Astell & Kern KANN - DAP with Massive Storage & Battery

[Luvdac]

Ps. I do get a ' scanningmedia' pop up briefly once the Kann comes on. If I add new albums to the card, the scanning can take upto 5 minutes.

 

[Shetzu]

Hi all,
New to the Kann, finally bit the bullet and picked one up to replace the otherwise buggy FiiO X5 mkIII. So far, I love it- but I have one small issue with the SD Card. I have a Sandisk 512 and it has about 130 gigs of free space currently on the card. It has been formatted at ExFat via a Macbook. It takes very long, upwards of 5 minutes, for the Kann to mount the card, which seems very slow and not a very good solution.

I've tried to reformat it using the KANN itself, as I did with my 256 card, but once the SD card is mounted, the option to erase the card under "system information" is still greyed out and it does not let me. ANy suggestions on how to get this card to mount faster and more smoothly- or is this just the way it is each time I boot it up? Thanks in advance!

Always format cards in fat32 and then use it in Kann. All other formats will not work and give your card error.
If you are using Macbook :

Begin by running the following command in terminal:

diskutil list

For example, if we wanted to format our SDCard to FAT32 and give it the name of KANN and it was located on /dev/disk2, then we’d run the following command :

sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 KANN MBRFormat /dev/disk2

If you use diskutility it will format in Exfat and it will not work in Kann and give you card damaged error. So for all mac users like me use this terminal command and you are good to go.Cheers

 

[Shetzu]

Hi,
It can take 5 minutes when you insert the card. Once initial scan is done it only takes around 30 seconds or so. The issue I had with my sandisk 512gb card was the formatting. On exfat I had the same issues as you and at one point it showed the card as corrupted. I ended up formatting it ito fat32 and it solved all issues. The Kann itself formats the card to exfat, but then has issues with it. I formatted it to fat32 in my laptop and then inserted it in the Kann.

Agree there Kann formats in Exfat and then shows as damaged card. Strange. This issue should be addressed ny Astell & Kern if they happen to read this post. Only format accepted whether the card is above 32gb and higher up it requires Fat32.

 

[Shetzu]

Ps. I do get a ' scanningmedia' pop up briefly once the Kann comes on. If I add new albums to the card, the scanning can take upto 5 minutes.

This is perfectly natural for "scanning media" pop up

 

[Shetzu]

Where would I find that?

Nope. There is no such method.

 

[superuser1]

Nope. There is no such method.

There ought to be. If every time i start up a DAP it takes me 5 minutes to start playing a song, i wouldn't pay $100 for it. It seems to me to be counter intuitive to not have the ability of read NTFS and ExFAT formats. AFAIK and read people tend to avoid fat32 in most situations.

 

[Luvdac]

There ought to be. If every time i start up a DAP it takes me 5 minutes to start playing a song, i wouldn't pay $100 for it. It seems to me to be counter intuitive to not have the ability of read NTFS and ExFAT formats. AFAIK and read people tend to avoid fat32 in most situations.

It just sounds soooo good!

 

[JJF_888]

Takes me about 40 seconds to get my Kann started. Not sure where the 5 minute idea comes from. I've got nearly 100GB of music on it.

 

[Terry Newton]

Solved.

 

[Terry Newton]

Solved.

 

[Shetzu]

There ought to be. If every time i start up a DAP it takes me 5 minutes to start playing a song, i wouldn't pay $100 for it. It seems to me to be counter intuitive to not have the ability of read NTFS and ExFAT formats. AFAIK and read people tend to avoid fat32 in most situations.

It doesnot take 5 mins but to be on safe side I may say about 45-50 secs. For rest of your message I agree with you. There should be a way for the library to show fast with indexing but i Saw a video on Youtube of Jude of Hifi showing the review of A&K 240 or maybe 380. You see the indexing of alphabets A to Z to immediately get to the song you want. Apparently its not there in Kann. God knows why a $1000 DAP is deprived of such simple software requirement.
Also when the world is moving forward and new formats are available and faster solutions why do manufacturers keep going backwards to the FAT32 format?
I faced similar issues when I had the Fiiio X5 ii( now sold).

 

[Shetzu]

Jeebers,now it says the sd card is damaged and it doesn't show up at all.I've been using it for weeks every day with no issues but it is in exFat.So now I will have to try and format it to Fat32.The last time I tried formatting to Fat 32 I destroyed a brand new 512 card,kinda expensive at around $400 but it was replaced for free.I had a lot of problems trying to get to Fat32 so after the sd card issue I tried exFat and that worked for awhile,not today.Not impressed.It shouldn't be this difficult to get a 512 card to format to Fat 32.Windows won't do it.I'll have to try a command prompt method and just hope the 512 sd card doesn't get destroyed like the last time.Bah!

Yeah. Best of luck with the formatting issue. It seems A&K may be the best DAP manufacturer but little software issues like these make a big dent. I dont know why they donot address these issues of Card Format type. I know these cards dont come cheap. If A&K person ( Jason) reading this post please try to rectify this ongoing issue in your next software update.

We donot want to loose our expensive SD Cards just because of format issue.

 

[Terry Newton]

Solved.

 

[Shetzu]

Very difficult for me to get to Fat 32,in fact I couldn't which is why I am using exFat.Had no problem getting the 256 to Fat 32 but not the 512.Now I have to try again and hope it doesn't destroy my card again. Oh well.

These days Windows too doesnot allow Fat32 format unless the card is below 32GB. You have to use a 3rd party software to format to Fat32. If you happen to use a mac computer follow the terminal commands I have listed in my post above if you scroll upwards.

 

[Terry Newton]

Solved.