Features?

[CrayzeeGuy]

Thinking of switching from my non-user friendly Sansa to a new model - either the new iAudio 7 or Clix2. Im leaning towards the Cowon b/c im not in need of a video player or pretty graphics.

My 1st ever player was a Dell DJ and it had all sorts of features that i havent been able to find in 1 package since. Specifically, i am looking for the following, so if ya'll can confirm if the Cowon has it, i would greatly appreciate it.

- On the go playlist functionality where you and queue up tracks. You must play the track on the Sansa before adding it to a playlist.

- Searchable artist listing by letter. On the Sansa, you must scroll through all the artists to find what you want to play as opposed to jumping directly to the letter of the alphabet the artist begins with like on the Dell.

- Queue up multiple genres. On the Sansa, you can only play 1 genre at a time. On the Dell i could select Rock and Classic Rock if i wanted a random mix of both.

Thanks guys for the help!
~Ryan

[GSV3MiaC]

The I7 is folder orientated. Yes, you can queue stuff to the playlist, but you don't access files by artist or by genre, you access them by folder. How you lay your folders out is up to you .. if you go with

driive:/music/ubergenre/genre/artist/album, then you can play a random shuffled set at, as far as I know, any level (you can select all, folder, or subfolder, for the repeat and shuffle functions I believe).

Of course if you have an album which is 50% hard rock and 50% lullabys then you are stuck - you either have to manually split it and put half in each place in the tree structure, or put up with having some lullabys in your hard rock (or vice versa).

Maybe in some future firmware release you will get ID3 tag browsing or multiple playlist support, but not yet (maybe not ever).

The I7 manual is on line - you might want to read it (bearing in mind it has errors!).

[Dominic]

I thought the i7 can do folder and ID3 browsing no? that's what it says in Martins review, better go double check with him

[GSV3MiaC]

Well you can put the player into 'music' browse (as opposed to file browse), which then requires you to reboot, however it doesn't seem to see any tags at all on my .ogg files (maybe it does better with MP3), although they are definitely there, so 'music browse' is not very useful.

Since it doesn't work (for me) I haven't been able to figure out whether you now have shuffle within a Genre, a date, or any of the other things you can select on. In music mode you lose the 'boundary' option, so all/folder/subfolder have gone away - I guess you play/shuffle within the item you have selected, but since I can't select anything except 'unknown' it's hard to test.

I'd just call it 'broken' and do it by folder/subfolder, which is iAudio's strong suit.

[Dominic]

I'd say mp3 tags work, similar to the D2. My D2 does not recognise my ogg tags, other than artist, album and track title, although without track number the other info is useless.... although the few mp3 files i did try worked like a charm


I do like file/folder browsing, bu would like to be able to use the library since it is there.

[b0ng0]

Yes, you can queue stuff to the playlist, but you don't access files by artist or by genre, you access them by folder.

As you mentioned above, you can browse by tags, which seems to work pretty well for me (although annoying when you have an album by multiple artists). Can't really comment too much on .ogg tagging but the 2 albums I have encoded to .ogg on my player seem to be picked up fine by the tag browser. MP3 tag browsing seems to work almost perfectly for me.

[Dominic]

Can't really comment too much on .ogg tagging but the 2 albums I have encoded to .ogg on my player seem to be picked up fine by the tag browser.

It picks up their track number? and genre? It would really help to know if this is true dude.

[b0ng0]

Well it lists the ogg files under Unknown Artist (I just checked) but i'm not sure if they're tagged properly since they were exported using Audacity.

[GSV3MiaC]

I have 'properly' tagged .ogg files (at least Mediamonkey and DBpoweramp think so) but the I7 lists everything as 'unknown', and when playing them in tag/music mode even display unknown artist and album on the 'now playing' screen - but in 'file/folder' browse mode it actually shows the album/artist tags correctly. Whacky, or what!!

Can't speak to the other tags, since the only place I know how to see those (on the player) is in tag/music mode, where everything (OK, everything except last added date) is 'unknown'.

OK, .ogg tags are 'only loosely defined', and I can see how Genre would be a problem (in .mp3, genre is a small (1 byte?) integer, defining a mapped set of fixed Genres .. in .ogg it is 'any old text string you like'). That doesn't excuse losing tag info you already managed to read properly in folder view!