Replacement for Cowon S9?

[chocky909]

So my S9 just went kaput and I was thinking of maybe just getting a J3 but seeing as they're a few years old now I thought I'd see if there are any other good replacements.

I like the size and weight of the S9 and the ability to drag and drop and view by folder or tag. I like the sound quality as I have high end headphones. I'd like more storage than the 32gb I had. I used to value the S9's ability to play video but now I have a Galaxy SII I can play my video on its bigger screen so my next player could be simply a music player.

I was even thinking of a Sansa Clip+ 4gb with a 64gb microSD card which would be around £100 all in.

So any suggestions?

[CrowdAds]

[Syndrome]

J3 is nearly the same as the S9, but with the micro SD expansion, and there isn't really any stand alone DAP's that are better than it. There are some that compete with it and their feature sets are focused differently. But nothing really beats it.

If you want music only then the Clip is a good DAP, although the battery life is a bit short IMO.

[chocky909]

I think I might try the Clip+ and if I don't like it I can get a J3 later. Does the Sansa have gapless playback and take 64gb cards? Also what about the Fuze?

I wish an mp3 maker would make a player with multiple card slots so you could add 4x 64gb cards and they would be appear as one storage space. You could even use different capacity cards. It's ridiculous the biggest player still only has 64gb or 32gb and one SD slot.

[skip252]

There's the Fuze and the Fuze+. Which one do you mean?

The original Fuze is pretty decent, the touchpad UI on the Fuze+ is really poor IMO. If you're accustomed to the S9 the Fuze+ will be frustrating to use.

Both have what sandisk calls gapless playback but isn't really. True gapless playback, like the Rockbox implementation, uses the information in the files to begin playback of one file exactly where the other ends and playback is seamless.

The sandisk implementation of gapless playback "guesses" where one file ends and the next begins. The guess is ordinarily good enough that unless you are used to true gapless you won't notice the little click you get sometimes on track changes. I'm used to Rockbox true gapless playback but when I do use the sandisk firmware I usually don't notice any objectionable gaps like I do with my Sony players. YMMV.

I've read several accounts of 64 GB sdxc cards working with sandisk players once they were formatted FAT32. I don't think I'd want to wait during the database refresh for a card that large in the sandisk firmware but it should work.

[chocky909]

Thanks. So you think a 64gb card might be quite slow? Also, if I Rockbox a Clip+ will the SQ be much worse than my S9 or a J3? I'd definately need to have true gapless being an album guy. Are the SD cards for the J3 formatted in FAT32 too and can you format them differently if they smaller like a 32gb?

[Syndrome]

A Rockboxed Sansa Clip will have great sound quality, I liked my old rockboxed fuze over my S9 for sound quality(hated the shorter battery life).

[skip252]

If you're thinking about Rockbox the database refresh time becomes moot. If you use the database in Rockbox it refreshes in the background but you can use the files from the File browser immediately. The largest card I have is 32 GB and it's accessible as soon as I unplug. I can browse the card about as fast as I can move my fingers immediately. Playback starts immediately and moving between files, folders, playlists and songs is very quick.

You don't have to use the database at all if you don't care to with Rockbox. If you never initiate the database, it never refreshes. The sandisk firmware refreshes on all data changes and the player is unusable until that finishes. I've read accounts of that taking more than 20 minutes.

There's also a chance you would run into the sandisk firmware database file limit using a large card. That's about 8000 files. There's no practical file limit using Rockbox. If you want to increase the number of files read you can do that by increasing the file limit setting.

SDXC cards come formatted exFAT. Formatting them to FAT32 can be done with 3rd party software. I've sen GuiFormat and Swissknife mentioned for that. I haven't used either one so I'm not sure how well they work or what's involved. I have seen accounts by people that seem tech challenged that say it's dead easy so I doubt it's very hard to get the card set properly.

[chocky909]

Cheers dude.