[Brooko]

Sorry - but I'll state the obvious.  Who has the real problem - the person who had all their MP3s in one directory, unsorted by a folder structure, and then expects an audio company who has only 2 years experience with DAPs to have an Apple ECO system ...... or the Audio company themselves.
 
Fiio are not "idiots" here. And my comment is not meant to be antagonistic - just realistic.

 

[Dobrescu George]

  Sure it would work that way but I shouldn't have to do such a complex "extremly super ultra mega long sorting" just to bypass the idiots at Fiio who couldn't think of something as simple as holding the center button while browsing the Artist, in order to pop-up a menu with letters from A to Z so you can scroll to ur letter then press the center button again to confirm.

I have 14,317 tested mp3 and I already had to create many folders to prevent the 15 seconds user interface freezing at the beginning of each songs or when scrolling back and forth. Now I have all files starting with "A" inside the folder "A" and so on, so I have 26 folders. Having a new folder for each artirst + each albums from them would make it go from 26 folders to something between 2000-4000 folders!?!?

ain't it wonderfull being an audiophile?
 
i have around 18.000 songs in total, but these take 500gb, because i only use flac. 
 
A piece of advice would be to make folders of shuffled songs, and use shuffle play, or take only favourite songs with you. But, with all seriousness, adding that feature would be so sweet for having a much better organization, but fiio are really doing all they can, you really should understand that they are working hard.. this feature is not that easy to implement..

 

[lordhumungus]

   
Set your folders up:
 
A-C
D-F
G-I
J-L etc
 
Then put the artist under each appropriate folder
 
Then put their albums under those folders.
 
Use folder mode.
 
Scrolling and finding albums now a lot faster 

 
Oh and mention it to the BILLIONS of people who're having issues with it.  It might help them too.
 
Your welcome 

Your solution, while nice, doesn't actually address the core problem, particularly for people with huge collections. I have my music extremely well organized, but even then, my A-C folder would be something like 250+ artists, each with some number of albums under them. Needless to say I have a lot of music... From a design perspective, more than about 3 or 4 clicks to get to where you need to be starts to get into questionable quality territory. I say this as someone who works in mobile QA and not someone who just wants to bitch for no reason. The good news is I'm very happy with the large list of things the X5 does right and only hope that Fiio gets to a solution eventually. I'm happy to wait as long as a "real solution" makes it on the list somewhere.
 
If the Fiio team is reading this, thanks in advance for all of the fantastic work and thought you've already put into your player.

 

[Brooko]

Oh I totally agree with you - and gave you rep for a well thought out and articulated post.  What a lot of people don't appreciate though is that Fiio have been in this game for less than two years (DAP), and look at what they've achieved!  I think they'll get the UI right over time - but I'm patient enough to work around things until they do.
 
What I'm amazed at is some of the comments from the vocal few who treat Fiio as if they don't care and are incompetent.
 
I use my Fiio DAPs everyday, and am still amazed at how easy to use they are, how good they sound, and how little I paid (comparatively).

 

[lordhumungus]

While you and I are clearly on the same page as far as not minding waiting for features to get fleshed out, I'm not convinced that we can expect the general paying public to take this same stance. Joe P. Consumer, whether reasonable or not, expects that new products being launched have the cumulative knowledge/leanings/abilities of products that came before them and add their own additional features on top of the base expectation. Really, no one owes it to a company to give their money for what is functionally an unfinished product. I'd use Tesla motors as an example here. Can you imagine if they had launched with a car that wasn't immediately a game changer? I doubt they'd have found nearly the success they have.
 
All that being said, something I'd love to see is the more well informed users on this forum cutting FiiO some slack. They've been absolutely phenomenal about being forthcoming with limitations and works in progress, which is much more than I can say for most companies. It's for this reason that I chose to support them by purchasing the player in its less than finished state, celebrate the many strengths that it does have (seriously, the dual card slots is huge for me personally), and keep the positive feedback rolling to help both the company and player reach what I believe to be its full potential. I can't tell you how frustrated I've been over the last decade to have my demographic passed over because we can't collectively move the Apple cash-o-meter far enough for them to care. So again, thank you FiiO for attempting to make a product that fits my needs. I truly appreciate the effort.

 

[tjw321]

 
Your solution, while nice, doesn't actually address the core problem, particularly for people with huge collections. I have my music extremely well organized, but even then, my A-C folder would be something like 250+ artists, each with some number of albums under them. Needless to say I have a lot of music... From a design perspective, more than about 3 or 4 clicks to get to where you need to be starts to get into questionable quality territory. I say this as someone who works in mobile QA and not someone who just wants to bitch for no reason. The good news is I'm very happy with the large list of things the X5 does right and only hope that Fiio gets to a solution eventually. I'm happy to wait as long as a "real solution" makes it on the list somewhere.
 
If the Fiio team is reading this, thanks in advance for all of the fantastic work and thought you've already put into your player.

Is there a UI solution which'll require less than (or not much more than) 3 or 4 clicks to get to where you need to be with a collection like yours? I can't think of one without adding a lot more buttons. Even with a scrollable touch-screen it would take a good few swipes to get to where you want. Or would that count as a single interaction?
 
The only solution I can think of for such a collection would be to make each folder smaller, thereby increasing the depth of your hierarchy. (e.g A,B,C... rather than A-C, or maybe even AA-AM, AN-AZ,....). And that is probably a terrible solution....in fact, no solution at all, really.
 
I would definitely be interested to know if one does exist.

 

[Dobrescu George]

there is a solution... it is a "little" backwards. but it does exist.
 
it can improove not only usuability, but how nice you feel using it.
 
so you have the root folder.
 
make folders with generas, depending on how you consider them generas. This can be very helpfull.
 
for example, i have a folder named "emo" that stores everything that is post hardcore, indie post hardcore, electronic post hardcore, everything that has a influence with post hardcore or emo music.
 
If this makes you have a genera with too many bands, try to have a folder with a more specific genera, like, instead of how i have emo, have an electronic post hardcore folder, an indie post hardcore folder and so on. If it is still too much [which i really doubt] be as specific as you can about the genere, for example, "symphonic metal with avant garde classical influences". and so on. each genera can be sorted until a very specific point, where you cannot end up with more than enough few bands for it to be scrollable.
 
Theoretically this should be very very helpfull because you will be able to fiind much faster what you need and you will be able to listen much faster to what you are in the mood for.
 
Now, if you finish with a folder with 100 bands, it is no big problem, 100 bands are scrollable, fast and nice. If you end up with 1000 bands, split the folder exactly after Brooko method, with letters. you don't have the have the entire alphabet, depending on how many letter are there, you can split the folder in 4 sub folders or less.
 
Also, if you have bands from which you listen to 1-2-3 songs, don't take the entire band, or make a folder for this. 
You can create a folder named Shuffle, in which to store all these bands. I have a big shuffle folder, because it would be a waste to keep a folder for a band or album from which i listen to 3 or four songs. i only have folders for bands from which i listen to 5+ songs.
 
This shuffle folder would be a pain to scroll, as you will end up with a very big folder, so use shuffle with this. I use shuffle with mine, and every time i get a selection of good songs from it. 
 
If you really want to browse it, make sub folder in shuffle using generas, as a syntax for foobar usually looks like /nn.artist - album - song.file type/
 
you will end up with all songs being in the 0-9 folder, so make folder like Classical shuffle, metal shuffle, or be more specific, post hardcore shuffle/
 
 
 
I hope this helps everyone in having a better time with their x5!

 

[lordhumungus]

I myself don't know what the best solution to my problem is; I don't know that it's been discovered yet. That said, I'd take any amount of creativity that doesn't involve me having to create folder upon folder upon folder. More clicks to get to where I need to go is bad. Genres is a headache I can't even begin to imagine as the amount subgenre-ing I'd have to do is enough to drive me mad. About 75% of my collection is heavy metal of every imaginable variety, which often isn't even consistently the same genre from album to album, let alone an entire bands lifetime. For now I'd be happy with some form of accelerated scrolling by letter or similar. Anything to improve the experience really would be appreciated.
 
For the record, the number I was quoting only includes bands with full albums. Single songs is another ~50 per ~3 letters (wild guess really) on top of that initial number.
 
And just to attempt to get out ahead of the "why does anyone need that much music" responses. The answer is that no one needs this much anything. I do however enjoy music immensely and have it playing near constantly. Being forced to cherry pick the things that I want available at any given moment is miserable. It changes with my mood amongst other things. Sometimes it's also great to just browse and see something I haven't heard in a while and fire it up. I'm practically frothing at the prospect of 200GB cards from Sandisk.

 

[Hal Rockwell]

  there is a solution... it is a "little" backwards. but it does exist.
 
it can improove not only usuability, but how nice you feel using it.
 
so you have the root folder.
 
make folders with generas, depending on how you consider them generas. This can be very helpfull.
 
for example, i have a folder named "emo" that stores everything that is post hardcore, indie post hardcore, electronic post hardcore, everything that has a influence with post hardcore or emo music.
 
If this makes you have a genera with too many bands, try to have a folder with a more specific genera, like, instead of how i have emo, have an electronic post hardcore folder, an indie post hardcore folder and so on. If it is still too much [which i really doubt] be as specific as you can about the genere, for example, "symphonic metal with avant garde classical influences". and so on. each genera can be sorted until a very specific point, where you cannot end up with more than enough few bands for it to be scrollable.
 
Theoretically this should be very very helpfull because you will be able to fiind much faster what you need and you will be able to listen much faster to what you are in the mood for.
 
Now, if you finish with a folder with 100 bands, it is no big problem, 100 bands are scrollable, fast and nice. If you end up with 1000 bands, split the folder exactly after Brooko method, with letters. you don't have the have the entire alphabet, depending on how many letter are there, you can split the folder in 4 sub folders or less.
 
Also, if you have bands from which you listen to 1-2-3 songs, don't take the entire band, or make a folder for this. 
You can create a folder named Shuffle, in which to store all these bands. I have a big shuffle folder, because it would be a waste to keep a folder for a band or album from which i listen to 3 or four songs. i only have folders for bands from which i listen to 5+ songs.
 
This shuffle folder would be a pain to scroll, as you will end up with a very big folder, so use shuffle with this. I use shuffle with mine, and every time i get a selection of good songs from it. 
 
If you really want to browse it, make sub folder in shuffle using generas, as a syntax for foobar usually looks like /nn.artist - album - song.file type/
 
you will end up with all songs being in the 0-9 folder, so make folder like Classical shuffle, metal shuffle, or be more specific, post hardcore shuffle/
 
 
 
I hope this helps everyone in having a better time with their x5!

 
Just remember that in Windows the path is limited to 260 characters. On OSX and Linux the limit is 255.

 

[JukeBoxJimmy]

Many years ago the Creative JB1 had a search function in its OS. You would scroll the first letter of the search, then the second and so on if required. If you want items in 'b' just enter 'b' or 'be' to get close to beatles or beach boys. Should work great with the wheel..........Jim

 

[JediRemi]

I am reverting to 2.36b

My X5 has been crashing a lot since I moved to 2.4

I need the FiiO to do 2 basic things before everything else (although the other improvements are very appreciated):
-load the ~2000 songs playlist I have and play them continuously
-have a true random playing order

These 2 things were working on 2.36 if I remember well so I'll go back there.
Now my X5 plays 5 or 6 songs and crashes. It hangs at the end of a song and doesn't play the next one. Buttons become unresponsive and I have to restart it.

Am I the only one with this problem ? If I knew what was causing this I could try to find a way to get around it.


Other observations:
-is there a way to deactivate the auto-turn-on when I put the X5 on charge. Several time I put it on charge, it turned on by itself without me notifying. Then I took it, put it in my bag and couldn't use it when I wanted to because the battery was depleted.
(am I the only one annoyed by this ?)
-the  ~2000 songs playlist takes forever to load. It is especially a problem with the 2.4 crashing problem since every time it crashes (every 15mins) I have to reset it and wait 2 mins for it to reload the playlist.
-PLEASSSSE make your next DAP open source: a lot of us are programmers, we can add a lot of improvements ourselves or do debugging and find what needs to be corrected.

 

[DeeKay10]

-PLEASSSSE make your next DAP open source

 

With you on that one.

 

[Tyke666]

  I am reverting to 2.36b

My X5 has been crashing a lot since I moved to 2.4

I need the FiiO to do 2 basic things before everything else (although the other improvements are very appreciated):
-load the ~2000 songs playlist I have and play them continuously
-have a true random playing order

These 2 things were working on 2.36 if I remember well so I'll go back there.
Now my X5 plays 5 or 6 songs and crashes. It hangs at the end of a song and doesn't play the next one. Buttons become unresponsive and I have to restart it.

Am I the only one with this problem ? If I knew what was causing this I could try to find a way to get around it.


Other observations:
-is there a way to deactivate the auto-turn-on when I put the X5 on charge. Several time I put it on charge, it turned on by itself without me notifying. Then I took it, put it in my bag and couldn't use it when I wanted to because the battery was depleted.
(am I the only one annoyed by this ?)
-the  ~2000 songs playlist takes forever to load. It is especially a problem with the 2.4 crashing problem since every time it crashes (every 15mins) I have to reset it and wait 2 mins for it to reload the playlist.
-PLEASSSSE make your next DAP open source: a lot of us are programmers, we can add a lot of improvements ourselves or do debugging and find what needs to be corrected.

Hmm, I don't know if you are the only one with these problems but I am running 2.4 and can confirm:
1) I have never had a crash of the nature you describe. It has worked flawlessly on my large library. However, I never use playlists so it may be related to those.
2) I have never seen the device auto turn-on when on charge. When the device is plugged in to charge, it does start up with a welcome screen and then reverts to the "charging screen". After it's charged I unplug it from the charger and it is not then in play mode. Seems turned off to me when I unplug it as I need to press the power key for 2 seconds and get the usual startup screen.
 
So I can only assume that there is either an issue with your device (hardware), or there is a more general issue (software) that does not impact me due to the difference in how we use the device.
Also, as far as I can recall without re-reading the 11 pages of this thread, I don't think anyone else is having crashes. As that's a major issue I would have thought there would be many posts for something like that.
But if you can use the device in the same way with 2.36b and do not get crashes, that would point to a software issue and that something has changed that impacts how you use it. Your information may well be key for the devs to work out what changes they made could be causing crashes.
 
I for one would be keen to hear if others are having crashes and hope they post here if that's the case. It's important for the developers to be aware.

 

[djselbeck]

Originally Posted by JediRemi /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
-PLEASSSSE make your next DAP open source: a lot of us are programmers, we can add a lot of improvements ourselves or do debugging and find what needs to be corrected.

 
this would be very nice. This could then be used to port rockbox for example. Proper boot/flash tools would be needed. And I think there might lay some problem because I don't think the ingenic tools are free/distributable. Some usbboot tools exist and it is easy to boot the player in the boot mode.

 

[reihead]

Fiio, is time, browse by letter is needed. 
Sorry to repeat this, but you know...