iRiver T20 1 GB

I chose this player from iRiver based on a good experience with one of their products. The dinky T20 is just as good as I expected, comes packed with features, is good value for money (I got my one new for £70) and best of all, has a shiny chrome casing (unfortunately not shown in the photo.) It definitely has more wow to it than a Shuffle.

I was looking for a music player that would support line-in input, and have been using it to ...
...to tune it in anyway. The iRiver site does say though that some T20s do not include this function (strangely), so if the radio is important to you, then double check before you buy.

All in, a very good basic player with some very handy addtional features.  ... more

I chose this player from iRiver based on a good experience with one of their products. The dinky T20 is just as good as I expected, comes packed with features, is good value for money (I got my one new for £70) and best of all, has a shiny chrome casing (unfortunately not shown in the photo.) It definitely has more wow to it than a Shuffle.

I was looking for a music player that would support line-in input, and have been using it to record speeches for over 2 months now. The display gives you a readout of how long you can record for, and everything is encoded to MP3 directly, so editing the file later is no trouble at all.

You can also change the bitrate when recording, and using the lowest of these (128kbps) the quality is still very good. For the best quality, you can use the medium or higher quality settings, but you do have to remember to check how much space you've got left before you start recording.

The size of this player makes listening anywhere an absolute dream. That said, it's not so light that you wouldn't notice it falling out of your pocket - there's enough weight to it to let you know it's still there. The only problem I've found with the design is that as the player is quite a lot larger than the USB connector, you sometimes have to disconnect other USB devices to get it plugged into the pc. Nothing a nice USB hub wouldn't solve, but worth knowing if you're using this as you travel on different pcs.

Not being someone who wants to take my entire music collection with me, 1Gb of storage is more than enough. If you update the firmware, you can use this as a USB storage decide too. The USB connector that slides out (very stylish by the way) negates the need for lugging around a cable, making this one handy player indeed. So for keeping your important files with you and a reasonable amount of songs, you can't really go wrong.

Soundwise it's great but not outstanding, and it comes with some decidedly better than average earphones. There are plenty of good equaliser settings, plus one you can set yourself. The user interface can become quite cumbersome once you have a lot of folders stored, which can get annoying after you've pressed the wrong button a couple of times. If you do a lot of searching for a specific track, the interface may well annoy you rather too much.

My T20 includes a radio function which comes in handy now and again. It has a preset system for this but here the interface lets everything down and I've not worked out how to set any stations, but it doesn't take a minute to tune it in anyway. The iRiver site does say though that some T20s do not include this function (strangely), so if the radio is important to you, then double check before you buy.

All in, a very good basic player with some very handy addtional features. 

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