Ok guys, I have very good news. I just bought the new Sandisk Micro Sd with 400GB storage capacity and it works like a charm with the Cayin i5! (it scans everything on the card and the read speed is AWESOME), which rises the player max storage capacity to a real 400GB! (The Sandisk micro SD actual free space is 366GB). Compared to my Samsung 256Gb microSD the read speed was definitely improved (I have every album tagged with the cover art at 600x600) and every single cover art pops really fast in the albums tab, yet the write speed is still better on the samsung. I can confirm this is excellent news for playback in the Cayin i5 since right now aprox 6000+ lossless tracks could be stored in the device.
This is indeed excellent news, theoretically this is the way i5 is fully compatible with SDXC format, so as long as the new 400GB TF card is SDXC formatted, it should work. However we have seen enough mystical TF/SD card compatibility problems, so we are glad that someone has confirmed this for us.
I understand your concerns Andy, and It's really good to see you are still around this thread. I'm still using the unit like I did the first month. I'm sincerely very happy with it, but please, if you are ever able to get true gapless support and a few fixes for album sorting working for the i5, I will declare the i5 king of DAP haha! Even if it takes years to make it work.
Best regards,
The release of N5ii has confirmed our worry: the HiBy code is correct, the Leadcore MCU is the source of the problem.
If you have followed the N5ii thread, you probably aware that the HiByMusic App used in N5ii is very similar to i5, we have make some cosmetic and layout changes, but the system level code are basically identical. In fact when we displayed N5ii in Hong Kong back in August for the first time, we literally "forced" the i5 firmware into N5ii engineering sample in order to showcase the DAP way before its offical launch, so the software part of the two DAP are very similar.
The trick is, when the customzied HiBy player were migrated to N5ii without any changes or optimization on gapless support, it works flawlessly in N5ii. I can assure you the codes on gapless function are untouched, it just work as it should be in the Rockchip RK3188. If we have changed the code and make it work it the N5ii, it literally cause us nothing to copy and paste the change to i5 firmware, because they are very similar on the music playback part. Unfortunately, no change is need in N5ii, so i5 can't take benefit of the gapless success experience of N5ii.
On the other hand, discussion with Neutron is moving on smoothly, we are about to send an i5 to Neutron so that they can test their codes developed for i5, so this is something we can looking forwards to.