Duncan, mused, then expounded: > > For that reason, I'm writing Archos off as a choice at this point in time. > Due to their popularity, support for iPods is a fairly good gamble, even > yet to be released models with different hardware. It may take awhile, > but it's fairly likely to happen. The iriver h10s look to be the only > other close to viable alternatives in the 20+ gig range, at this point. > There are several sub-10GB flash based players in various stages of > support, but that's not what I'm looking at. >
The Neuros Audio 2 come with an 80GB drive, supports Vorbis and has had an open firmware project for a couple of years now. The price is less than an iPod as it's being discontinued. While not offically supported or sactiioned, both the hard drive and battery can be replaced. I had the first version, just as Vorbis support was deing added. Upgraded my hard drive with a standard laptop unit, and used it for a few years before it finally died - probably too much poking around inside trying to get a better understanding of it. The first version's audio wasn't all that great, but then most people won't care. And it's a bit bulky as it takes 2.5" drives and it seperates into two pieces. After mine died, I picked up an Iriver IFP-999 which is quite nice, very good audio and quite small. But I miss having 40 GB of space as 1 GB is very limiting in the music I can carry. Neuros has the replacment device on hold as they are just finishing up the OSD - kind of a portable, networked VCR that uses CF, SD, etc. cards, runs linux with a version of e17 as the display manager. Rasterman, himself, created the display manager and has (or had, I haven't followed the irc logs lately) worked quite hard on it. There is a pretty active, though small, community supporting the Neuros Audio devices. There main website is - http://www.neurosaudio.com/ And there development process is fairly open - irc dev logs, with some mild censoring, blogs, wiki, and support forums. As for me, after mucking in the swamps of Myth, I'm looking forward to the OSD. Bob - -- [email protected] mailing list
