mp3 player advice: Cowon J3

[Anti]

I'm looking for an mp3 player that:

1) has excellent, loud sound
The ones I've had so far are just run-of-the-mill Chinese branded ones in the 60 - 80€ range. My current one is an 80€ DTI electronics model, so anything sounding better than that is acceptable, although for the price range of the Cowon I'd expect a lot better.

2) has good 'repeat' functions
I'm learning a language and intend to have lots of long language files on the player, and so would like one with:
· easy bookmarking for long tracks
· easy a->b repeat within a file
· easy rewind (when I mishear a sentence, I'd like to rewind for 3-20 seconds and play it again, and perhaps set the a->b repeat)
· good playlisting that works with exported MediaMonkey static playlists (I don't need the player's on-the-fly playlisting to be great)
· easy to set 'repeat track' (and set it separately from the a->b repeat)
· easy to repeat a folder or playlist

3) has good battery life
At the moment I need to recharge my 80€ DTI player after two hours of listening, and discharges overnight on standby.
I want my new player to give me a minimum of 12 hours listening, and takes days/weeks to discharge on standby.

Does anyone with a Cowon J3 think that it fits the above criteria? It costs 200€, which is the same price as an ipod touch 4Gen(!) I'm trying to work out which one would be more suitable (or is there perhaps something else, like a Samsung YP-M1 or a Sony X Series?). My brother said I'd be mad to buy something for 200€ that didn't have a cam and internet, and suggested I got a mobile phone contract and rent a smartphone (Eg. Xperia x10) instead. My phone is ten years old, and I only use it to make emergency calls - I'm really not sure about all that stuff.

I should also mention that I am very against Apple at the moment. I haven't actually used or seen an ipod touch in action, but I have tried to help friends tame iTunes in the past, and grew to hate Apple because of that - so disgusted with iTunes and DRM, in fact, that I have ignored all Apple products since then - MacBooks, iPads, ipods and iphones: I've never even bothered to look at any of it. That's why I need other opinions; in case I'm letting my prejudice get in the way of buying the best player for my needs.

I've also looked at:
Philips GoGear range - reviews all seem a bit 'meh... nothing special'.
Sony Walkman - The A series looks great, but the volume is extremely low (EU regulation). Also, the X series appears to be USA only(?)
Creative - seem robust, but seem lack the features I need and the screen size.

Thanks in advance for any advice, especially from Cowon J3 and iTouch owners, and anyone who can suggest other alternatives.

[rovingcowboy]

as you know its so personel of an reply to question that its bound to get lots of different replys.

but my sister uses her phillips player now all the time it drains the battery fast as most will but it is a loud one if you have
the song files recorded with the volume in the file and or if you use the EQ presets on the player.
but it has to have headphones / ear buds, to hear it, theres no speaker on it.

she's been using that for about 3 years now since the old zenmicro was not working for her anymore.

[Anti]

After another day's research, I'm still not totally sure the J3 is worth the money (it's 3x more than my usual budget for mp3 players), especially as the build quality is supposedly not great and I've read about a high fault rate for these machines. However, it does appear to have most of the features I want for music and language learning, and there isn't really a matching alternative. If I don't buy the J3, I may as well just get a cheaper, crappy non-branded player as usual, but that's not really a path I'm willing to go down again.

So I guess I'm stuck with the J3 for now. I'm ordering one tomorrow.

Cheers.

[normgr00]

I have a Cowon J3 32G. Sound is great but my problem is with transferring playlists. This problem happens using MediaMonkey or any other music program. First you need to set the J3 System configs USB mode to MTP. Without this the files transfer but not the playlists. The other thing is that as of firmware version 2.25 the playlists are limited to 400 songs, fairly small considering you can have up to 8000 music files. These problems are identical even if you use the Cowon supplied music program JetAudio. They need to solve this with new firmware version but as from their tech support responses they seem to be compleately ignorant of these shortcomings.