[Tiber]

I recently contacted Colorfly to ask if a firmware update to resolve the - admittedly minor - clicks/pops problem was likely any time soon. I also said that I thought gapless playback might be an advantage. 
 
Here's the reply;
 
"During converting from FLAC into WAV you should filter out ID Tag information and during CD ripping the BWF metafile extensions of WAF files too.  The DAC can’t interpret the ID tags and produce the noise like a click or pop between songs.  An real gape less playback function is only possible with 2 DAC chips working at same time. The most vendor of MP3 Player make Advertisement with gapless support, but this is not correct. It is a software solution and works only for compressed and mostly poor quality formats such as MP3.
Only for FLAC up to 16 Bit 44,1 kHz you can catch an acceptable result with them".    
 
Really? 
 
Thanks to all the previous posters who explained how using CUE sheets could solve this problem. I now use Exact Audio Copy and their CUE sheet creation option when ripping CDs to play on my C3. For other files, for instance those I have downloaded or have ripped from a Blu Ray or DVD, I use Audacity and label2cue.  
 
I'm currently using the C3 with a pair of Bowers and Wilkins P5s and have all my files as WAV. I'm going to test some FLAC files to see how they compare.
 
All I need to do now is figure out why the volume sometimes increases when the player is just sitting on my desk.
 
Thanks again to the CUE sheet posters.
 
 
 
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[H20Fidelity]

With information like that, I'm in no way surprised C3 has backwards scrolling folder titles and a messy sorting system. After reading that section they stated about gapless I'm surprised the music we hear coming out of Colorfly C3 doesn't play backwards.

 

[watchmania]

With information like that, I'm in no way surprised C3 has backwards scrolling folder titles and a messy sorting system. After reading that section they stated about gapless I'm surprised the music we hear coming out of Colorfly C3 doesn't play backwards.

 
C3 is not sorting it, it just directly reads the basic FAT32 filesystem entries.
 
The only true way to sort is to sort file the entries in the FAT32 table externally, with Anerty's DriveSort. I've also used it for the internal storage and it works very well.
 
This confirms my suspicion of the very limited hardware that runs the UI. It seems that the hardware modeled around cellphones in the 2000s era. Even the Sandisk's Sansa Clip+ UI and decoder hardware is much more powerful than C3.
 
With sorting, you'll need some RAM to store the list temporarily in the memory and sorting it. It seems that it is impossible to do that with the limited UI hardware in C3. It is possible to have optimised list sorting requiring very less RAM, but I believe the overall file browser performance will be severely impacted.
 
That very limited hardware UI will not have sufficient resource to decode and stream the file data bits as well, so I'm hypothesizing that all the file decoder formats -- MP3, FLAC, etc -- supported in C3 is hardware-based. What was referred as "DAC" in the e-mail is actually as set of hardware that does the decoding and data streaming, and finally the actual DAC. So, it's not possible to remove any click/pop sounds with UI software intervention, as the UI doesn't even perform the file read and stream itself.
 
Still, there are still possible improvements which is plausible to do with the limited UI hardware.
 
Whoever team or person that designs Colorfly C3 is a hardware expert for sure. And I am sure the other Colorfly players are designed by a different team.