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Linux and the Cowan iAudio X5e

justification

I was looking for a digital music player long before I could afford one. I had all but settled on an iRiver model, as they advertised ogg support on the unit. But when I finally had the money and went to buy one, the old model I was looking at was discontinued, and all the new models were photo-this and video-that. Who gives a crap? I just want to listen to music! Then the dealbreaker, they no longer supported ogg format. Or maybe they did and just didn't advertise it. Either way, no IRiver for me.

So: more searching. I looked high and low, but nothing was suitable, or if it was suitable, there was no ogg support. I have 80+ GBs of oggs, and I am not about to go reencoding them to an inferior format. Finally, I came across the Cowan iAudio X5 series of HDD audio players. Looks very good, has ogg support (also mp3, flac, wma, and wav), and the kicker, the website proudly exclaims: "Use Mac or Linux? No problem!! iAUDIO X5 is available to be used on Mac or Linux OS". Not that I was worried, but it is nice they acknowledge that operating systems other than Windows exist. So I dropped $350 in undervalued Canadian currency and a week later the X5 lit up my doorstep.

first impressions

Well, this unit is real nice. It comes with an AC adapter, a USB cable, and a little adapter that plugs into the bottom of the unit to hookup said AC and USB cables, as well as a line in and line out jacks.. I am sure it will be a real bitch if I loose this thing, and I am still not sure why it was designed this way at all. Just to keep the unit clean I guess, but as I say, if I loose this thing (and it is tiny) the unit is all but useless. Also included are a set of earbud style headphones that actually sound pretty damn good, although they are kind of big for my sensitive ears. Of course you can buy other headphones to suit your style.

After reading the instructions, which due to very poor Korean translations are useful for nothing but a good laugh, I charged the unit and fired it up. There was a sample song and video on the unit, and these were even funnier than the instructions. Anyway, I played with the unit and navigated the many menus and options, and I must say the unit is pretty slick. The small 160x128px LCD is actually quite sharp and expressive. There are actually three different versions, the X5 20GB, X5E 30GB (mine), and the X5L 60GB. As far as I can tell the only differnce is disk size. Here is a brief listing of features, most of which I will never use:

• Video playback
• Import pictures from your digital camera
• Text and Image view modes
• Set your own wallpaper
• Built in microphone for voice recording
• Direct line-in recording
• FM tuner
• Dynamic playlists
• M3U playlists

talking to linux

So now it's time to add some songs. If you have your computer set up for USB mass storage you should be all good. Just plug the unit into an available USB port. It will power up (but not turn 'on') and display a flashing 'connected' message. My dmesg says this:

usb 3-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 4
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
  Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK3006GAL         Rev: BY10
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sda: 58605120 512-byte hdwr sectors (30006 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 58605120 512-byte hdwr sectors (30006 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

So I mounted the iAudio at /home/music/iaudio (-t vfat) and started copying files to it. If you are having difficulty getting the device recognized or mounted I suggest you read your distributions documentation on mounting USB mass-storage devices. Now, I don't keep my music organized in albums or anything, so I just created directories (with mkdir) 'a', 'b', 'c' etc, and create a directory for each artist alphabetically. So I have:

a/
    aSilverMountZion/
    aTribeCalledQuest/
    alecEmpire/
    ...
b/
    babesInToyland/
    badBrains/
    badlyDrawnBoy/
    ...
c/
...
 

and so on. You can of course organize however you want. And yes you can have spaces, that's just how my music is named on my computer. After copying files, simply unmount the device and turn it on. The directories and files are now available when navigating via the toggle and screen.

creating playlists

So, as I mentioned there are two different types of playlists. The first is what Cowan calls a 'dynamic' playlist. To create a dynamic playlist simply navigate through your songs and use the fob to select "Add to List". After you have collected the songs you want you can access them all collectively in the top-level D-PLAYLIST directory.

The iAudio also supports M3U playlists, though they are a little trickier. After a few failures, I have found the best way to create an M3U playlist is to use xmms. Presumably any app capable of creating playlists should work here. The unit has a directory named PLAYLIST for storing M3U playlists. Now, using xmms I start adding files (from the mounted unit) to create the playlist. When you are satisfied you simply save the list to your home directory or whatever (not to the unit just yet).

We still need to finesse the list a bit to fix the paths and to adjust it for the vfat filesystem. This is why we saved it to our home directory rather than the unit itself. Luckily, we can use a short Perl script that I found from lonelymachines.org :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $mount = '/home/music/iaudio';

while () {
s/$mount//g;
s/n/rn/g;
s////g if (! /#EXTINF/);
print $_;
}

Be sure to change the "my $mount" line to the actual directory where your unit is mounted. Assuming you name this Perl script "playlist.pl" you would use it thusly:

cat xmms-list.m3u | playlist.pl > /home/music/iaudio/PLAYLIST/iaudio-list.m3u

In this example I am catting the xmms playlist through the Perl filter, and writing it to the 'PLAYLIST' directory on my mounted unit. Change the filenames and paths to suit your setup. After this is done the 'iaudio-list.m3u' will be formatted with the correct vfat line endings and the paths will be relative to the top level of the iAudio unit. Now to play the list you simply select it as you would a regular song. It will create an on-the-fly 'directory' which contains all the songs on your list.

video playback

I have not tried this because I have no interest in watching movies on this thing, but for those that want to here are a few notes. The unit comes with some software for creating playlists and formatting video files to play on the unit. This is, of course, windows only. You may be able to get it to run using wine, or maybe you have a windows box, or dual boot or something.

I have also learned that a Java app called iriverter can format the video in the proper way for the iAudio. If you want video on your iAudio and you are Linux-only this may be your best bet.

updating firmware

Upgrading the firmware could not be simpler. I was forced to do this, as after a few weeks of use the unit froze up on me. I downloaded newer firmware from Cowan's website in .zip format. After unzipping you simply copy the .bin file to the units FIRMWARE directory, unmount and power the unit on.

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