After a chat with a colleague I decided to dig a little deeper into the Cowon IAudio U-3's apparent aversion to Overdrive and Netlibrary. There's a relevant discussion in the Cowon America Forums, (don'tcha love the interweb?) For the full scoop, check out Prospect112's info. (I'm excerpting, so please read the source post / forum thread before you make any changes on your player.)

The major factors...were switching the U3 from UMS to MTP mode in Settings>General>USB connection (requires you to restart the player for change to take effect) and only using windows media player to add the files.

Now, when I plug the U3 into my PC it is recognized as a windows portable media device and not as a flash drive.

Next, I open the downloaded NetLibrary file in Windows Media Player (I'm assuming you've already gone thru setting up the license to play it), and it appears in the "Now Playing List."

I right click on the title in the "now Playing list" and select "Add to sync list" from the pull down menu. Click on the "sync" to open that window of the player.

Select the title(s) you want to sync from the left side window. Your player should appear in the right side window. Hit the "start sync" button in the upper left side of the window. That's it.

I haven't gotten a straight answer about safely ejecting the U3 from the PC when it is MTP mode. There is no dedicated icon for "safe to remove" in this mode, and I'm not sure if it is necessary to disable it from the device control panel or if you can just pull it out after closing down WMP.

Anyway, now, when the U3 is in MTP mode and its file browser is set to "music", I can find the audiobooks under the artist/author name or album name "unknown" and they play great. They are not visible if I switch back to UMS mode.
I'm happy to report that this works! I listened to an Overdrive Audiobook on the way home from work last night. I had to update Windows Media Player (again) and update the security settings. I made sure to sync the files to the MP-3 player from within Windows Media Player also. Worked out great, and my previously downloaded podcasts still play in the new setting.

I'm a downloadin' fool!

1 comments:

  1. Jaye Holly said...

    Thanks so much for figuring this out! This will be very helpful to folks.
    Jaye :)  


 

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