Its not your place to pass judgement on another s choices.

Why so judgmental, presumptuous and rude?!

I assume its this one? http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kid3/kid3-3.1-Darwin.dmg?download

Thank you. I haven't yet loaded that tool. Hopefully today.

And how does one check the embedded artwork??

Thank you Canaudio, I am aware that HDtracks purchases come with PDF files in the folders, and having previously encountered problems allowing the PDFs  to load onto my AK100, I avoided loading any of these files onto my X5, assuming that was best avoided. As you've discovered, omitting the...

Yes, please just ignore me. After all, I'm the only person who has ever had or will ever have a less than amazing experience with this device, so there must be something wrong with me, not the player, right? Clearly I'm just imagining the problems I encounter and if I just stopped believing they...

Thank you both. I will investigate that.

I don't have any utility that allows me to remove tags or album art. I'm on Mac OS X, by the way.

A question worth pondering, to be sure. But this is new behavior that has shown up in the past week, playing purchased high res albums that played fine ten days ago! In that time I have added precisely one new album, ripped from CD myself, and that album plays flawlessly (Ripped as AIFF and...

Sandisk 64gb From Amazon's headline: SanDisk Ultra 64GB MicroSDXC Class 10 UHS Memory Card Speed Up To 30MB/s

  When I bought the X5 I was very aware of the semi-compatible file format issue, so I too great care to acquire/rip or convert all my files to FLAC (the ones I already had were AIFF, which all got converted to FLAC). I thought this had circumvented the potential problems, but it seems I was...

Did that as well -- same outcome.

  I acquired CleanMyDrive, connected the X5 to my Mac, run the CMD application, instructed it to "clean upon eject" (reported there was no "junk" on the tf card) and rebuilt my library in the X5.   The problem persists: the high res albums stutter -- unlistenable. Thanks for the suggestion...

Thank you, I will look into this. Still, it seems unlikely that these "hidden files" would explain this new behavior emerging out of the blue.