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COWON iAUDIO 7 MP3 Player
Navigation, Playback and Software
Navigation Using the player to play albums is simple. From the main menu, you select music. By default, the player is in "File" mode (as opposed to ID3) so you navigate your music by whatever method you've got on your computer. Beyond that, things get a little hairy. The playlist system is "dynamic," meaning that it doesn't support outside playlists. You have to use the player to create them; which if you're going by album it's not hard, but if you're doing it song-by-song it's annoying. You could pre-make mix folders, at the risk of including some songs multiple times. You can play your whole music library as a random list, but you need to go into the settings menu to enable and disable random. Nothing aside from playing music by folder is particularly straight-forward. That isn't to say that there aren't some great ideas going on for audio segregation. The iAUDIO 7 has a discrete "podcast" folder, which I used for both podcasts and audio books--these files never get tossed in with the music, so if you're listening to your collection on random, you won't, for example, be caught off-guard by a chapter of Pattern Recognition or a back cast of The Widget Show. Also, you can listen to one thing while using another of the player's features; you can read a book (a single paragraph at a time) while listening to music. Ease of use is a deception with this player. The back button, while playing music, is the best example of how this player doesn't do things right. It doesn't go back, it starts an A-B loop of what you're listening to. For voice recordings, this is priceless. But when you just want to go up a level to select a different album, it's a pain. First you need to hit menu, taking you out of play mode, then back works like it should. The player supports ID3 tags, but only in ID3 mode, which disables all file management, including creating dynamic playlists. Another thing is that this is, for the most part, a two-handed player. After spending a long time with it, I've trained myself to use it in my right hand only, but it's not comfortable or even intuitive that way. If you stick it in your pocket, you have to make absolutely certain that you put the player on hold, because even with the sensitivity turned down, it will register commands through cloth. The truth is that this thing likes to live on a desk or next to you on the couch. Playback Audio quality with the iAUDIO 7 is magnificent. Seriously, it's as good as a real hi-fi setup. But it's not just that, there's quantity. The volume goes up to 40, and I never turn it up past 30, and I like my music harmful. This device has no problems driving real cans, either. It has the most powerful amp I've ever come across in any player. They don't stop there, it has a highly customizable 5-band equalizer that reads in dB. You can control the width of the bands individually, and even set the mid-point for the frequencies. The sound-tweaking JetAudio functions, like BBE (whatever it stands for, it's similar to a re-crystallizer) which honestly cleans up .mp3s, it's not like a "loud" button, bass boost, and surround sound all cannot just be turned on or off, but have their levels set on a 1-10 scale. All of the audio settings can be saved as one of ten presets, so if you have things tweaked for music versus audio books, or even different headphones, you can swiftly change settings around without losing your perfectly-tweaked ones. Software Software just isn't necessary for the player, but if you're Hell-bent on watching videos, the included transcoder will come in handy. The video processing isn't very powerful, so it pays to optimize it for the player. Fortunately, a 160 x 128px XviD video at 12FPS doesn't take up much space at all, so you can pretty easily fit the first two seasons of the Venture Brothers on there without threatening your favorite music. One oversight is that the player's default formatting isn't optimized for small files--seriously--so there are delays with load times and transfer rates. At first, I didn't get more than 5mb/s with my file transfers. Many iAUDIO users go ahead and copy all the data off the player, format it with 16k allocations, and copy all the data back onto the player. This improves, well, everything...even the UI's speed.
Page 1: Introduction, First Impressions
Page 2: Navigation, Playback and Software Page 3: Extra Features, Conclusion 
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1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
amyt
on November 23, 2008 - 6:31 am I just purchased the iaudio7 and cannot seem to get the downloaded audiobook in WMA to play. Any suggestions? Amy Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
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