My Iriver H340 is on it's way out. The battery life, about 14 hours originally, is now struggling to do 2 hours and is decreasing rapidly. Also, it's 40GB and I now have too much music.

My music is about 65% MP3, 30% OGG and 5% ACC/other. My favourite music is in Ogg format. I need Ogg.

My priorities are...
Required:
- Ogg support
- 60GB or more
- Good battery life
Preferred:
- Replaceable battery if possible
- Acts like a removable hard drive. No special software thanks, I want to keep using Sync Toy.
- Something not quite as ugly as the H340 would be nice I guess. It's a great player but it's a brick, no two ways about it.

I've found a grand total of one candidate, the Cowon A3. It's £270 for the 80GB model which is good. It's physically large because it's made for video which I don't give a rat's ass about which is a shame. Battery life is 7 hours for video and 9 for audio, which sounds odd - I thought audio would last several times that of video, considering the video presumably has audio it's self. I wonder how accurate those numbers are.

Is there anything else? I thought Ogg would be dominant by now

(I know there are iPod sync programs which will re-encode Oggs to MP3s but that hurts quality, is slow and means if my PC's drives are killed, I've lost the good quality. I like my audio player acting as a backup for all my music.)

So that's a no then. Hmm...

ipod 5G + Rockbox

I had a little Samsung player about the size of a regular USB flash drive that supported ogg. It did not have a replaceable battery though. I imagine their newer players may still support the format though.

The Samsung would be too small at a guess. Rockbox eh. I tried that on my iRiver and it was good, but not great. Gapless playback was excellent but otherwise the default was just much cleaner and I switched back. It's probably a lot better on the iPod. Damn now I'm conflicted. Is Rockbox for the latest iPods good? Is it even available for the iPod Classic 160GB? I just ordered a Cowon A3 but I should be able to cancel.

The newer builds of Rockbox on my 5.5G are very good. Like I'm averaging better battery life than with the native firmware good.


No. Apple started encrypting the firmware with the 6th generation, or something like that.