Thu, 16 Sep 2004

New Nerd Toy - cheap noname mp3 player usb drive thingo from ebay.com.au

Here are a few remarks on this device and comments on using it with a Linux computer. Mainly got it for listening to music in the car easily, but the quite decent recording quality also opens up a few additional uses for it. It is small and handy and runs off a single AA battery so I can use my rechargeables.

mp3 player

It appears to be a clone (or no-badged version?) of the iRiver iFP-395T

Sound quality is quite good, and the output level is higher than I expected, and has driven every device I have tried at a loud enough level.

The user interface is quite slow and not very well designed, either the buttons dont register every click or it is quite slow to respond, but it is workable (although annoying) once you get the hang of it.

There is absoluetely no brand name or model number anywhere in the software, manual or on the unit itself. It seems completely no-name except for identifying as "Philips" but I reckon that is who made the USB storage chip it uses. The manual is copright 2003 "our company" and the box mentions 128M and 256M size, but has 512M written on by hand..

It claims to be "Firmware Upgradable", and there is an Upgrade/ subdirectory on the USB storage device but there is no mention of where, how, or what upgrades are available.

When I plug it into my Debian GNU/Linux box the USB hotplug stuff reports: 

scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: Philips   Model: MassStorage Disk  Rev:
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
SCSI device sda: 259073 2048-byte hdwr sectors (531 MB)
sda: assuming Write Enabled
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
..so it meets the advertised 512MB space although df reports 506M size. I can mount it if I mount /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1 as there is no partition table (type VFAT), and read/write files like any USB storage device. It has an Upgrade/ directory and a Radio/ directory, presumably for firmware updates and recordings respectively.

Recording a random mp3 into the line in after setting it to maximum sample rate and quality (it has a range to choose from) produces a file identified by "file" as: 

teleport:/mnt/mp3# file /mnt/mp3/Radio/Radio004.wav
/mnt/mp3/Radio/Radio004.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, IMA ADPCM, stereo 44100 Hz
.. which is not a straigh digital audio file but stored in IMA ADPCM lossy compression. Most Linux audio programs don't seem to like this format, but it can be converted to normal uncompressed PCM .wav files (and hence processed further. The trick I found to do this with sox (as both have .wav extensions so dont want to convert) is to use a non-lossy intermediate format: 
teleport:/tmp#  sox -V Radio004.wav  Radio004x.cdr
sox: Detected file format type: wav

sox: Chunk fmt
sox: Chunk fact
sox: Chunk void
sox: Chunk data
sox: Reading Wave file: IMA ADPCM format, 2 channels, 44100 samp/sec
sox:         44711 byte/sec, 512 block align, 4 bits/samp, 2364928 data bytes
sox:         2 Extsize, 505 Samps/block, 512 bytes/block
sox: Input file Radio004.wav: using sample rate 44100
        size shorts, encoding ima_adpcm, 2 channels
sox: Input file Radio004.wav: comment "Radio004.wav"

sox: Output file Radio004x.cdr: using sample rate 44100
        size shorts, encoding signed (2's complement), 2 channels
sox: Output file: comment "Radio004.wav"

teleport:/tmp#   sox -V Radio004x.cdr Radio004x.wav
sox: Detected file format type: cdr

sox: Input file Radio004x.cdr: using sample rate 44100
        size shorts, encoding signed (2's complement), 2 channels
sox: Writing Wave file: Microsoft PCM format, 2 channels, 44100 samp/sec
sox:         176400 byte/sec, 4 block align, 16 bits/samp
sox: Output file Radio004x.wav: using sample rate 44100
        size shorts, encoding signed (2's complement), 2 channels
sox: Finished writing Wave file, 9330384 data bytes 4665192 samples
However setting levels is a bit hit and miss as there is no VU meter, but there is a input level control and a AGC mode which I haven't tried. The line-in is audible on the headphone outs so some basic monitoring can be done however. Due to the fiddly user interface I wouldn't try anything in a hurry however. The quality, while not DAT crystal, is noise free and quite usable enough for making quick demo recordings, etc.

Posted at: 00:11 | category: / | # | 0 comments