[Shanling]

I understand it's out of your hands personally, but there's no excuse for this limitation. I am spelling out exactly how easy this is to fix, and giving you arguments to take back to the dev team and superiors to get this nonsense issue resolved once and for all.

Your software devs are ruining your brand for absolutely no reason, since other devices running the weaker Ingenic X1000E chips don't have this limitation and your software dev team created the limitation in the first place.

There is no inherent 20,000 track limit - that was a software design choice and it is a choice easily modified. I assume that someone thought they could upsell more expensive Android DAP's without that limitation by just not supporting more than 20,000 tracks in the library for these MIPS architecture chips, but instead, this nonsense makes me distrust the Shanling brand and I do not want to ever buy more Shanling products, especially not at a higher price, because I don't trust that Shanling has the power or desire to make good changes for its customers. At best you have a rouge software dev team, who refuses to do simple and easy code work and regression testing and at worst Shanling has decided to tier their players in a foolsih way to encourage upselling which is definitely NOT WORKING.

All that should need to change is ONE number in the firmware.

About the file limit, this is something that goes back to the days of our very first players in 2015, which were running software by HiBy. These models had it set at 15 000 files. When we moved to MTouch, our software team was testing 25 000 file limit at first, but then chose 20 000 file limit, claiming the limit needs to be there due to memory limitations of the hardware. That applies to our system. If RockBox or the old Fiio's system behaves differently, good for them.

If I remember correctly, HiBy fixed their file limit just last year in October.

We hope that our software team will also manage to fix this issue one day and will gladly release it as a firmware update.



These limits predate any of our Android players, so any of these speculations about deliberate limiting are vastly misleading.

We never tried to force product separation based on the software. From our cheapest player to the most premium ones, we always offered the same software platform, with the same features. It was the sound section (and other hardware/constructions) that made the difference. M0 Pro and M5 Ultra stand alongside each other on the software side.

 

[hanskey]

Mate, I am software engineer for over 20 years, and let me tell you why it may be not easy to fix compared to other products

This device firmware is running in the space constraint by hardware architecture, and if database format and handling is dependent on this architecture - it can't be changed as a number in the code. Whole database structure and it's usage may be principally dependant on architecture limitations coming from the chipset and it's software instrumentation kits.

Yeah, I understand that software is constrained by hardware. I write embedded device code too, my dude, but I really doubt it is that hard to fix. Yeah, probably fair to say not quite as easy as I represented, but certainly not unresolvable by any stretch of the imagination.

Hiby, Rockbox and Fiio were able to overcome the same limitation (Fiio did it within weeks) on the predecessor chip, the Ingenic X1000E, that is also used by prior models of Shanlings running MIPS chips.

The is the new, better, faster, larger, Ingenic X2000E on the M1S - so I'm not buying that this is a difficult issue in any real sense.

More to the point, I won't be buying more Shanling products unless this issue is resolved and I would not have bought this one if I knew about the 20,000 track limit in the library at the time of purchase, because that limit does not fit my requirements, period.

 

[hanskey]

About the file limit, this is something that goes back to the days of our very first players in 2015, which were running software by HiBy. These models had it set at 15 000 files. When we moved to MTouch, our software team was testing 25 000 file limit at first, but then chose 20 000 file limit, claiming the limit needs to be there due to memory limitations of the hardware. That applies to our system. If RockBox or the old Fiio's system behaves differently, good for them.

If I remember correctly, HiBy fixed their file limit just last year in October.

We hope that our software team will also manage to fix this issue one day and will gladly release it as a firmware update.



These limits predate any of our Android players, so any of these speculations about deliberate limiting are vastly misleading.

We never tried to force product separation based on the software. From our cheapest player to the most premium ones, we always offered the same software platform, with the same features. It was the sound section (and other hardware/constructions) that made the difference. M0 Pro and M5 Ultra stand alongside each other on the software side.

Well I'm glad to hear it is not an intentional sales tactic, obviously. Thank you for this helpful insight into the software development history.

Unfortunately, none of that resolves the issue. I had and have no expectation that this issue will be addressed in a timely manner, if at all, and I already am not buying more from Shanling until these software issues are resolved. I hope that changes and we can do business again because I really prefer dedicated DAP's to phones and your device is otherwise excellent.

Have a good one & I wish you well.

 

[losber]

As I know that limit is related to sqlite3 library performance on Ingenic X1000E in HiBy OS. In latest HiBy OS (Tempotec V3 fw v1.0) that limit is 50000. The previous way to fix that limit was manual patching the binary (another one) and obviously limited by max value of 16 bit unsigned integer 65535 or 0xFFFF. Last known mod by snoopy112 set that limit to 65000 (0xFDE8) https://www.head-fi.org/threads/the...oved-sound-and-bluetooth.872288/post-15300999
There was no technical statement about lack performance same realization of sqlite3 library on X2000E yet.

 

[hanskey]

As I know that limit is related to sqlite3 library performance on Ingenic X1000E in HiBy OS. In latest HiBy OS (Tempotec V3 fw v1.0) that limit is 50000. The previous way to fix that limit was manual patching the binary (another one) and obviously limited by max value of 16 bit unsigned integer 65535 or 0xFFFF. Last known mod by snoopy112 set that limit to 65000 (0xFDE8) https://www.head-fi.org/threads/the...oved-sound-and-bluetooth.872288/post-15300999
There was no technical statement about lack performance same realization of sqlite3 library on X2000E yet.

So basically what I said - change one number, issue gone. Just unacceptable.

This also confirms my other, unvoiced, hypothesis that the track limitation in library comes from someone that is not the end user deciding what acceptable performance looks like and not from a true limitation.

Most certainly the Fiio M3K has a noticeable performance dip on X1000E when you throw 50,000+ tracks at it, and yet I found that to be an acceptable tradeoff to be able to load and play all my music, and easily swap between shuffle-all tracks and playing individual albums sequentially, all without draining my phone battery.

Anyway, I'm done with this topic. It's within Shanling's power to fix this and they don't have any valid excuse.

In the meantime, these devices are a hard pass for me and I regret spending the money on it. At a minimum, any artificial track # limitations of the software should be listed in the product information available where these are sold, not just in this forum, so users are not stuck with a device that can never be what they thought they were buying. As of yet, after 6 years of this limitation, it is not spelled out in any of Shanling's product documentation provided to sellers and reviewers, leaving the public to find out the hard way. That's not a good way to build brand loyalty, period.

For those of you tempted to advise me to just get a headphone DAC/AMP for my phone to make it all better - save it for a newb. I've owned several, and now own 0. All I got was much worse battery life of phone, extra device to charge, meh SQ "improvement," and extra cables and bulk in the pocket. I absolutely will "settle" for "less good" SQ from phone's headphone-out than put up with that nonsense again, and since I only use highly sensitive headphones, the amp section is irrelevant in the first place.

Edit: I've been in this forum or lurking for nearly a decade seeking price-performance sweet spot equipment so I can afford to collect an ass-ton of actual music. TotL isn't interesting to me, because that inhibits the whole reason for good sound equipment - listening to more and more good music. I collect several hundred new albums a year, so hyper-expensive and usually fragile gear is a non-starter.

Peace out