Review: iAudio M5 (day 1)

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however.

The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it). I got Jackie the iAudio M5 for her birthday hoping it would be better than the neuros. She’s had it for a week and now it’s my turn to figure out all the features she hasn’t yet. I figured, “while I’m at it, I’ll do a little review.” Here’s one iAudio M5 review I’ve found for it which includes pretty pictures.

Disclaimer: This is my first real mp3 player (other than the neuros), so I am not spoiled by the features of other players.

First thing I notice was how small it was- it is also very sleek. It’s a nice neutral silver color with a polished control joystick. At first I had doubts about the joystick- I was afraid it was easily breakable. That is not the case. it’s very study, and as an added bonus I can adjust the volume while its in my shirt pocket without removing it. It’s just sensitive enough to make operating it in this fashion easy, but not easy enough to accident switch songs if it gets bumped.

it has a USB 2.0 socket on the side under a protective cover. The cover is connected in an odd way that makes it “dangley”, and I have doubts as to how long it will last. That’s just a minor complaint though- I honestly think it’ll last longer than the rubber booties on my digital camera did.

As for oddities, there’s a button on the top of it labelled “charge”. I don’t know what it does, and it doesn’t appear to have much to do with charging. I’m guessing it’s tied into the windows software that came with it. I’d read the Manual but it appears to have gone missing.

The actual onboard software is a bit confusing at first- it took me a minute or two to get the hang of it. Jackie had a hard time trying to figure out how to get it to shuffle, but I found the setting in “settings->playmode->shuffle” in about 30 seconds.

One nice feature I found was fade-in. I set it to 3 seconds, and I’m guessing that it’ll take the last 3 sconds of the current song and fade into the next, which is much nicer than the half-second gap that was there beforehand. I’ve had it set like this for the last 30 minutes, but I haven’t actually heard it do it- the transition is too smooth for me to notice despite the range of music I’m listening to.

As I write this, I’m listening to “Hittin’ the Note by the Allman Brothers. I’m using my own set of headphones, and the sound quality is pretty good. This is one of the CDs I’m currently favoring

It also has a voice-record feature for taking verbal notes- it’s a good idea and nice feature, but the mic placement is a little crappy- if you hold it like you’d expect to hold an oldschool micro-tape voice recorder( with your thumb on the record button), the mic hole sits between your thumb tip and the fleshy part at the base of the thumb.
I haven’t tested the quality yet, I just know that it exists.

Probably the best feature of the entire system is the fact that it’s a USB storage device, meaning I can directly copy files/playlists voice records, etc back and forth in linux as if it were an external harddrive. This also makes it easy for me to script up playlists in bash and write it to a file.

Overall I’m impressed with the unit, and have no problem recommending it, especially if you’re a linux user or have a collection in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis.