I just upgraded my iRiver firmware, the new stuff was adding Hebrew support, and I'm happy to report that I now have Hebrew characters on my hebrew songs. Too bad that they are reversed. :-(

For the Hebrew speakers here, one thing that you really need to do it to listen to Don't Play With Me and then to Not Playing With You. They make a great story, and the whole thing is really funny.

The songs are: "אל תשחק איתי - נועה פארן" and "לא משחק איתך - האלמונים".

For the non Hebrew speakers, the first song is about a girl publically breaking up from her boyfriend, with some harsh words invovled. The second song is the reply from the boyfriend to the girl, and it's just killing to hear them one after another. They both has the same musical style, and you can't easily identify which song is which. This mean that you can listen to both and get the feeling that it's one song. Just great.

I hope that there is a third song, and that it will carry on.

This post is for the readers from Israel, I just listened to a great song in the radio, but I didn't catch its name, and I can only remember two lines:

I heard it on Galgalatz, and I would like the name of the song and the singers.

I bought an iRiver 340 a couple of weeks ago and I'm very pleased with it. It's small, has a long battery life, easy to use and has great sound quality.

I've heard some claims that it's not easy to use, but I found it very easy. I'm still just using it for listening to podcasts, although I understand that it a fantastic microphone that I can't wait to start using next user group meeting. I had some problems with the length of the earphone cord, but I'm now using the remote, so that solves this.

So far I've found only two things that are annoying with it:

• The belt clip sometimes get lose and the iRiver falls. This happens because the clip is attached with a screw, so it just screw itself out over time. This is really annoying, but I got a belt pouch that I carry now, so that is okay.
• No way to do accelerated fast forward for large media. I often listen to podcasts that are over an hour long. If I lose my place in them, I have to fast forward for five to ten minutes to get to the point I was before. My expectation was that the speed of the fast forward would accelerate the longer I hold the forward (or back) button. For smaller files, it's a non issue.

Very cool technology and it's single handedly responsible for my resuming of sport activities. I'm simply incapable of doing something repetitive without going disgustingly bored and stopping.

BTW,  On A Podcast - The Squeaky Clean Remix rocks!

I want to get myself a mobile player with enough storage to hold all my music, podcasts, etcs. I currently use a 256Mb player, and it's annoying to manually go and find out what I want to hear each time. Especially as I only do it at home, and I'm rarely there.

Basically, I would like to have something with 20Gb or more, easy to use on both the device and the computer application side. One major consideration is the sound quality and the volume. I'm often outside, and in my current player, it's nearly inauidable as soon there are traffic noises around. If it's the headphones that matter in such a case (as I guess it would be), they a recommendation for them would be appriciated as well.

My mother is taking a tour to the USA in a few days, so she can get me the newest and brightest. What do you recommend? Should I get and iPod? iRiver? Something else?

I've heard much recently about Yahoo! Music, Napster and Rhapsody. The first problem is that Yahoo and Rhapsody took a dislike of my choice of living and shut me out for no reason that I can find. I can't find the info about Napster, but I've a bad feeling about it.

The second problem is that they simply do no carry the mousic that I want. What I want is several CDs of filk music, specifially, those cds. All three services claim to carry over million songs, but that doesn't help much. :-(

As far as I can tell, the above link is the only place where I can get these CDs, which cost quite a bit, and I can't find anything about international shipping. Beyond that, I don't really have anything to do with CDs, I would rip them and play them on my computer/player, never as CDs.

One thing to note, it's awesome to hear filk music when you read the relevant book.

 THE HYPE MACHINE is an archive of blog audio, I'm currently listenning to the songs that they've there, and have downloaded some of them.

(For Windows Media Player users, click on the Winamp icon, it works just fine.)

Very cool idea, and very good music, recommended.

There is also a semi-official RSS Feed, but I've not used it yet.