So my bad luck finally managed to catch up to me. Sometime during the night last night the hard drive in my Karma managed to go into click mode, and I woke up to no music but a clicking and rather warm box. After a couple resets, hitting it on things, and letting it sit, it still isn't actually able to access the hard drive enough to boot before the bootloader times out and shut it off. I guess it's not too unexpected. I was probably lucky to have been able to get it back after the last time I had it go bouncing off each corner in turn across pavement and then rolling over a few times for good measure. Or the few times before that. That one actually involved me having to give it a drop of a few feet to unstick the heads (smacking it against hard surfaces from a few inches wasn't enough). Hard drives (even the 1.8" ones) aren't designed to take that sort of abuse, and after the last big tumble I'd occasionally notice it obviously trying to remap things on the hard drive and a few tracks suddenly being "bad". Unfortunately the drives are like half the cost of it, so I now have what's effectively an expensive paperweight.

So given the amount I use the thing, I began my quest to find a suitable repair/replacement. Repair involved hard drives, which are about as much as a new Karma, and I'd have to check compatibility and install it. eBay isn't much cheaper than new. Even though it's come down a third in price since I bought it, it's still kinda pricey for a device that's been effectively EOLed by the manufacturer. Off to the Intarweb. My main feature requirement is Vorbis support and good quality audio, with around 20GB of space being preferred (I had, while I guess still have, about 17GB on there). Those on IM were no help with suggestions other than iPod, which is out due to the lack of Vorbis and that &#!% wheel thingy. I don't like interfaces without a tactile response unless I'm looking at the screen - and for me a music player generally qualifies. The UI just seems unintuitive to me as well - I always have to use my second guess as to how to do something when I play with them. My first other idea was to use my Axim. It's handled the role temporarily before nicely, albeit the touch screen is a drawback - but at least it could have a custom interface. The fact that 8GB of storage costs over $600 and 4GB is over $200 pretty much shot that idea down though. I'm not going back to swapping a bunch of small cards again. So with my requirements I'm basically left with 4 players, one of which is the Karma.

After much reading reviews, checking comparisons, and looking up prices, I settled on the iAudio X5L. It has the Vorbis, and FLAC is an extra bonus. I don't care about color screens other than if they suck battery, as my Axim can play full xvid movies at 640x480, which no dmp can even approach. The X5L is rated for 35 hours of battery life, so that's not gonna be a problem. Reviews still place it in at somewhere over 30 hours. As a bonus the thing has a very strong, very clean audio output, with the highest S/N ratio out there. Apparently the output is very flat too, although it has plenty of adjustments. I contemplated for a second the lack of the 5 band agile equalizer and being locked into fixed frequencies, until I realized the only real use is to compensate for crappy headphones. It lacks crossfade which I'll miss. The ID3 database probably won't be an issue for me, as while Rio has awesome selection stuff in RioDJ, I never really used them. Having direct access to the files and ability to mount and generate m3us will actually be much nicer. As an added bonus this thing should be able to mount external drives to pull data across. It sounds like anything that complies with USB Mass Storage. Should be interesting to see how well it works. Theoretically it could double as a place to offload CF cards from the camera. Anyways, I'll have to post a review shortly after it arrives. Which will hopefully be early next week. I love that basic shipping from Newegg always ends up arriving the day after shipping.