Cowon iAudio X5 Player under Suse and Ubuntu Linux & Using Grip to Rip Some Ogg

Summary: The Cowon iAudio X5 mp3 (ogg) player is "officially" supported under linux kernels 2.2+ as a USB mass storage device. That means it is like plugging in a USB pen drive or similar. Don't expect to be able to use their special software "JetAudio", which is only for Windows OS. I describe the basic usage of this device under linux below.

Grip is your friend: I suggest using the ripping program called grip. The last release was in 2002, but I haven't found any times when it didn't do what I wanted it to in 2005. The only tricks are figuring out the tab menu (at times it's hard to remember where you are) and then the options are cryptic. There is a good help system that took the guesswork out of the options. Here are the main ones you might need:

t = track number (01, 02,...)
n = track name (song name)
A = artist name for the disc
d = name of the disc
G = ID3 genre name
x = encoded file extension (ogg, mp3)

There are many options under the "Config" tab, but if you just want to make some files for your mp3 player, you can safely ignore some of them. Under Config..Encode..Options, you can choose "Delete the .wav file after encoding" to get rid of the HUGE .wav file. You can also safely uncheck "Create .m3u files" if you just want the mp3/ogg files. This is also the section to change the bit rate for encoding. 128 is kind of standard, but if you want to replace your CD collection with 100% computer files, you could consider going as high as 256kbps.

The only other thing I had to change was the final file format. The default is to put a folder called "mp3" inside your home directory and then another directory of the artist and then the album inside of it. It is purely a matter of choice, but I wanted a "flatter" collection of albums to click through and I wanted the track numbers (not included by default), so that I could use the iAudio X5 option of "Play a folder" to play a album in sequence. The bottom line is I modified the Config..Encode..Encoder page option called "Encode File Format" to read "~/ogg/%A - %d/%t - %n.%x". This would give a file of the form /home/myhome/ogg/Miles Davis - Kind of Blue/01 - So What.ogg. Cool beans...er, um "bop" as it were.

Cowon iAudio X5 with Suse linux 9.3: This is truly a no-brainer. Get the USB cable connected to your player and then plug it into the computer. The player is automagically mounted under "/media". You can use Konqueror (or other file browser) to create and manage the folders on the iAudio player. Copy and paste some files and/or directories and start listening. The player seems to start off at the last song played. Tap the toggle switch to get back and browse to the folder/playlist you want.

Cowon iAudio X5 with Ubuntu linux 5.10: This is a brain bender. You can choose in the preferences to have devices automatically mounted, but I don't know what else you have to do to make it work nicely. I tried this with both "magicdev" and "gnome volume manager" packages without success. The player says "connected", but the device doesn't show up. What I had to do was:

# sudo mkdir /media/mp3
# sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/mp3 (From some mailing list. Who knew?!)
# sudo nautilus (If you don't want to have to type it all out.)

Cowon iAudio X5 with Ubuntu linux 6.04: Good news. I'm evaluating the new Ubuntu linux due out in April (06.04, a.k.a. Dapper Drake) and when I plug in the Cowon iAudio using this release, the player is automatically mounted and a file manager window opens showing you what's in it. Ah, another no-brainer... thanks.

Got play lists if you want them: More good news. I was looking through the manual on playlists and it describes making them with the JetAudio software. I saw that the ending file format was ".m3u". So then I'm making a playlist from my fileserver using the program Amarok and find out it saves playlists with the same extension. [*Incandescant bulb lights up over author's head*].

So, plug in the iAudio and start up Amarok (there are likely others that work, but I haven't tried them). Pick "Playlist...Add media" (or similar language) and add songs and/or folders FROM THE iAUDIO DEVICE. Then save the playlist to the "Playlist" folder ON THE iAUDIO DEVICE. I wasn't sure it would handle the relative versus absolute path names of the files, but it does work and you can make playlists yourself without JetAudio.

Good luck,
Kim