iRiver H340 40GB MP3 Player With Tuner

I owned an iRiver H340 for about 3-4 weeks and it was an utter disappointment. The main reasons for choosing it over other players were the 40GB capacity and the ability to play WMA.Obviously there are some quality features. The colour screen looks wonderful and there is plenty of information displayed for tracks that are playing.The radio tuner is hard to fault and you can scan and save up to 20 preset stations. I personally don't listen to the radio so it was nice to have rather than critical.The player will also play avi video at 10fps. You can also rip DVDs to avi format (using an independent program called Iriverter). An episode of family guy is about 80megs. A 90minute movie will use up about 300megs. So not a bad overhead, but not something I'd use that much. Just a gimmick really, but an admirable one all the same.The player will be recognised as a fixed drive when connected via USB to your PC. So to get files on to the player it is simply a case of 'drag and drop'. With this 'filetree' method, you can browse your files on your player the same way as you would on your PC. Obviously it makes sense to organise them in some sensible way like Artist --> Album --> Track.The player can also be used as a USB host. You can hook up a digital camera to the player and transfer files to the player, using it as a picture viewer. You can also use it as a big hard drive and view text files too should you want to.The battery life is average. I found it was less than the 12 hours that iRiver claimed, probably somewhere around 6-9 hours but certainly no more than that. This is always hard to judge because excessive use of the colour screen or viewing video for a while will obviously drain the battery more.But there are some serious flaws which marked the player down for me and ultimately ended in me selling it after less than a month.The navigation has been described as 'fine once you get used to it' but I found it sub-par. A NAVI button surrounded by four directional arrows proved difficult to use when compared to my other mp3 experience, the scroll wheel on the Creative Zen Xtra. Scrolling through 180 artists was a painful exercise.If you want to use your ID3 tags to navigate around your collection, you better hope that you don't have too many tracks onboard. The 'DB Scan' option will group your tracks using Artist, Album or Genre. But with my 500-odd albums, the start-up time for the player increased hugely-to close to two minutes. Without DB Scan switched on, startup was about 15-20 seconds which was fine - about equivalent to the Zen (but which by default organised your ID3 tags without slowdown).The biggest disgrace is really the lack of on the fly playlists. This is the ability to queue tracks one after another in an 'on the fly' manner. You can only queue one at a time which really limits the usability for someone like me. I like to queue 10-12 tracks for a journey, pop the player in to my pocket and not take it out again. Taking it out 11 times to queue the next song is a pain - especially when you consider the slow navigation. My Zen was fast to navigate and you could queue as many as you want. This might not be a factor for some/many people but everyone needs to be aware of it. The fact that iRiver have not addressed this in a firmware upgrade is just lazy.Also on the subject of playlists, if you are playing a pre-defined playlist (I tend to create specific artist 'favourites' playlists), turn off the player and then turn it back on, the player will continue from where it left off but will not resume the playlist. It simply plays the next track on the player. This is basic functionality.Also worth mentioning that it won't play DRM (Digital Rights Management) which I didn't actually know anything about until loads of my tracks wouldn't play. I had to re-rip my CDs with the Windows Media Player protection switched off.There are plenty of people who love their iRiver and that's great. But I didn't enjoy using it and if you think the above problems that I've highlighted would impact your enjoyment, then you should really make sure you try it before you buy. I wish I had.

I spent several weeks deciding which portable audio device to buy. I finally settled on the i-River after seriously considering the COWAN and MPIO alternatives. I have had the player for a week now and feel that I have made the right choice. The positives - great build quality, supports a variety of formats and is pretty easy to use (don't believe those that say it is not user friendly - they obviously don't read the manual properly. The headphones aren't as bad as many reviewers make out - although an upgrade is definitely worthwhile considering.Now for the negatives. No DRM on European models - important if (like me) you want to subscribe to some internet radio streaming services. It is also a tad heavy, though not enough to put me off recommending it. Doesn't seem to support WMA Lossless - although someone may correct me on that.Overall, well worth considering. I am not disappointed.

I bought the Iriver 40Gb MP3 player in March after reading a number of reviews of this and other similar items. Overall I am more than happy with this product, I have a large music collection of about 4Gb on the disc, that still leaves a lot of memory for storage and transfer of files. As with other viewers I found the navigation a little difficult and the manual not very clear on how to get around the system, I also found that downloading tracks onto the disc impossible until I realised that the file type had to be included to allow the machine to recognise that it was music. Once I had sorted out problems with navigation I found the system simple to use and transferring music to the hard drive is indeed simplicity itself.The headphones supplied are adequate, I have not yet bought a more sophisticated set but may do so. Battery life really is 16 hours and charge time is fairly short too. The case supplied is adequate if not terribly stylish but at 49 years old it would take more than a flash carrying case to make me appear "cool".Although the price was high I felt that you got what you paid for, I have taken this player with me whilst travelling and working in Africa and the Middle East and it has given me no problems at all. I have recommended this product to others.

The iRiver has actually a lot of features, a pity it does NOT work properly. I contacted a few times the iRiver help desk and they have been useless, for example I asked help on playing videos and they replied that mp3 tagging could be done with various software!! The volume on the headphones is way too low even when set to maximum (using the provided headphones) and they replied that when connected to a stereo the volume can be low!!Installation easy but everytime I tried to load the song information it generated an error on explorer. I updated to Firmware 1.27, took out antivirus, firewall, re-installed the software to no result (I am using XP on a laptop 2 months old).If you want to see pictures just get ready to wait (10 seconds to load any picture). The quality of the video is than excellent and the iRiver is bulky but well designed (except for the menus which are hard to use). A final word on the manual: you can use to light up the fire and for nothing else. If you are not a super geek and techy savy please get something else that is simpler and actually works.