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iRiver LPlayer MP3 Player
Setup
You have a couple of options for synchronization: Windows Media Player 11 can handle song transfers if you're already comfortable with the software, or you can install iRiver's Plus ver. 3, which handles audio / video playback and management of all compatible media types. Either method is fairly straightforward, but you'll have to dig into the player menus to switch the “connection type” depending on your choice. Adding tracks with WMP is a simple drag-and-drop affair; choose the songs you want to sync from your library, drag them onto the Lplayer's icon, and sync away. Pictures and video can be added the same way. It's pretty hard to mess up. Even I, the Windows n00b, was able to get it working near instantly. Using iRiver's software proved to have some ups and downs. On the plus side, it keeps track of what you've synced to your player, even it it's not connected. After adding tracks to your “Plus” library, you simply check the songs you want to move to the player and click a large red transfer button at the bottom of the window. When you open up the software, all synced songs are checked in your library. Pictures and movies have their own identical sync sections. The only knocks I have against the iRiver Plus software are, for the most part, aesthetic. It doesn't work well on a lower resolution screen because of poor real estate utilization, and the menu text translation is not the most accurate I have ever seen. You can manage, but if that kind of thing annoys you, stick with Windows Media Player. The status update boxes that pop up when an action is completed are awkwardly placed and seem to sometimes hang around until you exit the software. For you Mac users out there, I'd advise you to just go buy an iPod. The Lplayer isn't meant for your tidy, walled-off ecosystem. You can transfer stuff via mass-storage mode, but you'll miss out on most, if not all, of the organizational benefits of using a syncing software. Usability / Performance Up to this point, the experience had been almost too easy. Install some software, plug cables into their appropriate ports, and get stuff transferred. I ran into my first problem when I powered the Lplayer on and navigated to the music area. When I chose to sort by artist, only 9 (8 if you don't count “unknown”) names showed up. And within these 9, only a small number of the synced songs showed up. I was flabbergasted. A very similar situation presented itself when I tried to view songs by album name or genre. Luckily, you can browse the contents of the Lplayer by directory. I was able to locate and play all of the synced music using this strategy, although proper ID3 tag reading was spotty at best. And I have my tags in tip-top condition (remember how iTunes 8 convinced me to finish out all of my album art?). Or at least I thought I did. Apparently, the iRiver Lplayer (and, most likely, their other players) isn't down with ID3 tags that are v2.2 or older. I found that all of the files that displayed properly on the Lplayer were version 2.3, and the less fortunate tracks were v2.2. The documentation for the Lplayer didn't give me any clues as to what the problem was, and I do wish it would have mentioned something as important as this. The iRiver website was similarly unhelpful. (Note: I probably wouldn't have been able to figure this out without 1. caffeine, and lots of it; and 2: a piece of software called Mp3tag (www.mp3tag.de), which gave me more information about my mp3s than I knew existed) Once I sorted out my tagging situation, I was able to get a proper picture of how the Lplayer performed. Once you select your music from the aforementioned categories (artist, album, genre, and playlists), you're presented with the “Now Playing”screen. You get album art to the left, artist and album info to the right, and song title below. Across the top of the screen there is a clock, a battery indicator, and icons for random or repeat settings. There's also a 5-star rating display below the left side of the track progress indicator. Since we're talking about the screen layout, I guess I should mention the screen itself: it's beautiful. If you're not using the Lplayer in direct sunlight. Indoors, it's vibrant & rich, but the way the interface theme is set up, the colors are just too dark for sunlight use. There are three brightness settings, and even on the highest, you'll get no quarter outdoors. Video playback came through at a more than acceptable framerate, and pictures looked nice and sharp.  You also have two different equalizer setting menus available. The first one allows you to pick a standard Rock-Pop-Classical EQ, with two extra options at the end: custom EQ and SRS WOW HD. Those can be customized in the “Setup Sound” menu. Under “Setup Sound” you'll discover a five-band graphical EQ that you can do some limited customization with. It's not super-fancy, but if you'd like to boost midrange a bit, it'll suffice. The other EQ option is SRS WOW HD. This is where I got completely lost. You can sort through five different categories of sound enhancement here: SRS, TruBass, FOCUS, WOW, and Definition. If you play around with the settings for a bit, you can come up with a pretty pleasing sound. But when I A-B'd these settings with the vanilla “Normal” setting at multiple volume levels, the SRS shtick fell apart. You might have better luck with it on a cheaper pair of 'phones, but distortion is very apparent on a higher-fi set. Rounding out the remaining menu options are the 0-5 star rating setting, a bookmarking option, lyrics display, scan speed, and the all-important “Fade-In” setting. Turn it off. Now. It takes so long to fade in or out of a track, it'll distract you. You'll miss the opening of a song almost entirely when it's on. I didn't know you could change this until a few hours in, and I wanted to 1-8-7 the Lplayer the whole time.
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