Over the last couple of years I have not been getting on too well with my second generation iPod Touch but it has been a bit of a love hate relationship… I love it when works well with my mac’s at home but find it a real pain on Windows, it works but it feels like I’m forcing it to work… even the sound feel damp and uninspiring..
Anyway, I thought it time was to try something different out, so I had a look around and decided to pick up the Cowon J3.
So what do I think about it, well I had an interesting first day experience… I managed to brick… yes… completely brick it… even for me this was a first!
I used to have an old creative labs mp3 player and this used Microsoft’s MTP protocol and so did the new shinney J3… so I downloaded and built libmtp and started to play around with the protocol to see if I could automatically create some playlist… well that was my intention… a couple of hours later the cowon froze up on me and pressed the reset switch and the reset button… and the rest has gone down in brick laying history..
Using the guide at iaudiophile.net I manager to get the right tools and the firmware to try and repair it myself.
Using the tools above, I managed to install a new firmware but it still crashed with “checking albums” on startup.. so I decided to place the firmware on the micro sd card and I found it booted off this…. wow I thought its not completely bricked… Then I was able to mount the drive… re-format it as fat and then I re-installed the firmware… this time it worked!
Anyway, as you can imagine after this first day experience I really was not too impressed with myself, libmtp or the cowon.
Nows, its a couple of weeks later… I now have started to like my lovely cowon… at first I thought the user interface was childish but it has grown on me.. it simpy works when I need it to work.. however the nicest surprise is that I now love my music again but I have left libmtp alone!