Firmware Update: Cowon iAudio M3 1.30 beta 2

New firmware for the iAudio M3 mp3 player can be found on the Cowon Systems forum. It is version 1.30 beta 2 and the 400KB file is from here to download. The most important innovation is support for FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and is a form of compression, specially developed for audio files. The big advantage is that this happens without loss of quality, as is the case, for example, with MP3 compression. FLAC has nine levels of compression (level zero through eight), however, this firmware only supports levels zero, one, and two. The full changelog looks like this:

New Feature

• Support for FLAC Codec (Officially supported compression Levels are 0, 1 and 2)

Improved Features

• Reduced “Wait” time
• Support for display of Unicode ID3 Tags

Fixed Bugs

• Fixed bug where the device would freeze when certain M3U playlists were loaded
• Fixed bug with DPL boundary[break]