Getting back to the gmini 400

I recently bought one and I couldn't be happier. It takes a tiny bit of fiddling to get it to do exactly what I want but that was less effort than I thought it would be.

Archos has just come out with the gmini 402, same player but with a usb host port instead of the CF slot and some firmware changes (including playsforsure support).

Since I have a CF camera I'm happy with the 400.

I bought 2 X5-30GBs, one for daughter and one for me. Couldn't be happier. It only lacks a bigger hard drive (would have preferred 60GB of course) and ID3 browsing. But it is terrific in every other way.

Cowon announced a few weeks back that they will be manufacturing the 60 GB also and it should be out in future. iaudiophile.net is a very good place to read about Cowon products.

i am in the market for a digital music player, and have been looking at the X5L 30GB. A couple posts in this thread raised questions for me - please excuse my ignorance:

- what is ID3 browsing? i read on another site that you can't play tracks by album with this player? how does the browsing work then?

- what is "gapless" play? Does that mean if i have a live concert with multiple tracks, it will put spaces between the songs? no seamless Scarlet->Fire transition?

thanks!

- ID3 browsing is basically browsing the music on the DAP by the song title, etc. I'm not sure what exactly the other site poster was referring to when they say you 'can't play tracks by album on the iAudio X5. I do that all the time. My music is stored artist/album/track and I can browse and play by either method. I do have to move through the hierarchy to play an individual song. Most of the time I navigate to the album I want and just tell my X5 to play the album and away it goes.

- gapless play is moving from one song to the next without a pause or 'gap'. So, yes there'd be a short gap between tracks in your example.

iAudio seems to be very responsive to their customers and I fully expect them to release a firmware upgrade to support ID3 and 'fix' some of the other minor things. I love my X5 and wouldn't trade it for any of the other players on the market.

I've had several players without ID3 tag support, and they all sucked.

My RIO took around a minute to load the entire track list, my old iriver took up to 3 minutes before I could browse the list.

On my ipod I can browse my collection without any delay or effort, better than any player I've ever had.

I have no delay in browsing my collection on my X5. If my DAP is on I just move the little joystick to navigate up down and it's instantaneous. I load everything Artist\Album\Track but I could just as easily do some other way.

There is no lag when browsing with iaudio/cowon. Basically it is instantaneous, u can even adjust the speed of the display information as it moves from navigation screen to navigation screen. ID3 tags are a little over reated. I thought it would be a problem @ first but it isn't since the majority of my music isn't even tagged( I got tons of music and mixes from IRC and bulletin boards pre-Napster, now I get a ton of it from bit torrent and the Russian sites). I prefer the file tree system over the ID3 because it allows me to organize my music the way I want to in the folders I want. I toyed with the ipod and it is a nice little system but I prefer to use joystick and button navigation with my DAP in my pocket rather than pulling out the DAP and using the click wheel.

But still; after playing with jog wheels (rio), joysticks (iriver) and any other form of button; the iPod scrollwheel is simply the best and fastest solution there is.

I am not going to debate about the fastest way because based on the way I file my songs I doubt if the ipod can get me my music any faster but I do know after using an Ipod and using a iaudio/cowon player; I find the cowon joystick navigation to be a better mechanism for me than the clickwheel. Try a cowon player and tell me what u think.