For those of you who own any iRiver MP3 / CD players or RioVolt MP3 / CD players, you'll be happy to know that a brand new firmware update was released today!
http://www.iriver.com/english/firmw01.htm (http://www.iriver.com/english/firmw01.htm)
Some of the changes are:
1. Gapless playback of continuous audio CD's.
2. Playback of AVEX copy-protected CD's.
3. Miscellaneous bug fixes.
I just flashed my SlimX with v2.02 and it seems to work great, apart from the fact that it still won't play my copy-protected Milk Inc. - Walk On Water (http://www.emimusic.de/xml/9/3250359/8799912.html) CD-maxi. Oh well, apart from that, this new firmware release is a definite improvement!
Great news! Gapless playback of CDDA is what I waited for a long time! I didn't thought, that this feature would actually be implented anymore. Now they only need to implement Ogg Vorbis support and I am perfectly happy!
Yeah, it's very likely that iRiver will be the first hardware company to support Ogg Vorbis playback. Personally, though, I'm not sure that Ogg Vorbis is ready for prime time just yet. I tried out RC3 a while back, but on some tracks (at -q5) the quality sounded worse than MP3. Oh well, I'm sure it'll improve over time.