EasyH10 1.5

EasyH10 is an open source project for the development of a software suite for iRiver H10 digital audio players. The project creates the database layout for an H10 player, without the need for iRiver Plus or Windows Media Player 10, based on music and playlist files transferred manually (e.g., drag-and-drop operation, copy command, rsync utility, etc).
EasyH10 is compatible with iriver H10 5GB, 6GB, and 20GB models shipped worldwide as well as various platforms such as Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, Linux, MacOS X, and other POSIX-like operating systems.
EasyH10 is for whom?
EasyH10 is for those users who know a bit about digital audio players and have become more accustomed to doing things the better way rather than the "newbie" way. In contrast with iRiver Plus and Windows Media Player 10, EasyH10 does not incorporate unnecessary and cumbersome features:
- Converting a music CD into music files (since we have excellent sources of free software, e.g., Exact Audio Copy, CDex, and LAME).
- Editing media information (since e.g., MP3TAG and The GodFather will do).
- Transferring music/playlist files from a local HDD to your iriver H10 player (since drag-and-drop with Explorer or rsync will do).
- Creating playlists from scratch on demand (e.g., WinAmp or foobar2000).
Whether a user finds integrated software useful or annoying depends on his or her level of knowledge regarding electronics, digital audio players in particular. Some users (including me) may prefer other excellent software for performing the tasks listed above. EasyH10 assumes a user is able to:
- Prepare music files with tag information (a good idea, but no mandatory any longer)
- Transfer music files to the iRiver H10 player without syncronization software
- Create playlist files through existing software
Do the above steps seem fairly easy? Then EasyH10 does just two remaining tasks for your H10 player, before it is ready to use:
- Media database construction, which is a necessary process for an H10 player to display song information in MUSIC mode.
- Playlist conversion, which is also a necessary process for your playlist files to become compatible (recognizable) with an H10 player.
Enhancements:
- [common] Added Hebrew support, which arranges artist/album/title/genre names in reversed order. Although the H10 firmware cant display a string in right-to-left language correctly, EasyH10 tries to improve this situation by flipping Hebrew letters in the database. EasyH10 [Win32 GUI] activates this routine automatically when running on the Hebrew locale, but one can disable it by setting LanguageRightToLeft variable to -1 in easyh10.ini. EasyH10 [CUI] uses the routine only when option -b (--bidi) is specified. The flipping routine was written by David Kohen.
- [POSIX CUI] Added automatic detection of a system character-encoding. EasyH10 detects the character encoding of the current system if its not specified with -e option.
- [POSIX CUI] Options -n, -i, and -c for database construction were removed for simplicity. EasyH10 [CUI] now has two options: -C (database rebuild) and -U (database update).
- [POSIX CUI] Show an error message when EasyH10 cannot initialize the routine for converting multi-byte characters to UCS-2.
- [POSIX CUI] Crash fix for MP3 files without read permission.
- [POSIX CUI] Crash fix for MP3 files with compilation flags enabled but with empty artist names. This fix was submitted by Carsten Pfeiffer (#1539139)
- [POSIX CUI] Bug fix for an incorrect usage of returned codes from iconv.
- [POSIX CUI] Updated the man-page.