As I blogged about a while ago, I decided to practice what I preach and purchase a digital audio player (DAP) that supports open standards such as OGG and FLAC. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and now have some actual opinions on the matter. I just plug it into my laptop via the supplied usb cable and it mounts it as it would any other usb device.
Firmware Update
Since I had read the current firmware for the iAudio 7 was 1.15 and it shipped with 1.14 the first thing I did was upgrade. This was a very easy process. First, I downloaded the firmware here. There is only one file in the archive, I7_FW.BIN, which you just need to copy to the players root directory (for me it was /media/I AUDIO7). Restart the iAudio and you get a message that it is upgrading the firmware.
Syncronization
First off, after completing the long and tedious process of importing all of my CD’s using a combination of Sound Juicer, Amarok and EasyTag, I could not believe that Amarok lacks a simple ‘sync’ utility to synchronize your collection with your DAP. It does let you dig down into your playlists to find your entire collection and “synchronize” that with your DAP. First, it doesn’t erase files that were previously on your DAP, hence, it’s not a true “sync.” Secondly, I kept getting random errors that it was not able to transfer “such and such” a file. After retrying, the errors mysteriously went away. This did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Before restorting to using rsync or synchroback to do this, I kept looking for something that would play nice. What I found was Banshee. Banshee was able to copy my tracks to the player with ease. One edit was necessary to get Banshee to recognize my DAP as an audio device. I added a file called .is_audio_player to the top level of the mounted device with these contents:
audio_folders=music/
After that, no problems. Banshee synced quickly and I had my music collection on my DAP. However, since this was yet another piece of software I needed, I ended up using rsync in the end for simplicities sake.
Using the iAudio 7
Using the Cowon as a standalone music player takes some getting used to. As many have stated before, the interface needs work. I would call it awful. It’s about the least intuitive device I have used in a while. I’m not sure this matters to me a whole lot because I typically just set it to shuffle and go. Even this was kind of goofy though as you must navigate to your settings, check the ‘shuffle’ box and then play your music. What the device lacks is a main menu with options. Navigating to ‘Music’ sends you directly to a file browser which lets you walk through the contents of your music directory. No options to browse by artist or album, no shuffle, it just lays things out the way you have them on your filesystem. For me, not so bad since I carefully laid things out in an ‘artist/album/track – title’ format. One good feature is that you can choose to browse by .id3 tags which has worked nice for me so far. If you haven’t put id3 tags on your files though, it’s filename only.
One good spot is the sound quality, the default settings sound louder and clearer than an iPod and it gives you an interface to adjust your levels. Nicely done.
Album art
I can’t get this to work. Others have reported seeing album art by placing the cover image in the album home directory as ‘cover.jpg’. I went though a lot of hassle to find a program to pull album art of the Amarok database, convert it to .jpg and put it in the right place. After I had a nice script that does this for me, I still can’t see the art. Bummer.
You *can* sync to your iAudio 7 with Amarok by using the Devices section.
- Go to Settings > Configure Amarok > Media Devices.
- Click on “Add Device”
- Select Generic Audio Player for the plugin
- Type in a name for your device (ie. iAudio 7)
- Enter the mount point (‘/media/I AUDIO7′). You may need the quotes or double-quotes in your mount point if you have a space. – Click OK.
- Click on the configure button (gears) for the plugin to configure it.
- All you need to do here is add the formats that the iAudio 7 supports (MP3, OGG, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV) and…
- Add “/MUSIC” at the beginning of the song location string to point it to the MUSIC directory on your player. For Podcasts, I believe you would point it to the VOICE folder.
- Click OK.
- Click Apply, OK.
- Back in the main Amarok window, click on Connect at the top left.
- You’ll see your player’s directory structure.
- Drag any songs from your playlist to the MUSIC folder.
- You’ll see a Transfer Queue section appear below the directory listing of your device.
- Once you’re done selecting the songs you want to sync to your player, click on the Transfer button.
Works like a charm for me on Ubuntu 7.10!
I hope this helps you. 
Kevin,
Thanks for the response. I’ll definitely be trying that out as soon as I remember to bring my iaudio home from work. I remember doing it in a similar way, but I just wanted a ‘sync’ button instead of dragging and dropping. I’ll revisit it soon as I’ve just reinstalled my laptop.
THANK YOOOOOOUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!
that lil tutorial has made me sooooooooo happy!!
i’ve been using pclinux os , and have been sweating for a way to sync muh ia7 up, i followed your directions and TADA!!!!! it worked!
thanks a lot
Liam
Glad to hear it Liam, it was a little tricky so I was hoping this would save somebody the time I spent. Good luck!
I’d be interested in your rsync script if you’re using one.
I just cp -a the music I want onto my iaudio 7.
Are you also seeing extreme slowness when you tell the iaudio to browse using id3 tags? I used it for a while, but once I got a little more than a trivial amount of music copied over, it just went waaay too slow for me, so I wrote a script to normalize my filenames to something sensible.
Cover art seems to be tricky. For some albums “it just works”, for others I can’t get it to display at all. I don’t find this too much of a problem — as an embedded geek who has hacked on too many battery powered devices, I prefer to leave the display off as much as possible.
Hey Philip,
I had a script that handled copying the cover art to my dap, but it never worked so now I’m just using:
rsync –size-only -r –progress /home/bdunn/music /media/I AUDIO7
Using size-only instead of checksums speeds it up. I haven’t noticed any significant slowdown though I typically just mount it and use Amarok to manage it. Though I’ve read that adding a cover.gif file to the album directory should work I’ve only seen it work when the covers are embedded in the mp3 itself. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good method to embed the album art.
I’m with you on the battery life, not worth the trouble of having the display on. Good luck to you.
You need a program to add album art. I’m using mp3tag 5 and it works just fine
u can also use the “cover fetcher”-script of Amarok to add the cover-pics as a mp3-tag (but only if you havent so much ogg as me). So u can see it too in the Cowon iAudio 7 (but if a cover in the player looks better is the other point, if you ask me i say no^^).
Attention: The cover-fetcher script only works with local saved cover-pics, but not with the covers fetched from amazon. I think thats because this covers are saved in another folder and not in the music collection
Hi, I bought an iaudio7 but it does not show the id3 tags for ogg files. I updated to firmware 1.18 but it did not solve the problem..
Anybody had the same problem?
Thanks