Note: My opinion of this device has changed, see the updates below for a far better ogg player for far less money.

Product: iRiver e100 2gb portable music player (iPod[tm] alternative)

Review

I recently purchased an iRiver e100 on eBay for about $130 in a package deal that included a small FM transmitter (for playing it on the car stereo) and a screen protector. It was for my wife, but I have been guilty of hijacking it pretty regularly.

The product is a music and video player with some very nice standard features:
o Built-in FM radio tuner
o Ability to record anything including radio
o Supports text files, photos, video
o Built in microphone and tiny speakers
o Supports external sd card up to 8gb
o Supports superior audiophile formats like ogg and flac which are alternatives to the often muddy sounding mp3 format. This was the major selling point for me.

In brief, the product lives up to almost all of the information you can read through on the site promoting the product. It does what you expect it to and the interface is very similar to iPod, but it looks a lot nicer.

The already well covered gotcha is with the interface being just slightly unresponsive or slow to react to input. This is a little bit annoying but not really a deal breaker for me at least. I’m hopeful that this can be optimized and fixed in a future firmware update.

iRiver e100 Ogg Tag Problem (and a hack to fix it)

The only problem I encountered was that it doesn’t read standard ogg/flac tags correctly. It will only read the tags (embedded song name and other info) in uppercase while the standard ogg encoding software makes the tags lowercase.

My solution to this was to append custom “ARTIST” “ALBUM” “TITLE” tags with the -c option to oggenc. You can read the script I use to re-encode my lossless flac files into much smaller ogg files here to see the options needed to make this happen if you run into the same problem. The encoding line is near the end.

The only other problem is that it seems to have a hard time starting up when a Sandisk 4gb micro sd card is inserted, you have to pop the sd card out to get it to boot up. Not good.

Conclusion

(updated)

With a nicer look than the iPod and several very cool extra features built in this is a wonderful device for the audiophile who can tell the difference between CD and mp3 quality. The support for flac and ogg is a must for me, but I am not happy with the support from iRiver: “Your device is not defected all you need to do is power on your device and put your sd card in after.” Defective by design I guess.

(updated again)

After about 6 weeks the thing stuck on the “iRiver” bootup screen and refuses to be reset or otherwise used. So I’ve just let the battery run out and still the same result after a day of dead battery. It’s going back, what a nice looking piece of junk.

(and updated one more time)
I ended up buying the house brand “Insignia Pilot” from Best Buy because it supports ogg and many other formats. This thing puts the e100 to shame. It doesn’t play flac, but all in all it is far more capable, stable, attractive, and cost effective by a long shot. I will review this player later on my blog once it’s had a chance to survive a few months of abuse.