Classic to see if the color would look better in person versus in print or on a monitor… I still didn’t like the color, at least compared to the classic iPod white or black.

More updates to come.

For over a year, my portable audio player of choice has been a 60GB iPod Photo which I have loaded a good chunk of my music collection and podcasts that I have been downloading (manually I might add; I have yet to find a podcast download tool that fits my requirements). Unfortunately, I started running out of space on the iPod about 6 months ago and have been juggling podcasts and albums in order to keep a little bit of free space on it.

During Apple’s recent iPod announcements, I had been hoping for an iPod that could hold more than 80GB of storage. Thankfully, a 160GB iPod Classic was announced, and while the iPod Touch was enticing, the limited storage (8GB and 16GB) put it off my list immediately. Sure, the other option would be an Archos 705 player with a large touch screen, WiFi, various video codec support and a 160GB model, but I didn’t care much for portable videos and didn’t really like the feel of the previous model.

The iPod arrived Tuesday morning while I was at work, so I didn’t get my hands on it until that evening. After carefully opening the boxes and removing the plastic wrappers, I was relatively surprised at the slim profile and the feel of the black, metal case. Comparing it to my 60GB iPod Photo, I preferred the smooth transition as I slid my finger from the front to the side of the iPod, while the iPod Classic has a slight ridge.

As far as the bundled headphone, it stayed in the box since I already have two Sennheiser headphones (HD560 and HD580) at home and a Bose Quiet Comfort set at work.

After plugging the iPod into my laptop, registering the device and scanned through the options present in iTunes and on the device, I decided to plug the iPod into my main workstation (which has a Gigabit Ethernet connection to my file server, versus a 100Mbit connection for my laptop) and started to load a good chunk of music and podcasts on to the iPod. Since I do not manage my music library or my Podcasts directly through iTunes (good folder management, file naming and tagging, and crafted playlists work for me and other devices), it was basically drag-and-drop the files/folders/playlists on to the iPod in iTunes.

Just as a side note: even though I do not use iTunes to manage my podcasts, I do import them into iTunes into the appropriate playlists, add or correct any missing or incorrect album art and set the “Skip while shuffling” flag. This works wonderfully on my iPod Photo since I routinely use the “Shuffle Songs” feature of the iPod and do not want podcasts (or spoken word tracks) to get jumbled in with my music.

After loading the initial set of music, podcasts, photos and videos (Podstar Runner FTW), I unmounted the iPod from iTunes and changed a handful of settings on the iPod (such as: setting Shuffle to Song, Repeat to All, enabled/disabled a couple of menu items and reduced the backlight to 40%). I then plugged the iPod into my Hi-Fi and started playing a track from the “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” podcast playlist that I created. That worked fine until the track ended and started playing again. Being a little miffed, I chose another track from the playlist and decided to skip around; upon pressing “Next”, it starts playing the same track again. NOT what I was expecting based on the behavior of my iPod Photo.

I also wanted the check on the menu responsiveness of the iPod Classic versus the iPod Photo and found it to be a tad bit more sluggish than the iPod Photo. Also, the touchwheel seems to be a bit too sensitive at times, but not as responsive at other times.

Other than that, I haven’t messed around with the new iPod yet and decided to carry my iPod Photo to work until I can find a resolution to the issue noted above.

I’ll post more about my experiences with the iPod Classic as I use it more.