Costs: 5 hours of hard carpenter work.
Materials: a nice piece of wood, wood chisel, drill, saw, fine-grade file, sand paper, wood cement and a lot of elbow grease :)
Instructions: Just think about your school woodwork classes... now they actually come in handy :) The most difficult part was to cut out the wood with the wood chisel so the H140 would fit.
Nokia-Holder modified to an iRiver H140 Docking Station
Costs: My neighbour was throwing out this old Nokia mobil-holder. I got it for free :)
Materials: a blowtorch to heat a screwdriver, some sticky tape, fine-grade file, sand paper, a connector, some cord, a soldering iron.
Instruction: I needed to extend it a little bit to make my H140 fit - I simply melted the plastic with a hot screwdriver. Primitive I know, but it worked.
I screwed the connector through the plastic and connected the cords to the orignal socket in the Nokia holder (fits the adapter connector)
iRiver H1xx Recording Glitches (Sample drops bug)
Download a wav-file sample: iRiver H140 audio recording glitch
This is a recording of a sinus signal. The glitches will not be as distinct when recording music.
H1xx Startup Graphics
Change your startup graphics of your H1xx. The graphic will only be shown for approximately 2 sec. and does not replace the "read file system" graphics. The official page of this mod is: ihpbmp. WARNING: THIS COMES WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. IF YOUR IRIVER STOPS WORKING, IT IS YOUR FAULT FOR UPLOADING USER-MODIFIED FIRMWARE, NOT MY FAULT.
* Make a full backup of your H120/H140 on your PC.
* Delete all files... also hidden (Recycle Bin can be disabled if you use the "TweakUI" tool).
* Open a commando prompt START->Run->write "cmd" and press enter
* Go to your H1x0 backup drive (write "help cd" if you are lost here :)
* Now copy all your directories from your "H1x0 backup" to the your "H1x0-drive" (i.e. E:) by
xcopy . E: /T
* Verify with a defragmentation program (i.e. "OO defrag") that your folders are positioned at the start of the harddrive.
* If not then try to delete the folders (maybe copy some random big files and delete them again) and do the xcopy folder structure copy again (FAT32 file positioning is strange)
* Copy all your files and music back to your H1x0 by
xcopy * E: /S
or use Total Commander (Windows Explorer does not copy in correct alphabetical order)
You now have a much faster startup time of your H1x0 when DB-scan is disabled. With the DB enabled the harddisk reading time is insignificant compared to sorting/structuring-time of the DB
Advice to improve DB Startup-Time:
The above trick only effect the harddisk read in time. I achieved an improvement from 1:28 min. to 0:33 min. with the DB enabled
after I converted my TITLE TAG syntax from "##-title" to "title" on the entire collection of 4100 songs. I am not sure how why I achieved this increase in startup but I have a few advices which may help:
* Keep the TAGs in your collection as clean as possible. (1 artist = name, 1 album = name etc.)
* If you have a lot of singles songs instead of full albums, you will experience an increased DB startup-time.
* Limit the number of genres. The best is to have all the songs of one artist belonging to one genre
* Avoid having the "##-title" syntax in the TITLE TAG (this is not the filename - the filename should be ##-title.mp3), because this syntax means that extra sorting has to be done in the TITLE-list
* Keep your iRivNavi.iDB defragmented (this will however not effect the sorting time where the harddisk has finished reading)
I have my collection in the following file/folder structure:
ROOT/ALBUMS/A-B-C-D/ARTIST/YEAR-ALBUM/##-TITLE.MP3
Slippery Joystick Fix:
I cut out a round piece of white velcro (from my winter jacket) and glued it onto the joystick with super-fast-clue. Result: One-Finger operation of the H1xx!
