Samsung P3 or Cowon S9

just tried out flac on my p3. the title infoormation didn't change, it still showed the information for the previous track and after 10 seconds the music stopped and i had to reset the player. I am on the newest firmware, 2.22. It seems flac is not working too well on the samsung.

But, to answer your question: i only listen to compressed file on the go, mainly mp3s, some ogg, some aac. they are all pretty good.

all players with Flash-based UI are always not as responsive as the non flash based players (ipod touch,zune hd, etc) . Flash-based UI including Iriver K1, Samsung M1, Cowon S9.

For sound quality, overall i still prefer X1000 over P3 and S9 (only a little bit), but i dont know about other people 

The S9 is my choice, unless you want to throw the J3 in there.  The J3 is just a little better in most aspects than my S9 is. The X series Sonys are fine and sound great, but limited codec support compared to the Cowons leaves my X1051 on the shelf.

4D  

The S9 doesn't support AAC does it?  Having spent years encoding with AAC, I am kind of forced into looking for players that support it.  Which fortunately most do.  I really don't want to start the very long tedious process of ripping all my itunes tracks onto a cd and then re ripping them back through windows to get them into MP3 format. 

The S9 won't even show AAC files in the browser.  The J3 shows AAC and M4A  and plays them both. Cover art doesn't show up though. I found this out by testing rather than looking at specs.

4D

Cowon J3: 29 mW/channel.

P3: 20 mW/channel.

I'd take any Cowon over any Samsung any day and that is saying a lot. It isn't because of sound though, it is because of Samsung's stronghold dictatorship in South Korea. 

5mW left + 5mW right.

The Sony spec means that all other manufacturers spec should be taken with a grain of salt. My Sony's are as loud and powerful as any of my other players despite sporting the 'weak' spec of 5mw per channel. I'd take Cowon's claims with more salt than Sony.