I alway rip my purchased CD’s to (Ogg) Vorbis, notably because the format outperforms all other lossy audio compression codecs. I has looking for a portable player supporting Vorbis and big enough to hold my entire collection of thousands of songs. I didn’t want the added cost of video playback (I’m not yet used to watching movies on a thumb-sized screen) and it needn’t to be a recently-released product. In the eventuality that the device maker would drop software support, the ability to install Rockbox* was a definite plus.
To select a device, I basically proceeded in reverse: I browsed the Rockbox page of version releases, looked up the devices specs and tried to locate one of those meeting my requirements. I eventually located a Cowon iAudio M5, which appeared to be one of the last items on Swiss store shelves.
Unveiled in August 2005, the M5 was simplified version of the codec-ubiquitous, color screen X5 released in May 2005. Measuring 61 x 104 x 19 to 15 mm, the M5 had been downgraded to a gray screen. The radio has been removed but the device can play MP3, (Ogg) Vorbis, WMA, ASF, FLAC and WAV; and it keeps the excellent sound output quality and the BBE-Jeteffect system of the X5.
I purchased my device in October 2007, and the battery capacity had been seriously reduced during the year spent in the store warehouse. The play button was not mounted properly, so after two weeks of warranty repair, I got my M5 player back with a new battery and could start playing with it.
The equaliser features presets such as Normal, Rock, Jazz, Classic, Pop, Voice or user personalized. The BBE-Jeteffect system also allow for 3D enhance and a surround effect. The 5 directions navigation button is sometimes cumbersome to use: if sometimes gets puched down when I meant to flip it or change track when I intended to change the volume.
The M5 features the X5 voice and line-in recorders, which can respectively be set to 32, 48, 64, 96 or 128 kbps; and 64, 96, 128, 192, 256 or 320 kbps. I have used both: the voice recorder uses the inbuilt microphone, which is good at accurately picking up sound within 1 meter while leaving out other ambient noises; and the line-in recorder requires a docking pad with the dedicated jack plug. Unfortunately, the start and end activation is not self-explanatory.
I have alway paid attention to tagging my audio files with as much information as possible, to the extend of looking up each release year on my Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gay compilation CD’s. Over time, I ended up hierarchically dividing the songs by:
(First letter of album artist) / Album artist / Album title / (track).Song_title.format
That way, it is easy to scroll down the libraby structure with the M5 file explorer. The device always takes half-a-dozen seconds when switched on. It usually resumes play unless the USB port has been used to connect or recharge it, in which case it updates its table of content. The player can be set to play songs in sequencial, random or playlist mode. Each or these options can either be applied to all folders, to a single song, to a directory or to subdirectories. I have notices that for some reason the random play algorithm tends to favor newly added folders or certain other folders, but still manages to go through the entire collection.
Overall, the iAudio M5 is perfect for what I needed: I switch it on when I get in the office, and with a charge time of less than 2 hours, the battery allows it to run from 8 to 9 hour of random play. The system has very few bugs: In 15 month I only had to manually reset it three to four times. The interface is dull but self-explanatory (except for the recorders) and easy to navigate through.
* As they say: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me“. I once purchased a Vorbis-enabled TEAC player which proved bug-ridden. Within a couple of year the company, which makes outstanding audio equipment by the way, competely dropped all software support for the portable player. Needless to say: I didn’t want to repeat the same experience.
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