[Tempy-17]

I'm having trouble with my Cowon J3. I had an old micro sd card that was 10 g full out of a total of 16. Then recently I put an extra 4 g of new mp3s.... but now it's not showing up in the songs list. It is the same song list as before 10g.... so I formatted it and put some new mp3s. They showed up, but then when I went to add the whole thing together, it shows only 579 tracks instead of 1102 which is what Jetaudio says it has got... what can I do? I'd rather keep this player. It's a gem for mp3 music....makes it more electronic and atmospheric.

 

[Mython]

First of all, I suspect the microSD card may be corrupt.
 
 
A corrupt card can report a different number of tracks to what is actually physically saved on the card, if there are corrupt sectors on the card.
 
For example, this is common with damaged cards, or fake-capacity Chinese cards.
 
 
I've never experienced the J3 being to blame for mis-reporting track numbers, although I suppose it could happen if the internal memory becomes corrupted.
 
 
In your case, I'd point the finger of suspicion at the microSD card, first of all.

 

[Mython]

Also check that the files themselves are:
 

1. Not corrupted, on your hard drive (do they actually play successfully and smoothly, all the way through?)
2. Definitely .mp3 and not accidentally in a codec the J3 doesn't read (opus, ape?, etc.  I've even found my J3 won't play some .m4a files if they're not encoded with the parameters common in .aac files)

 
 
But I still think the most likely culprit is a corrupt memory card.

 

[Tempy-17]

I figured out the solution. The problem is not with the SD card. For some reason the J3 remembers the SD card from before and loads the same number of tracks even if you've added new ones to the card. So what you need to do is, renew the J3 by a factory reset which is done by Formatting it (the J3 itself, not the card) to Fat32. Next make sure you have filled the sd card with MP3s fully before it is read by the J3 for the first time.