About to purchase S9, have a few questions

[jtm33]

Hi, over the past week I have been searching for a new media player to purchase. My previous player was a Creative Zen Vision:M 60GB and I have been very happy with it for the past 3 years. After doing research for the past few days I have settled upon the Cowon S9 as my next player. I just want a few simple questions answered by some S9 owners and would appreciate any help.

1. If it is charging via USB what is the approximate time to fully charge from a low battery?

2. Is it safe to assume that any videos that played on my ZVM would play on the S9?

3. Does album art have to be saved onto the tag for it to be recognised by the player? Or can the album art simply be in the folder? With my ZVM album art is simply syncronised with WMP but I've read that it may not work with the S9.

4. How far does Cowon typically support a player after release? By this I mean mainly firmware updates.

5. I am a bit unfamiliar with some audio codecs, mainly lossless ones, so what is a good program for encoding lossless audio? I've heard media monkey a bit on this forum as a good program.

6. A lot of my music is in 320kbps CBR MP3 or WMA. Would it be worth converting my music to VBR? Any suggestions here?

That's all I can think of now. I plan to make my order in the next few days anyways. Thanks!

[amit]

Originally Posted by jtm33

1. If it is charging via USB what is the approximate time to fully charge from a low battery?

Not sure about this, I usually keep it plugged in for about 2-3 hours & the battery is back to full when I remove it.

Originally Posted by jtm33

2. Is it safe to assume that any videos that played on my ZVM would play on the S9?

S9 supports XviD & DivX (3/4/5 - not 6) & WMV 7/8/9 codecs only in AVI or WMV containers. So if your videos are in any of these formats then they'll play otherwise not.

Originally Posted by jtm33

3. Does album art have to be saved onto the tag for it to be recognised by the player? Or can the album art simply be in the folder? With my ZVM album art is simply syncronised with WMP but I've read that it may not work with the S9.

Album art in folder didn't work for me when I first got my S9, so since then I just tag the tracks with it & its been ok so far. If you use Media Monkey or other software to sync with S9 then I heard they can transfer album art properly.

Originally Posted by jtm33

4. How far does Cowon typically support a player after release? By this I mean mainly firmware updates.

Their support in this regard is quite good. S9 came out around Dec. 2008 & all through 2009 Cowon has issued regular firmware updates fixing bugs & in some adding some features etc. Check out the firmware sub-forum here in S9 forum, you'll see threads on new firmware releases every 2-3 months.

Originally Posted by jtm33

5. I am a bit unfamiliar with some audio codecs, mainly lossless ones, so what is a good program for encoding lossless audio? I've heard media monkey a bit on this forum as a good program.

FLAC is the codec to go if you want lossless. I personally use Winamp to rip my CDs to FLAC. Check here for more info.

Originally Posted by jtm33

6. A lot of my music is in 320kbps CBR MP3 or WMA. Would it be worth converting my music to VBR? Any suggestions here?

There's no point in converting CBR music to VBR, the highs & lows are already screwed in CBR. If you have the CDs of those tracks, you can rip from those to VBR, otherwise just keep them as they are.

[jtm33]

Thanks for the help!