I don't know about 256s in an X5ii, but 200s in an X5i work beautifully.  And 200s are half the price of 256s.... 

I finally had a dropout-free day with my pre-Deoxit 900s.  The corrosion had been getting worse and worse, especially on the right.  Yesterday the right was driving me mad on my daily bike ride - I finally gave up and rode sans music.  Today, I hit my 900s with some WD40 connection cleaner and a...

My beloved Michell Gyrodec w/ RB300 and Benz H20  

'fraid so...  BikeActive did a great job of getting me my frame though.  Any reason that route won't work for you?

The 2002 I bought with, the 2013 I bought frame-only via http://www.bikeactive.com in the UK. 

I'm loving this winter...   Me and my two Oranges (a 2002 Patriot, and a 2013 Five) in Cunningham Park, Queens.    

At the risk of being a pedant, the equalizer also works for 48kHz

It was a pain, but that's what I did.

Large playlists are a problem.  I have a playlist of all 6000+ tracks on my X5 (no, I don't know why either), and it takes two and a half minutes to open.

  Snap.

  I just tested and mine does exactly the same.   I don't think you have a defective player - you just found a firmware bug.  A pretty harmless bug, but a bug all the same.

  That's some sweet gear...  But can you dance to it? ;)

Nowhere near as impressive as some, but I'm more than happy with it (for now!)   FiiO X5 Ultimate Ears UE900 with FiiO cable & frankenstein tips made up of the wax-guard cores from Comply TX-200 plus orange triple flanges that came with MEElectronics Sport-Fi M6 (the MEElectronics are on...

Today I'm happy that I finally got round to tidying up my music folder!!   But it would be nice if it were fixed in a future firmware update - I shouldn't really have to rename the following just so it'll fit in a playlist:    Music/G/Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five/320/The Adventures...

My collection wasn't too bad - just a smattering of French and German characters that I had to Anglicize.  The bigger problem for me was the length issue - I went through a phase of including artist and album name in all my filenames, so I had to strip them all out...  

The X5 has problems with playlist entries that are either longer than 130 characters, or that contain non-ascii characters.  I'm assuming that the X3 is the same.  I spent most of the weekend renaming way too many files...

I found the limit to be more like 130 or 131 characters.   I spent most of the weekend implementing a strict /initial_letter/artist/codec/album/num_title.ext naming convention (thank you mp3tag!) to cut my playlist entries down to size.  Also had to get rid of any dodgy/foreign characters in...

No player is perfect.  I'm sure I'm not the only person here whose first mp3 player was a CD player with no display, no equalizer, no card slots, no OTG, and certainly no scroll wheel.  They weren't perfect, but we loved those things.  DAT players and Minidiscs came and went, and I loved those...

My scroll wheel works.  

I'm hoping that this problem is something that FiiO can easily fix in a future firmware upgrade - changing my music's directory structure would be a huge job! 

I was wrong about the limit being 128 characters.  129 will play, 131 will not.   :)

#EXTM3U Music\B\Bill Withers\FLAC\The Essential Bill Withers (FLAC)\The Essential Bill Withers (Disc 1) (FLAC)\102-bill_withers-aint_no_sunshine.flac Music\D\Depeche Mode\FLAC\SD\2011 - Remixes 2 (FLAC)\Remixes 2 (Disc 3) (FLAC)\03 - Behind The Wheel Vince Clarke Remix [2011].flac...

Can you open up the playlist in a text editor?  If so, have a look at the entries for the songs that won't play.  I've had the same problem on my X5 and I found that playlist entries of over 128 characters in length won't work.

  Check the length of the playlist entry.  It seems that anything longer than 128 characters won't work.   Edit:  128 characters is fine, as is 129.  Not sure about 130, but 131 won't work!   I'd just assumed 128 since it's a power of 2

Any chance of getting Album Artist as well as/instead of Artist in the Play By Category list?    I have tons of miscellaneous artists that only exist on compilations, and they make the Artists list much too unwieldy.  I'd much rather have them buried under Various.