Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black)

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I recieved this as a gift for our anniversary and was thrilled to get it since I had been looking into getting some sort of music player recently. My husband owns a Cowon MP3 and enjoys the sound quality and I agree. The sound quality is fabulous but the controls are confusing for me, a non "techie" person. I had to download the manual so I could understand all the symbols since one does not come with it. Other than that, I am very happy with the Cowon J3. It lets you pick your equalizer settings for the best sound. I would buy this product again even with the confusion controls.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

One great sounding mp3 player- has good base and clear audio. Battery life is great- have charged it once since received two weeks ago and it is used every day. Very easy to transfer music to.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

This player is easy to use and doesn't require proprietary software. Battery life is fantastic. Audio quality is superb and way better than iPod's I have owned in the past. Invest in some high end earbuds or headphones and you'll really enjoy the audio quality this player puts out.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I use the product mostly when walking or at the gym. It is incredibly light. The device does not have all the fluff that the iPlayer has, and for that, I'm grateful. To put a firmware revision on the player, just drag 3 files onto the root directory from your PC. Turn off, turn on, and you are done. Manage your library? Do it all on the PC, and then copy to the player, which looks just like an attached drive. Battery life? Yup, it is good. I can't tell you how good, because I've got 72 hours on this charge (that is 72 hours of use over 3.5 weeks), and I have not had to re-charge yet. (No, I'm not kidding). The display is unbelievable. The sound has no hiss, no gaps. I could not believe that the music which had gaps on that other iPlayer sounded SO good. Put on a great set of headphones.

Negatives? The interface is not as intuitive as it might be.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I upgraded to a J3 from the Cowon S9 which I'd owned for 2 1/2 years - the J3 is an improvement in many ways, which is great. It is much faster (no lag between screens), the touch screen seems more responsive, the UI is much better, and of course there is the additional card slot to give you more storage space.

Pros:
* File-tree navigation available (good for people with complex, well-organized music collections - I won't buy a player without it)
* Great sound quality
* Great file format support (I have a lot of OGG & FLAC)
* Gorgeous AMOLED screen - I don't even really care but it's hard not to notice
* Highly customizable user interface and sound
* Lots of other stuff I don't use much but will be useful for someone - radio, games, voice recorder, calculator etc.

Cons:
* I find the buttons poorly placed, I often hit the volume by accident while holding the player or using the power button
* The USB cable that comes with it is hard to fit - it works perfectly with my S9's cable, but the J3's cable is difficult to use
* When I first got it, the battery meter was totally useless and showed the battery empty after just 7 hours - I upgraded the firmware and now it works fine. But it should work out of the box.
* Doesn't really have playlist support. I don't really use playlists, but for people that do, this is a big problem.

Mostly it does everything I want it to, and does it well, there are just a few quirks which may or may not annoy you. It's not perfect, but for me it is easily the best option on the market right now.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

The J3 is stunning!

Is has awesome sound, a great display and plays a lot of different formats.

And the battery life is impressive.

The Cowon J3 is second to none.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I use this to listen to music.
This product is sleek in design and sounds great.
The instructions to load music and sync music from your computer to this unit is very poor! I've have this product for 2 weeks and have not been able to sync a playlist to the player and/or create a playlist!

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I searched online for about a month before I finally pulled the trigger and bought the Cowon J3. I wanted a player with the ability to play lossless files, a player that has great battery life, has very good sound quality and has a great reputation. This player was all of those.
There are a ton of "pros" for the J3 and a few "cons". One of the cons being the user interface. It isn't as user friendly as an Apple product, but there are several custom UI's that you can create and/or download (which can be fun). I think I will be a Cowon buyer for a long time. I love this thing!

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

Not an audiophile, but more knowledgeable than a casual listener. Like clear, uncolored audio with good separation and soundstage. Did a lot of research before I purchased this player. Not a lot of options in the mainstream market (well known, reliable brand names) and I didn't trust the reliability of the audiophile options. My iPhone has sub-par sound and doesn't support lossless. While far from perfect, the J3 had most of the features I needed. The sound quality and BBE audio enhancement software make this player worth the investment. Paired up with my Grado SR80i and Ultrasone HFI 580s, this little player not only drives them, but provides the best sound I've heard on a DAP. Both headphones sound awesome with the J3, despite having very different sound signatures. Grados are pretty forward and bright and Ultrasones are darker. The J3 really brings out the bass in the Grados via BBE for electronic music. Both are easy to drive, and the Cowon amp is more than enough to keep you from turning it up to 10.

Great battery life, tiny size. Cowon falls down on a number of fronts, including user interface and lack of OTF playlist features. Not an intuitive front end OS at all, but if you read the manual, you'll get it after a while. If the GUI and ergonomic placement of the buttons was done well I might have given this thing a 5 star review despite having no line out. It's that good, and the OS is that annoying. So I wouldn't recommend this to the average consumer, but rather to the more technically oriented tinkerer who understands computers, software, etc. I've been using MediaMonkey to export Playlists, but things can get a bit funky--maybe my bad, so I'll tinker with it more to see if there's something I overlooked.

I haven't tried using video on it as my iPhone is adequate for that. I also don't care about the IMOLED (or whatever it's called) screen -- all I care about is clean audio. The screen does seem to be hard to see outside, and I would like it to be dimmer than the #1 setting at night so I don't disturb my wife while she's sleeping.

The device has frozen up on me a number of times, so I have to carry a paper clip around with me. I think it was choking on my 24-bit FLACs, although it also crashed a couple times while choosing play options while listening to a track.

Button placement is poorly thought out.

Not a fan of proprietary USB cable and video cables (not included).

Bottom line, great device, needs work, but still worth it. 3.5 stars would be more appropriate.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I bought this because I started a longer commute. My previous MP3 player was (well, it still is in use) a Cowon iAudio7. The reasoning behind the purchase of both players were that they were solid state drives, had great sound quality, had FM tuners, and didn't require software to load the players (i use Windows and you can just drag n drop). They also support a wide range of auido file formats.

Some differences between the units is that the J3 appears to use tags when organizing the material, which I actually don't like (the iAudio7 just went by whatever the folder / file name was). The j3 gives you a hold option to lock down the whole thing or just the touchscreen, which is handy because you can then still conrol the volume and skip tracks without going out of hold.
The file navigation takes a bit to get used to as it uses symbols that were not immediately clear to me. It only took about 20 minutes of fiddling to work through everything and how to navigate through the folders to choose songs / artists / etc.

firmware upgrades are on Cowon's site.

Overall, I am pleased with the player and would purchase Cowon audio products in the future. One feature I would like to see would be the ability to view .pdf (it has a .txt viewer) but I realize that's a bit of a pipe dream.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

everything is vary good

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

The sound quailty is excellent. Very clear for both studio and live recordings.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

Great sound quality! If that's what is the most important to you, don't go any further. Also: great AMOLED screen - bright, sharp, fantastic! Now the criticism:

The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. On the hardware side: the "volume control" buttons are below the "skip track" buttons which makes them harder to reach when you hold the player in your hand. It is likely you will be often skipping tracks each time you want to adjust the volume.

On the software side, things are worse: many functions are grouped in a highly unnatural way. The little manual is useless (it doesn't cover the UI at all). There are many important functions you'd never know existed unless you stumble upon the discussion on them in some online forum.

Folks at Cowon appear to not have done the very basic UI analysis which involves studying sequences of user actions. This means things like: given that I jumped from playing an individual track to seeing the list of tracks, there is a 30% chance I will want to return back to playing the track, a 40% chance that I will want to see all albums by the same artist, 10% chance that I will want to get to the list of all artists.. etc. I am making the numbers up, but the point is: if one type of action naturally leads to the next, the buttons controlling these actions should be somewhere near, in some cases it could even be the same button.

With this Cowon player, you will find yourself having to memorize how to press buttons of various sizes at different parts of the screen, all to perform the most basic player tasks.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

All of this review is on a J3 with firmware version 2.23.

My main use case for an audio player is to listen to netcasts/podcasts on my commute to and from work. I plug in the audio player into an FM modulator so I can play the netcasts over my car stereo. Therefore these were the requirements I had in selecting an audio player:

1. Must play ogg vorbis, flac and mp3 files.
2. Must work under Linux
3. Must not require any software to load podcasts or music onto the player.
4. Must have tactile buttons for on, off, play, pause, skip, fast forward, rewind, volume up, and volume down.
5. Must be able to perform any of the functions mentioned above, with one hand operation without having to look at a screen.
6. Must have a LOUD output volume since I am basically using it as a preamp to FM modulator (and to my car stereo). The louder it is, the less noise you hear when the modulator sends the signal to the car stereo.
7. Must have a long battery life. The longer the better. My previous player had 60 hours of playback on a single charge.
8. Have excellent audio quality.
9. Must have a life expectancy of more than one month. (Just search the web for reviews about some audio players and you will understand what I mean).

My previous audio player was a Cowon iAudio7 which was a great audio player with phenomenal sound and 60 hour battery life. After several years of constant use (multiple hours every day, 7 days a week), I finally started having issues with it.

I looked at many players in the market but even if I dropped my requirement for long battery life, I couldn't match the other equirements above. Some had expansion slots, but they would only read MP3 from those slots (hardly an expansion slot). Others had very low volume or had quality control issues and would not last more than a month.

Cowon caters to the audiophile market, so their sound is incredible. I listened to players my friends had and they could not compete with Cowon.

After looking at other companies, I came back to Cowon. I looked at the S9 and the J3 as being the form factor I was looking for. I decided to go with the J3 for the expansion slot since I was going to have this player replace both my iAudio7 and my old iPod that I bought used and put the Rockbox firmware on it (which by the way increased the battery life of my iPod, allowed me to play all the formats I wanted, and improved the sound quality and volume of the unit). I think the S9 may have better buttons as far as shape and size since the J3 has small
buttons that are close together.

I decided to go with the 32 GB version of this player since the cost of adding a memory card to get up to that capacity was almost as expensive as buying the unit already without 32 GB built in. Also, what I read in general about audio players is that external memory is slower to read than internal memory. That is why I bought the 32 GB version. I can expand it later if I need to.

As a side note, you want an audio player for jogging or moving around a bit, you want a flash based player instead of a hard drive player (so you don't have the drive heads crashing into the platters and damaging sectors). I looked at both types in my search and still wound up with the J3.

Note that since this unit can be operated with one hand without having to look at the screen (thanks to the tactile buttons), you can get a case for it that has a screen cover to protect the screen from damage and still use the unit with the screen covered. Noreve makes a nice case for the J3. Get the heavy duty metal clip in addition to the case. It is more substantial than the one that comes with the Noreve J3 case. Watch out for the exchange rate since this company is in France.

The J3 comes with a protective film covering the unit. If you are careful when you unpack the J3, you can cut that film so it just covers the screen and therefore have a clear screen protector for no added charge. So wait on buying any clear screen protector until you have tried out what comes with the J3 already.

I use the J3 exclusively with Linux. I ran into some issues of using Thunar and Konqueror to transfer files to the J3. The files would look like they copied, but when I tried to play the files on the J3, the files were empty (zero byte files). I found that the Dolphin file manager worked the best so far. I create a folder on the J3 then copy x number of files at a time to make sure that they transfer properly. This could be a Linux issue and not a J3 issue.

Since I copy files to the J3 as if it were a hard drive, the browser view of the J3 does not populate properly. I think that part of the issue with the browser views may have to do with all the attempts I made to copy and recopy files that didn't transfer correctly may have messed up the
browser's fields. In folder view, you don't need the browser anyway.

This was the second Cowon that I have owned, so I new that the interface was going to be different than other audio players. This one was different than my iAudio7, but easy to use. You have to figure out some things for yourself (such as how to delete files from within J3). So I would make sure you keep extra copies of what you put on the J3 until you learn how to transfer and remove files from this unit (otherwise you may wind up re-downloading files over again).

There are many undocumented features such as separate volume levels for when you plug in headphones vs. using the external speaker.

I didn't need the fancy screen or video player that comes with this unit, but the video demos are fantastic.

The sound quality is fantastic. There are lots preset of eq choices (35 or so of them) if you want to play with EQ. If you want you can create your own EQ by choosing what frequencies you want to control and then choose what levels you want to use for those frequencies (there are four user defined eq banks).

The battery life is rated for 64 hours on a single charge (I believe). I have gone many weeks without charging this unit. I run the unit at full volume through my FM transmitter in my car. I play the unit at normal volumes when I listen to music at work. I don't use the video on this unit, so I can't speak to the battery life playing movies on the unit (though the manual rates 11 hours max for video playing).

The radio works fine. Has bluetooth support.
I haven't used many of the built-in apps or games on the unit.

The auto resume playback function does not work.

If you want the player to have maximum volume potential do NOT choose Europe for your country location when you first fire up the player. If you choose Europe, your player will have the volume capped. If you choose this setting, there is a way to undo it, but I think you have to do a factory reset (which means you lose all the data on the unit in the process). Search the web for how to fix this problem.

Make sure you update the firmware when you get the unit to get the latest features/bug fixes.

Download the manual from the Cowon site to get a general idea of what the J3 can do.

You can see some helpful reviews on YouTube.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

After about a month of use the J3 is working very well. I use it primarily as an mp3 player for podcasts in the car. Buttons are well placed.

Only two things about it I wish were different:

Unlike my old iAudio 9, the resume play feature doesn't play as soon as you turn on the player. You have to hit the play/pause button.

Also, after several minutes in use without making any adjustments, the screen goes black (to save power), but when you press a button, instead of bringing you to the screen of the file you're playing, it brings you to the main menu. Then you have to dig your way through the browser to get to the screen of the file you're playing.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I love this product because it is simply a fantastic sounding and fantastic featured player. It also has a fantastic battery life. It claims something like over 60 hours, which isn't true, but it does get something like 50. I haven't clocked it, but I can go over a week on heavy listening without a recharge. It could certainly get you through a long weekend of travelling.

I consider myself pretty picky about sound quality, but this player doesn't disappoint. Naturally, it has very good sound, but it also has the ability for many different user equalizer presets and sound enhancements. This is good for me, because it allows me to find a good frequency response for my favourite set of headphones to really make my music sound the best. No set of headphones will be perfect by default (they usually have a boost in the high frequencies somewhere around 7kHz), so having an equalizer is fantastic. It is governed by hardware, so there is no extra battery drain from using it. There are also some sound "enhancements" that claim to restore the frequency spectrum other things to lossy mp3s. I'm not completely sold on them, but I do use a few of their algorithms which are nice.

There is no wi-fi, but I personally don't care about that in an MP3 player. I'll either have a computer or my phone for that depending on where I am. It has a few apps (the standards), but can also play just about any flash game or application out there. Obviously, some won't be suited to it's control system or screen, but there are many options. The user interface is all done in flash also, and there are a few user created interfaces floating around on the internet. Some of these are very nice, and can certainly challenge (and surpass) the Cowon created ones in aesthetics and functionality.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with this device. It isn't perfect, but then again, what is?

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

This is a great Dedicated mp3 player!
the jet-effect equalizers are actually useful, they sound really good with lossy music. i have had the player for a little more then a week now and it hasn't crashed once, or glitched out, its extremely stable compared to some of Cowons past players.i have charged it once, been using it for 7 days, every day, the most, 7 hours, the least 2, and im at 60% battery life... Thats Good.....

BUT....

if your buying this you probably already know what your getting, but just in case you don't, this is not anything like an ipod or iphone. this is a media only device, theres no WiFi or 3g connection, apps are few and far between.but that is because they are not needed.this is a dedicated PMP and it does its job very well.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

Its a great player, a little small for my hand and takes some practice to get to know how to use it correctly, but very nice. Lots of hidden commands to find. Not a great manual.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

Good product but, its not any better than the S9. I like the buttons on the S9 better.
There is a place to put a Micro SD card, but the new Cowon X7 (160GB) makes this player obsolete.
So dont bother, buy the X7 instead.

Comments about Cowon J3 MP3 Player (Black):

I chose the Cowon J3 over the competition for its sound quality, long battery life and its upgradeable storage.

Support for FLAC and a wide variety of music files and its ability to read album art from tags was also a great thing to have.

The UI is responsive and looks nice, but it takes some time to get used to. Not all of the options are labelled or straightforward. No shuffle button for example, you have to go into your root directory and select a song at random with random turned on. Some symbols used in the options I have never seen before, and are not described in the manual.
With some playing around you come to learn about what each one does and how to use it properly.

Screen is bright and beautiful, Video playback is very responsive.

Physical buttons are also a very nice thing to have!

My main con with the device would have to be with the proprietary cable, its one of a kind and doesn't really match the player. You also have to remove a flimsy tab on the J3 to plug it in. I don't feel like it will break if you care for it properly but it is pretty flimsy.

My other major con is the freezing! Augh! Whenever I make a change to the player, be it adding new videos or music it seems to ALWAYS freeze the first time I turn it on and select a folder in the browser. After a manual reset it works fine thereafter. A little annoying for sure.

I also had a small problem with the album art displaying properly, the player automatically reads tags and folders for the album art and uses them to generate mini versions of the album art. These are used to display art in the Matrix browser. I had 1-2 albums that conflicted with this process and it caused all of the artwork to not get generated and therefore display. I had to go through my whole playlist, syncing a few albums at a time until I arrived at the conflicting ones. Now I'm not going to say this one is a problem with the player itself, it could just as easily be my fault for incorrectly tagging something, but perhaps a warning message pinpointing the problem would have been nice.

Overall its still a great player, I would definitely buy another.