Mpthrizzle - Rave-MP

So my Iriver broke a while ago, and a friend was kind enough to give me one of these ILO Rave-MPs he had lying around. As far as I can tell, bearing in mind the company responsible for making them ceased all production and support some time ago, they were made for WalMart, so I presume this model came from Asda. There's a suprising amount of sites dedicated to the upkeep of these things - I'm not sure if this is due to some massive fan base, or the players many flaws.

I'm pretty sure it's the latter though...

To be fair, it's pretty cool that it can be upgraded from a paltry 256mb storage with it's SD card slot, and it does have an FM radio and voice recorder built in, which are still anything but commonplace (indeed, when I bought my Iriver, it was one of a very small minority with these features.) BUT:

• To use an SD card over 512mb capacity (ie. a useful capacity) you need to update the firmware. Fine.
• The updated firmware is known to fail on boot-up at least some of the time, meaning you have to take the battery out and start again. With the company disowning the hardware, this is not going to be fixed.
• The screen turns off when it becomes exposed to high amounts of light. No-one seems sure if this is a feature or a fault.
• The left channel in the headphone jack will almost definately fail.

It was this last problem that led me to take mine apart yesterday, only to discover that the connection for the left headphone channel is hidden between the the two circuitboards, making it almost impossible to re-solder. Anyway, I found many people had worked around this simply by applying pressure with a slip of cardboard in the case, so I've got it back up and running for the time being. I actually don't mind it too much now one earphone doesn't continuously cut in and out, and next project I want to strip it down and mount it in a nice little metal tin.

If you do happen to have one of these fairly obscure things, you might find this a helpful collection of information.