[GandalfTheGrey]

Still seeing some "interesting" behavior:

Every time I power-down, reboot, wake-from-sleep, unplug the USB or - IIRC - sometimes even the headphone cable, the FiiO freezes up.

I've tried lowering the CPU frequency, have "frozen" non-essential apps that I thought might be causing bottlenecks (BetterBatteryStats and Greenify, for starters), and am running basically on minimums, as far as apps are concerned, but no luck.

I have a 1TB PNY MicroSD in each slot.

My current "workaround" consists of removing the SD cards after forcing a power-down, then reinserting them, as soon as the system seems to be up and running normally, one after another, with a short pause in between, to let the device mount the SD's properly. In this state (both MicroSD's inserted, read and running) everything works fine: I can play music off them without a glitch, and exploring the cards' contents goes smoothly, so it doesn't "feel" like the cards are somehow "laggy" or, generally, faulty.

Something must be "happening/changing" (going more on intuition, here, as opposed to knowledge) when there's a "state change" (from off to on, from plugged-in to unplugged, etc.) that freezes up the system.

1. I'd have to check the device's manufacture date, but could it be that having potentially been "dormant" for a while has made the battery too weak to cope with "peak" power draws? (Might unfreeze BetterBatteryStats to see if I can find any indications).

2. Can anyone tell me if the X5iii has some kind of logging function that I might be able to look into?

 

[darkarth]

Hello community,

I read a lot about this Custom kernel and fidelizer and I'm very excited to get into this. But I often read about people that don't recommened to install the Fidelizer with this custom kernel because of compatibility problems. And I'm a bit confused by now.

However, I don't use any online apps like tidal or something. I just want to listen to music on the classic way in the best quality.

So are there any good arguments for installing fidelity with custom rom? Better sound, battery life, smoother usability? Or should I use the custom kernel with the regular rom? What is your experience?

Would be nice if you can help me.

Best regards.

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

I'm probably the latest addition to the modded X5iii community. At least I'm the latest to post a question regarding the modded firmware, it seems.

I bought a brand new (probably manufactured in 2018, but otherwise unused) X5iii plus two 1TB MicroSD cards by PNY.

Flashing the firmware is a little complex, but it's well-documented, and if you follow the steps meticulously, you should be fine.

I had a big problem getting the FiiO to be stable, however. The biggest problem was freeze-ups due to the size of the MicroSD's, apparently. If you're interested in finding out more, go back to around page 32 of this thread, that's when I started asking questions. In the meantime, I found out that the audio player I had bought and was using (USB Audio Player Pro), was using up a lot of resources when it validates itself via the Google Play Store. This is a new feature, apparently, and leads to instability, as far as I could gather from another recent thread on the topic. I have now switched to foobar2000, and things are running almost 100% smoothly, but foobar2000 lacks A LOT of the high-end fine-tuning apps like UAPP have, for example. I'm still very satisfied with sound quality and happy to finally be able to use the FiiO as it should be.

I've chosen the following settings in the list of firmware flashing options:

- 1704MHz Kernel type (2016MHz made the device freeze up)
- COMPLETE disabling of system apps
- DISABLED system equalizers and effects
- REPLACE libaudioflinger.so with files from firmware 1.2.2-1.2.5
- DISABLED Boot Animation
- DISABLED FiiO Music Player
- ENABLED Interface Boost
- NO Auto Launch of Custom App

Basically, I've reduced my FiiO to an Audio-Player-Only device. I can still turn on WiFi and access the web, but there's hardly any need, and I've frozen every other app that SD Maid allowed me to freeze.

 

[darkarth]

Thanks, that helped me a lot so far.

Do you tested both cards on every slot seperatly? Maybe one slot or one card has a defect or something.


I ordered the same card as you and it's still on the way.


If you have the same problem with both cards on every slot sepparatly, than I will buy two 512 GB cards from Sandisk because someone on page 32 confirmed that they working good.


I never used UAPP, sand finetuning anyway. I thought about keeping the FiiO App but maybe I will use foobar, too. Don't know, yet.

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

I think the default FiiO music player is so bad, IT was basically the reason this whole firmware modding effort started in the first place.

No, I didn’t test inserting just ONE of the cards to see if the system was more stable that way, but I do remember reading here or in some other thread that all newer FiiO’s have only one slot because of instability reported with the x5iii. Something about both slots sharing the same connector, IIRC.

Like I said, using two cards works reasonably well, if:

1. you wait after boot-up for both cards to be read properly (It takes a little while), and

2. reduce the load on processor and memory as much as possible, incl. freezing/disabling/uninstalling as many apps as you can, incl. Google, which means you must use music players that don’t ‘phone home’ the way UAPP apparently does. I guess you can still re-flash to Google apps every once in a while, to have apps auto-update, then turn Google back off, OR download never versions of apps into the Download folder via USB+PC and install from there. Once the TWERP interface is installed, it’s fairly easy to re-flash the system via pressing a combination of buttons to re-boot into recovery.

 

[darkarth]

you wait after boot-up for both cards to be read properly (It takes a little while), and

Of course it takes a while.. but you talked about freezing. That are different things. How long does it take?

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

storage is checked at system start. If you go into Settings > Storage, you can see that, initially, both SD cards are grayed-out, then the cards are checked (‘calculating’) until the bar is filled according to capacity and free space. I’d say it takes about a minute, or so, for both cards to be up an running. No longer than two.

Admittedly, I ‘froze’ apps using an app called ‘SD Maid’ when I still had UAPP installed and, possibly, still using Google Play. I froze them to see if the card-checking process ran more smoothly. It may well be that - with Google apps deactivated and using foobar2000 instead of UAPP - those apps could be un-frozen because they never really had an adverse effect, but after so much testing, I’m happy that I can finally listen to music.

 

[darkarth]

Are the two cards combined as one memory or are they shown seperatly?

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

Separately.

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

Separately.

Are the two cards combined as one memory or are they shown seperatly?

I don't know how and why, but startup is unstable again. I keep having to remove the cards before I power-up again.
This seems to happen because I set up screen-lock. Removing the screen-lock makes boot-up normal again. Phew!

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

Has anyone here ever tried a RAM upgrade on his X5iii? Is it even possible?

I found a PDF with specifications of the internals, a datasheet of the RK3188 chip, to be more specific, and it states that it's "compatible with JEDEC standard DDR3/LPDDR2 SDRAM up to 1066MHz and up to 2GB or RAM (2x1GB or 1x2GB)", if I read it correctly. Don't know whether this means the memory is soldered onto the PSB, or there are actually two memory sockets inside much like you would find in a laptop.

I have an old 2GB laptop RAM module with the above specifications in my pile of disused components.

Should I ever take the X5iii to an electronics shop - to get the battery replaced, for example - would it be worth trying to double the device's RAM?

 

[darkarth]

Fidelizer offers specific hardware upgrades. So in general it is possible. But I don't see the sense in this as long as you have to pay for it. I mean you can have a new and better player for the same price and I don't think that something of the X5iii is like that special.

I decided to left the X5 and go to the Cayin N3Pro which has vacuum tubes as amplifier.

 

[WindowsX]

Hello community,

I read a lot about this Custom kernel and fidelizer and I'm very excited to get into this. But I often read about people that don't recommened to install the Fidelizer with this custom kernel because of compatibility problems. And I'm a bit confused by now.

However, I don't use any online apps like tidal or something. I just want to listen to music on the classic way in the best quality.

So are there any good arguments for installing fidelity with custom rom? Better sound, battery life, smoother usability? Or should I use the custom kernel with the regular rom? What is your experience?

Would be nice if you can help me.

Best regards.

I flashed his boot image with AndroidTool on my Advanced ROM. There's 4 image files to try and some of them should work. I ended up repacking his working kernel file with my own boot image optimizations. I didn't flash whole TWRP package as I prefer to maintain my own optimizations on system image. Hope this helps.

 

[quentingeo]

Hello there.

I'm having somes issues with my fiio + custom kernel 3.4.1

I recently changed my sd cards and for some reason my player refused to start. It got stuck in the "app optimisation" process and keep repeating the same operation.

I tried to factory reser + reinstall the custom kernel but now i've got an "Android system has stopped" warning and can't get pas that ( i can still access setting though)

Any advices ?

thanks !

 

[quentingeo]

I managed to get past the error message by switching pure mode and back to android but Home button don't work and the android quick access menu that let you turn on and off stuff like pure music mode etc... stop working after and few seconds.

I also notice that even if i reinstall the custom kernel and change settings (for exemple i choose to keep system apps), i still end up with my previous settings where all system apps are removed.

what can i do to make a clean new installation ?

thank you for your help