Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Living with the Cowon C2; How to Get Along with It

I recently purchased a Cowon C2 to replace an old and decrepit 2nd generation iPod mini. I used to not really listen to music on the go, because ear buds are probably the worst invention in the world for listening to music while out and about. However, music has always been important to me so in a quest to get really good sound quality, I bought AudioTechnica's ATH-M50s. The sound was absolutely astounding so I knew I needed a new portable player with better sound quality than the iPod and, well, better than 1-2 hours of battery life due to the status of it being oooold.

So cue the purchase of the Cowon C2, despite some negative reviews about its UI. To be honest, I thought and still think that the UI is adorable, although purple being my favourite colour may very well affect that thought. The screen is another issue people have with it, because it is like a DS touch screen rather than an iPod one, but I just wanted it to sound really good and do not mind the touch screen at all. I have no issues using it, and yes, some buttons are small, but they are not cluttered together and thus can be easily pressed without much fuss.

However, one of the bigger complaints is in regard to the connection bay door. I had some issues with this at first myself, but it is important to note that the bay door is not meant to be opened down towards the bottom of the player, but rather up towards the top (sort of like DeLorean door, keke).

Image is by "John Doe" on Amazon.com.

With the door open this way, it is both easy to get the USB cable in all the way, and the groove on the connector will be flush with the bay door once fully inserted. Hopefully this helps to solve everyone's woes related to the connection issue.



Adding Music

With the hardware part aside, I I am going to cover putting Music on the player now. The following rules should work with any Cowon player for those with other models. These are simply quality checks and steps you should take to ensure a good media database on the player, complete with album art and all.

Firstly you want to make sure your music is tagged properly. As in Artist name, Album name, Title and Track number for each track (aka song). As for covers, you want a fairly high resolution jpeg image of the cover art named "cover.jpg" to be located in the folder alongside the .ogg, .flac, .mp3 and etc files.


Some programs seem to shove a ton of album art named various things alongside the music files; you can safely delete those other images and just leave cover.jpg in if you want to keep things clean. The above is an example of a good and clean folder of music ready for transfer to a Cowon C2 or other Cowon player.




File Clean Up

Since I use Linux (currently Arch Linux for anyone keeping tabs), I will also give some tips for cleaning up useless files automagically which may be left behind by Gnome 3 or Windows.

Keep in mind that if you have not reformatted your Cowon C2 in Linux in order to get a lower case name of "Cowon C2" rather than "COWON C2," then you will want to enter in "/media/COWON C2" instead of "/media/Cowon C2" in the following commands. Users of other Cowon players entirely should adjust accordingly to what their device is called.

To start, the quite common and annoying desktop.ini and Thumbs.db files.

find "/media/Cowon C2" -name desktop.ini -exec rm -v {} \;
find "/media/Cowon C2" -name Thumbs.db -exec rm -v {} \;

Along with all the nice things in Gnome 3 came the decision to dump .mediaartlocal folders throughout the Music library for a reason probably related to annoying everyone, or because OS X and Windows already dump self-specific files everywhere they want, so why not? However, you can easily remove them from your Cowon player via the following command.

find "/media/Cowon C2" -name .mediaartlocal -exec rm -vr {} \;

After this, these pesky files should be cleaned automatically.

Now, let's say you have some albums from iTunes or some other place in Apple Lossless format and want to convert them to either FLAC, OGG or MP3. You could use a GUI tool, which some prefer, or use ffmpeg via the command line which I personally prefer. This will work for non-Apple-lossless m4a files as well, for the record.

First of all, open a terminal and go to the directory where your music is located. If you do not know how to do this, learn basic commands or bail out to a graphical sound conversion program.

  • ALAC or AAC to FLAC: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.m4a}.flac"; done
  • ALAC or AAC to OGG: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libvorbis -aq 9 "${f%.m4a}.ogg"; done
  • ALAC or AAC to MP3 (I personally recommend using one of the previous options): for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec lame -ab 320 "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done


Wrapping Up

I think that about covers things. Unlike iPods, a Cowon player expects certain things of you and things will not be done automatically. This gives you something that Apple does not like to give you; control. You can complain about that control, or learn to use it and find pleasure in it. That, of course, is up to you. I personally enjoy the control and lack of reliance on a program like Rhythmbox, Banshee or *gasp* iTunes to put music on to my player. The FLAC and OGG support is also very nice.

I hope all you Cowon C2 and other Cowon player owners find this useful. Until the next random thing I blog about~ ;o