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.

Surely FiiO has stated an official opinion on this subject, and if so, an approach to dealing with it -- if required?

You're going to have to be more specific than that. What hidden files?

Sorry, I worded that poorly -- Yes, that is correct. I simply wanted to state that I prefer to have Joe or James respond in this forum, publicly, rather than in private, since I think this deserves to be addressed openly :-)

I'd prefer to have FiiO respond in-thread, since I am not the only person having this problem and I think it warrants a public response.

  Read below: I did locate another card to test with, and the results were the same: high res albums loaded to the other, newly formatted card behaved the same: they all "stutter" now.

  Just completed this task, and the results were the same. I've selected a different HDtracks album that was shown to "stutter" when the problem was first identified, and it does it as well, after a complete reset as you described above.

Here is something interesting:   I was able to locate an unused 2gb tf card and perform a test with it -- I formatted it in the X5 and then removed the card, plugged it into my Mac/card reader, and loaded only one album: a 192khz recording purchased from HDtracks which I have identified as...

Done that - repeatedly. The results are the same :-(

No disc errors reported. Now what? I'm on fw2.0 ..... is there something more current? Should I bother, or is that just another wild goose chase?

Unfortunately, I don't have any spare tf cards hanging about -- I have no application for them other than in my DAP, and so I buy only what I need. I will see what Disc Utility has to say about this card.......