My Music Player is Back!
I got my iAudio back today from being sent back for repair. So, here we are
nearly a month after I bought it and I'm actually getting to use the
thing! I've been listening while studying for my MCSE Upgrade for work. (Yeah,
I know. Don't say it.) This time I used the cable that came with it and
filled nearly all of its 20GB up with tunes. I haven't fully read the manual
but the controls are pretty easy and fairly intuitive. And even with the
default ear buds it sound great. There is one very odd thing about the ear buds
though. The right side lead is maybe about 10 inches longer than the right. A
rather odd way to differentiate between left and right and it makes the wire a
little short for wearing the player on the right hip unless you swap the
ear buds.
Just as before the M5 was recognized as a USB Mass Storage device by Linux and
was easily mounted. I went a little further and created a udev rule to give
it a constant symlink of /dev/iaudio and modified my fstab to let me running as
a regular user mount it without having to su to root. Just for kicks I
rebooted into Windows and it also showed up as a new drive letter.
This thing,
as far as I can tell, is 100% platform independent on the hardware side.
Obviously being a USB Mass Storage device is a big plus, but you can even flash
the firmware without any special programs. I just grabbed the latest firmware
off of iAudio's site, unzipped it, and dropped the .bin file in the players
firmware directory. Once that's done I turned it off, plugged
in the charger, and turned it back on. Instead of the normal boot up screen I
got an "Upgrading Firmware..." message and a progress bar. In about 1 minute
it was done. Of course, the software that the player comes with runs only in
Windows based on the documentation it really doesn't do much of anything that
can't be done with other programs in Linux. The only feature of the software
that seems unique is it's ability to grab lyrics and associate them with the
song such that the lyrics scroll on the players screen in sync with the song.
That's cool but not something I'd really get into except for a small handful
of bands that I'm a fanatical fan of. Though I could see it as a nice thing if
you could find a transcript to a speech or lecture you wanted to listen to and
read at the same time. But how often does that need arise really?
Related to the player I also put on the zCover I bought. It's a molded silicon
case with a hard plastic clear scratch guard for the display and a belt clip.
All the holes for the various bits are molted exactly, and I mean exactly,
where they need to be. There is even a hole for the built in mic for voice
recording and a flap to cover the subpack/cradle port on the bottom. I don't
think you could cradle the device with the cover on but I'm not sure since I
don't have a cradle to try it in. The only two minor annoyances with the cover
are the hole for the sliding power switch is a little deep making it a little
harder to get at and the silicon seems to attract dust and hair a little. The
switch even so isn't terrible to get at and I think will became easy and second
nature after enough use. And the dust thing is kind of to be expected a
little since the cover is made of silicone. It could also be the fact that I
got the original black cover instead of the newer grayish one which would
probably hide the dust much better.
I love the fact that it works in Linux and it even plays my OGG files
too! No need to re-encode everything. Just for the record it supports MP3,
WMA, OGG, ASF, WAV, and FLAC formats. The USB interface is 2.0 so transfers
were fast. The battery is Lithium-Ion so it should last a good long time and
have minimal memory effect. In addition to Windows and Linux support it claims
to also support OS X. Both Linux and OS X are listed as data transfer only
support. And the box claims up to 14 hours of continuous play on a full
charge. I don't' know about that but I'm sure I'll find out over the next
couple of days.
Time will tell if any annoyances creep up on me as I use this but so far I think
it's an awesome player!