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If you want a good disk-based player, buy a Cowon iAudio M5 (or its successor, the X5). It has a really good D/A converter that can handle CD-level S/N ratios, its standard earbuds are OK (better buds are always a good idea), and it gets up to 14 hours on a single charge. Cowon honestly warns that 14 hours is what they get in factory testing, but I found that in real life usage the M5 comes close to factory performance. With the battery in good shape, 12 hours is the normal expected life of a single charge.

And the good thing is, both the M5 and the X5 come in Longplay versions with double the battery capacity. All in all, not a bad deal for a player that plays just about every format.

Cowon homepage

True, my H320 recently got stolen and the Apple players while having a better design are really short on features. However when browsing the current offering I was surprised to see that not only the H300 series had been dropped, but that there weren't really any equivalent products. The lower end of features for me would be something with at least 20GiB capacity, acting as mass storage, with a USB *host* feture (to dump photos in), an FM radio, MP3 and if possible OGG support (I never used WMA and other such formats and don't plan to, I rip my own CDs).
So far I'm considering the Cowon (also branded as iAudio) A2. A bit more pricey than the H300 unfortunately but also acts as a movie player. :(

The Cowon iAudio X5(L) series may offer what you are looking for. It has a built in microphone with fairly decent sound quality, but it really shines in that it offers a line-in recording jack for connecting a microphone to it. You can also record directly to mp3 with bitrates of up to 320 kbps (I think there might be a record-to-wav option, too, though I'm not quite sure, never having used it myself). Plus, the device supports xvid movies and flac lossless audio (and, of course, mp3, as well as ogg and wav) on a color screen. Although the color screen is nice, it really doesn't compare with an iPod Video. As for transfering your recorded files to other devices, the X5(L) acts as a usb host for connecting to other usb devices and as a usb mass storage device when it is connected to your computer, so transfering files is as easy as drag-and-drop. If this sounds like the device for you, check it out at the iAudio website.

I bougth this http://eng.iaudio.com/product/product_U3_feature.p hp and I'm very pleased. The FM reception is not that great but all the rest is very good. Plays ogg, supports firmware upgrades, works fine in Linux. Very cool.

Don't forget about http://www.iaudio.com./

I have a U3 and love it. Smaller than a Nano and even plays movies even though the screen is a little small for long term movie viewing. And yes you OSS guys, it even plays .ogg

There's no information on that page, just some embedded binary garbage that requires a plugin. Perhaps you can explain it to those of us who have passed puberty and find animation in documents distracting?

If you hate plugins, you might want at least to learn browsing without them...

I'll be able to play whatever I buy in my iaudio x5 http://eng.iaudio.com/ in ogg / flag - cool

http://eng.iaudio.com/ has several players that support flac.

Whaaa? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the iAudio playing Machinae Supremacy vorbis files.

My favourite thing to do with an iPod: sell it on eBay and buy myself something worth the $300+ like an iAUDIO. Most of my music is in Vorbis and FLAC; thanks, Apple, for providing minimal audio format support on, well, everything you make.

I highly recommend any of the iAudio series of portable players -- they advertise Linux and Mac OSX support. The hard drive players even have FLAC support. I have an iAudio G3 and I love it and use it for recording from Line-In microphones.

Here is a link:
iAudio

Not to mention, Cowon officially supports Linux, which was the main reason I originally bought the M3, then the X5.
Check out the feature list: http://eng.iaudio.com/product/product_X5_feature.p hp

There's an ogg-capable flash player coming out from Cowon, the same people who made my HD-based X5L. It's called the U3.

http://mp3.iaudio.com/product/product_U3_feature.p hp

Sorry the page is mostly in non-english, but with 1GB and 2GB models, it looks great for things like working out, et al.

Neuros Audio is very community oriented and has been mentioned quite a bit on Slashdot recently, and are known as being very friendly to open source.

IAudio isn't quite as friendly to open source as Neuros, but having a player that had USB Host functionality and would play OGG, FM stereo, Video, and (if I feel the urge) WMA 10 based files from Rhapsody or Napster was too good to pass up.

Bottom line, if there is any music I hear and want to keep, I go to the used CD store, buy it, rip it, and move it to my player. No DRM, no loss of audio quality as part of a conversion, and, since both players report as mass storage devices, OS compatibility is not a problem.

There's iAudio x5 that beats the shit out of iPods all day...has an fm tuner, line in recording, video, supports MP3, OGG, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV, MPEG4, JPG, TXT, AVI and it's comperably priced. Oh, and you can use it with windows, Linux and a mac. http://eng.iaudio.com/

No, I don't work for them - but I love mine.

At least the Apple site doesn't objectify women

Also they misspelled "cow on", which is in any case illegal in 48 states.

Here (sorry no direct link) is the product website. It can play compressed MPEG4. What I have to do is rip a DVD to MPEG4. Then I use Cowan's software to properly compress and resize the movie (160 x 128) for the X5. The movies get down to about 100 MB in size, so many movies can fit on its 20 GB mini hard drive. On my Athlon 64 notebook, the entire process takes 4 HOURS :-(

The screen is small, so it's better to NOT have the widescreen version of a movie. It just makes the movie even smaller. However, the small screen is still good enough to watch a movie when you are desperate for something to do on a plane or something.

In the future I am sure there will be players with higher quality video playback and video out. That way you can plug in into your hotel room TV or something.

There are numerous other players on the market, which already have fm-radio/ogg/mp3/wma/aac(?) support, and support AA batteries (Which are far better than a non-changeable rechargeable one). And they have greater storage (e.g. 1gb+).

I fail to see how this is news or worth looking at.

"Others who bought this player, also looked at : http://www.iaudio.com/ , http://www.iriver.com/ etc."

iAudio seems to be cheaper, check their product line: http://eng.iaudio.com/

If you want a mp3 player that supports OGG you should check out the iAUDIO M3 and X5. They support FLAC too!

They also have a quite a few flash players that support OGG.

check out iAudio http://www.iaudio.com/ ... I'm pretty happy with the M3L, but you might wanna check out X5... they do exactly what u have asked for and in good style at that...

Several. iRiver make some. But the Cowon Iaudio x5 is the latest and greatest.

>You'd think these would be standard in this podcast era.

Yeah, I thought it were?

>Any suggestions?

I'm goint to come of as a rabind fanboy, but since you asked; the iAUDIO5 fulfill those requirements. "resume-where-you-left-off" is standard (but can be turned off), and you're limited to 20 bookmarks (ought to be enough for anyone, eh?)

Suggest you peruse the manual. (a note: I thought the navigation came across as somewhat chaotic when I read the manual before owning the player, but navigation actually works great). I haven't tried using bookmarks and don't really remember how you set them, so I don't know if it's a hassle.

No! Please don't!

I myself have a 40Gb iAudio M3, and although it's a nice unit, it seems to have been totally abandoned by Cowon. One of the reasons I chose this over the other options was the frequency of firmware updates which added new features... but this only lasted until about 5 minutes after their next product was released :(

For example, the 40Gb player is incapable of handling more than 99 playlists over the whole device, and text display is buggy for long tracknames. There is no ability to search by, or even in some cases display, track metadata (such as year, genre, etc.)

Even worse is the problem which the flash players have (although it's primarily an issue on the 2Gb players, because of their capacity) - due to what is apparently a deliberate design decision, they simply *will not display* (or play) more than about 400 files. So, unless all of your audio files are more than 5Mb in size, you're wasting capacity.

Details of these, and numerous other, problems are discussed on Cowon's user forums at Cowon's iAudio site.

Cowon, for their part, seem to have abandoned their own site: You used to get replies from Cowon staff regularly, and now they don't even answer emails...

Yes. I bought a iAUDIO 5 a couple of days ago. It's got FM (with scheduled recording), clock+alarm, runs on one AAA battery (I don't like the idea of hardware turning to junk once the battery dies), fast USB transfers, great navigation, nice screen, is small and light (28g), is available in memory sizes from 128MB to 2GB, features a five-channel user-definable equalizer, resumes play where you left off, can bookmark up to 20 positions in audio files (like audio-books), supports many character sets (including Swedish), and most importantly for me, has got great Ogg Vorbis support.

There are some downsides, it's not very solid, being just a piece of plastic, and the USB- and battery-ports are a little flimsy (especially the USB-flap), and it's pricey for the amount of memory you get.

However, overall I'm pleasantly surprised! I researched it in detail, making note of criticism such as weak FM-reception (which I can confirm -- not so good indoors, but works outdoors. Adequate), but there's lots of small features which surprised me -- especially how good the navigation is. Small stuff like the wheels protuding a little to make for easy access, to the little "knob" on top of each to not only provide grip for your thumb, but also mark the centre...

I've only used mine for a couple of days, but I think I can recommend it. I don't understand people who can compare one of these with an Apple Shuffle with no radio and no display and no Vorbis. Just because YOU don't value these features doesn't mean the rest of us are idiots because we do.

If anyone got a question about this player, just post away and I'll try to answer it.

Without trying to sound like an advert look at the Cowon iAudio M3/M3L for a good non-flash hdd player.

I own an M3L (20GB) it has excellent fm reception and also a 35 hour battery life.

It supports OGG Vorbis, MP3 (would be kind of pointless without that), WMA, WAV and FLAC. (I think it supports a few other formats too)

Linky.

Cowon iAudio M3 and M3L. They play OGG Vorbis, come in 20 and 40 GB versions, and the M3L has the best battery life you're likely to see anytime soon.

If OGG Vorbis is your preferred format, it's simply a matter of doing the research.

Cheers, Nick.

check out iAudio. they have multi format players including flac and ogg.

The iAudio M3 plays FLAC, as well as Vorbis, MP3 and WMA.

More info:

• iAudio's site
• iAudiophile.net (community)

Maybe it sounds unpleasant or difficult to you, but it wouldn't be the first player without a screen on the device.

The Cowon iAudio M3 has no screen on the main device, only on a remote.

I had intended to purchase one of these until I got an iPod as a gift. Personally, I don't need to see the screen, I just need the play controls. I know this seems heretical, but in case you've forgotten, Walkmans don't have screens either, and we got along just fine with them...

If you use your MP3 player to just play music while you jog, for example, you're not going to be reading a display, you'll be pressing play and getting on the road. In addition, they may be planning (if this isn't a BS hype story) to put the screen on a remote.

-Jay

I wondered that too, and went with the iAudio M3 instead. It's usable as a removable USB storage device (no drivers needed for Win/Lin/Mac), comes with MP3, WMA, Ogg and FLAC support. Oh, and 40GB in a slim pack that looks better than the iPod. Works like a charm for me.

L-ViS

Cowon has updated the firmware for their iAUDIO M3 player, and it now includes FLAC support, next to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

There are actually four (at least) HD based music players that support Ogg/Vorbis. You missed out the iAudio M3. Plays OGG, MP3, WMA, ASF and WAV. Unlike the Rio Karma it's a standard USB Mass Storage device so no difficulty using it with Linux/Mac OS X/(insert favourite OS here). Plus it looks really cool.

The JetAudio media player software has a shoddy interface but the best sounding MP3 decoder I have ever heard, hands down! You can select between 32-bit float and 64-bit float decoding, and it supports 24-bit and 32-bit output to your soundcard.

So I bought the iAudio CW300 which comes with 512 Mb flash memory, Sennheiser MX 400 Earphones, and a whole bunch of accessories. Supposedly one AA battery lasts 30 hours (I assume if you turn the backlit display off.) It also has a microphone for recording to MP3, FM tuner that you can encode from.

I admittedly haven't tried other MP3 players, but after using JetAudio, I couldn't see many players being able to coming close to the sound quality with a standard Fraunhofer decoder.