::Knopper.TK::

Unfortunately my iPod mini started to produce a very bad sound quality with a lot of noise and it got worse every day. It turned out that the headphone connector of the iPod somehow managed to get a bit loose and thus causing a lot of trouble.

So I looked around a bit, see if I could get something better. Not necessarily an iPod again. Finally I came up with the Cowon iAudio M5 after thinking about an X5 of the same brand for some time. The only difference is that the X5 has a color display and the M5 does not. I quickly came to realize that I really don't wanna play movies or view pictures on my mp3 player and the 50 Euros saved by choosing the M5 are earned pretty easily... So the M5 it is. Here's a link with some more info about the player.

As with everything, the new player has some advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are very good sound quality, it really sounds a lot better than the iPod used to and it's fully supported by Linux. Even upgrading the firmware is as easy as copying the new firmware file into a folder of the player, restart the player and you're done. Whereas with the iPod I had to go to a Windows computer and download the updater (executable).

The main disadvantage is the menu, in particular how the songs are ordered and categorized. The iPod had a database where the iAudio simply has a "file browser" in which the files are sorted in alphabetical order, not in the order in which they appear on the album. So you have to create playlists, which I really don't like, but what can you do... Anyway, the sound really makes up for it.