Living With A ChiPod

In early 2007 I acquired a second-hand ChiPod portable music player. This player has decent sound quality and was inexpensive. It's cross-platform (it should work on any computer that supports USB 2.0 flash drives). It plays some Ogg Vorbis files even though it doesn't claim to support that format.

However, I can't recommend this player. For one thing, it was fraudulently advertised as having a 4GB capacity although its true capacity is 1GB. It has terrible documentation. There are serious bugs with the file browser that make the browser difficult to use. The quality of the accessories is poor. The battery life is also poor; it started at about 150 minutes and has dropped to about 45 minutes.

Nevertheless, I've managed to work around most of the problems, as described below.

Setting the True Capacity

As mentioned above, my player was advertised as having a 4GB capacity, and has a sticker on it to that effect. However, it really only has a 1GB capacity, and the previous owner's attempt to load more than 1GB of files resulted in corrupted files. The issue is often described as "hacked firmware," but I believe it's actually a partitioning issue.

My first step was to find the true capacity and to set it accordingly. Although the player itself is cross-platform, this step requires access to a Windows PC. Instructions can be found here.

My player only had one drive letter assigned (not two as described in the instructions) but the procedure worked fine. I also found that on my player it doesn't matter whether it's formatted as FAT or FAT-32.

Documentation

The manual that came with my player is the single worst set of instructions that I've ever seen. Various manuals of somewhat better quality can be downloaded here.

Accessories

The accessories that came with the player were of poor quality. As far as I know, the earbuds never worked. The USB cable worked briefly before giving out. The charger unit broke. The software CD had an unreadable bad spot on it.

Ogg Vorbis Support

My primary interest in this player is that it plays Ogg Vorbis files, although that feature is apparently unsupported as it's not listed anywhere. I haven't had any issues playing Ogg Vorbis files encoded at quality level 0. However, the player had problems with files encoded at quality level 3 (the default encoding level); less than half of the files I tried worked. I haven't tried any other quality levels. Fortunately for me, I only use quality level 0.

File Organization and Navigation

The biggest weakness of this player (not counting its short battery life) is its file organization and navigation. The player has three issues with regards to browsing files:

Normal file navigation stops working if the number of sub-folders within a folder exceeds a certain limit. The limit appears to be about seven sub-folders but may be less in some circumstances.
There's a bug in the firmware's file browser. The player displays up to five folders or files per screen page; however, the folder or file that should appear at the top of each page (other than the parent directory at the top of the first page) isn't displayed correctly.
The player makes no attempt to sort the files - all browsing is based on the sequence that that folders and files were added to the player.

I generally organize the music folders on the player so that no folder contains more than four sub-folders (in order to work around issues #1 and #2 above). I make exceptions for cases where I'd rather deal with the browser bug than with additional levels of subfolders.

I work around issue #3 above by using the procedure described here (for Linux and other UNIX-based systems only).