iAudio X5 (Part III): Loading It, Sorting It, Playing It, Cursing It

Subtitled: Having A Cow-on: Music On The Mooooove (There'll be plenty more of those bad jokes, I'm sure.) Push up the power button on the side and the player takes about twenty seconds to load up - and this with 12gigs already taken up with music files on the 30gb version - so you don't have to wait long to start having musical fun. There is a brief loading bar showing the firmware version, followed by a Cowon splash screen movie before it deposits you wherever you left off last time. At the end, when you shut down, it switches off almost instantly. Now, I had certain requirements I was looking for in an mp3 player. They were not many, but they were vital to me, and they drastically reduced the spectrum of players that I could choose from. In short, they were: 1. It had to be a machine that needed no proprietary software - just drag and drop the files, and the player would recognize them. I know that many players claim that they can do this, but I wanted all of the hard drive to be recognized, not just a section set assigned as drive space. I guess what I'm saying is that I wanted a portable hard drive which also played music when disconnected: UMS (Ultra Mass Storage) as opposed to MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). The latter requires that your mp3 collection can only be transferred to your player with the necessary software. Ultimately, I could either go for Cowon or Archos. 2. The player must have a "random" setting: folder, sub-folder, sub-sub-folder, whatever, just shuffle, alright. Ummm (nervous laugh), that was about it. I know that #1 is not necessarily a popular choice, but I wonder whether this is only because of what is generally expected, like sticking with your first bank, or going online with AOL (spit-spit). Suggest to someone that they can open up their player and use it over Windows Explorer as straightforward as copying files and folders any other time, and they may just prefer it. It is simplicity itself, and very quick. 1500 mp3s, VBR, and not small, were transferred in about...well, I didn't time it, but it can't have been much more than fifteen minutes. Although the X5 does not sort by ID3 tags (a l'Archos) it still reads them and displays the artist, album and track name while the song is playing. You can arrange the files and folders any way you wish while the player is plugged into the PC, and this is the way the player will display the folders when in use. I'm still undecided: I have my collection sorted into five broad genres so that I can shuffle the lot, or a particular genre depending on what I'm in the mood for. I don't know whether it will work, and it may not be too long before I'm back to plain old, dependable Artist/Album. It is easy enough to scroll through folders; push right to drill down, press to play or expand (as in, push right). When the music starts, you will not be disappointed in the sound. Enough has been written elsewhere about the superiority of Cowon's audio quality. Suffice to say that you will find nothing much to complain about in that department. This is their "thing", their raison d'etre, their forte... The player's user-friendliness, on the other hand, might well have you a tad frustrated. It seems to me to be a little on the buggy side, a little temperamental, if you will. Once or twice I have been marooned on a file - or, more annoyingly, in voice-record mode where I couldn't get out, and just kept "taping" myself turning the air blue. The only solution seemed to be to turn the whole thing off and then on again. It dumped me, rather alarmingly back into voice-record, but this time I was able to escape. You might also find yourself wandering around the "Settings" interface with the feeling that you are driving into a fog. It starts off innocently enough, but the choices gradually become more obscure, until you find that your only desire is to turn around and go back to the safer confines of your music collection until you feel a little braver. For a (tiny) bit of an easier ride, here are one or two things I have discovered so far: Settings/PlayMode/Boundary This simply determines whether your "play" selection is going to play a single file, a directory, sub-directory, or the whole darn shooting match. Use this last one cautiously, otherwise you might find yourself jumping from a music track to a spoken word file - and that may not be what you wanted to do. Settings/General/Controls Here you get faced with "PLAY-long" and "REC-long". Hey, you can choose what will happen when you press and hold the buttons on the side of your player. Very helpful if you want to toggle lyrics on and off (see below), or switch between "shuffle" and "boundary". Can you guess what mine are set to? Lyrics On/Off If only you could select "On" and, voila, there are the lyrics to all your mp3s. I'm telling you, at the other end of six months work that could be a dream come true: Click Here to find a brief how-to on attaching lyrics to a track. Dynamic Playlist My suggestion is you use this like queuing system, or a CD stacker. Going on a journey, or have some extended work to do? Select some albums and tracks and add them to the list. Go into Dynamic Playlist and start playing. Keep the serious playlisting for when you're connected to your PC; it will save some unnecessary frustration. Although the manual claims that m3u playlists will only recognise songs up to 128kbps, I find that it has no trouble recognising my files ripped at 192kbps VBR. And, while were on the manual, why is it that no matter how weighty these tomes are, no matter how extensive they appear to be, they never contain the information that you are really interested in. What, as they say, is that all about? TextFile If you find yourself caught in a web of text and you want to escape, press the REC button on the side. The usual method of clicking the joystick will present you with a choice of what line you want to jump to. Useful, but not if you want to get out. I'll add to this if I discover anything further, but it has been fairly intuitive otherwise. VIDEO Playback Make no mistake, video playback is not a major factor with the X5. It is obviously not a priority and subsequently suffers, by today's comparisons, by being sub-standard. On initial play one can be forgiven a moment of wonder at the moving picture being presented on a tiny screen, but, after a short while, as the pixilation begins to bleed all over the place, and the audio and video gradually part company, the irritation sets in. There is only so long your mind can flip-flop between "wow" and "darn this thing" before you want to turn it off, with a dull throbbing in your temples. For short bursts, it'll do. At the moment I'm learning how to turn my music DVDs into .avi and then splitting them into song sizes. For this, it could be a go-er. But, I'm thinking it wasn't meant for any serious video watching; with its USB-on-the-go support, it makes more sense to me that Cowon imagined it to be a means for playing back video captured by a camera, or some such device. If this is the case, it does the job ably enough. For all my determination about proprietary software, there is still a need to install jetAudio on your PC if you want to take advantage of any video playing. Putting an .avi through the jetAudio conversion tool was a breeze. I fed in a 350mb TV programme and it churned out a dinky little 70meg vid fit for the X5 in hardly any time at all. No need to fear that your portable hard drive is going to be quickly filled up with ungainly mpeg4s. IN CONCLUSION You might not think it with all my gripes about controls and usability, but I am really quite besotted with my X5. I wanted a portable hard drive mp3 player, and this solid gem delivers in spades. All the rest is just blah blah blah. I want to thank iAudiophile.NET for their kind permission to use several photos and link to their site. That's the place to go for any news; and head over to the X5 forum if you run into any trouble. They'll be happy to help.