[IryxBRO]

How did you do this? As in I didn't see a direct support email address or even a feedback type form on their site. Was I half awake and missed it or ?

If you've seen my comments here and elsewhere, its like I'm on a personal mission… Any DAP that has a clock / time feature should have an alarm too. It needn't be very fancy. It can have a fixed duration of ringing, preset and fixed alarm / chime sound, etc. Setting it can quite simply be an enter time alarm goes off entry. That's all I'm looking for. Of course things like a nap feature (go off in xxx minutes), ability to change the fixed items I mentioned previously and a snooze feature would be nice. But I'm not asking, wanting or even requesting those things. I understand that each feature takes time to implement and test and with an unknown benefit, as in if there was a nap feature yyy more units would be sold, I don't want to ask for unreasonable things.

They are responding on FaceBook (Hidizs) and (Hidizs User Group).

 

[darmanastartes]

Just posted a review of the AP60II: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/hidizs-ap60ii.22887/reviews#review-19814

 

[bsoplinger]

Just posted a review of the AP60II: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/hidizs-ap60ii.22887/reviews#review-19814

Question, but background first…

I've been pulling my hair out trying to get cue files to work on my Xduoo Nano D3. I just, as in a week ago, got the AP60 MKII and tossed the same mp3 and hand built cue file onto the SD card and it worked great. In fact it was the nicest implementation I've seen on the different DAPs I've tried. But I've always used a separate text format file for the cue file.

In your review you mentioned embedded cue files. Nowhere when I went to find out what a cue was and what it was supposed to do did I see mention of the cue file being embedded in the music file. How does one go about doing that? Or is the embedding done as part of the rip? Or?

 

[darmanastartes]

Question, but background first…

I've been pulling my hair out trying to get cue files to work on my Xduoo Nano D3. I just, as in a week ago, got the AP60 MKII and tossed the same mp3 and hand built cue file onto the SD card and it worked great. In fact it was the nicest implementation I've seen on the different DAPs I've tried. But I've always used a separate text format file for the cue file.

In your review you mentioned embedded cue files. Nowhere when I went to find out what a cue was and what it was supposed to do did I see mention of the cue file being embedded in the music file. How does one go about doing that? Or is the embedding done as part of the rip? Or?

That's incorrect terminology on my part. I'm referring to the CUE sheet + the FLAC file it goes with. I'll edit the review to make that clearer.

 

[jiangzhenjerry]

Question, but background first…

I've been pulling my hair out trying to get cue files to work on my Xduoo Nano D3. I just, as in a week ago, got the AP60 MKII and tossed the same mp3 and hand built cue file onto the SD card and it worked great. In fact it was the nicest implementation I've seen on the different DAPs I've tried. But I've always used a separate text format file for the cue file.

In your review you mentioned embedded cue files. Nowhere when I went to find out what a cue was and what it was supposed to do did I see mention of the cue file being embedded in the music file. How does one go about doing that? Or is the embedding done as part of the rip? Or?

Thought I should provide some additional comments (as my first post here!). Embedded CUE is pretty easy to do - for example using Foobar2000. You can insert a CUE sheet into an FLAC file, and then be able to delete the standalone CUE file. You can think of this as a special "tagging" process, similar to tagging music files with cover photos and track infos. Many PC music/video players can recognize embedded CUEs, for example AIMP, MPC-BE, PotPlayer, in addition to Foobar2000.

With that said, I am not aware of any DAP that supports embedded CUEs... I will receive my AP60ii soon but I don't think it will be an exception in this regard.

 

[bsoplinger]

Thought I should provide some additional comments (as my first post here!). Embedded CUE is pretty easy to do - for example using Foobar2000. You can insert a CUE sheet into an FLAC file, and then be able to delete the standalone CUE file. You can think of this as a special "tagging" process, similar to tagging music files with cover photos and track infos. Many PC music/video players can recognize embedded CUEs, for example AIMP, MPC-BE, PotPlayer, in addition to Foobar2000.

With that said, I am not aware of any DAP that supports embedded CUEs... I will receive my AP60ii soon but I don't think it will be an exception in this regard.

I understand embedding as part of the rip operation. My problem is that I won't change my methodology for ripping CDs to individual flac files for each track to instead rip 1 huge flac file for the whole CD just to get the inexpensive players to have "gapless" playback. So the solution you're mentioning isn't useful for me and really isn't my problem.

Since I had no idea what a cue file was I looked them up on the net. Realized that the idea of re-ripping for a cheap player to work wasn't for me. But then I realized that a cue file was perfect for an unrelated issue. I extracted the audio from plenty of YouTube videos of concerts. Not very good sounding but there's something about a good live performance that makes them still worth listening to for me. But I've always hated that it was just 1 long mp3 instead of being a collection of individual songs. Since a cue file is just text I could make my own for these concert mp3s and now I'd have a way to see the individual songs.

Its worked for me for the players I've tried it on with the exception of 1 player. So when I saw your comment about embedded cue files I was wondering if perhaps that was what this troublesome player needed. But the couple of mp3/flac tagging programs that I have don't have an option to embed a cue file. Searching for tag editor and cue file didn't get me anything. So I was hoping you'd have an answer along the lines of 'just use the xxx app and under the yyy menu select embed cue file' or something like that.

I do appreciate you answering my question though.

 

[jiangzhenjerry]

I understand embedding as part of the rip operation. My problem is that I won't change my methodology for ripping CDs to individual flac files for each track to instead rip 1 huge flac file for the whole CD just to get the inexpensive players to have "gapless" playback. So the solution you're mentioning isn't useful for me and really isn't my problem.

Since I had no idea what a cue file was I looked them up on the net. Realized that the idea of re-ripping for a cheap player to work wasn't for me. But then I realized that a cue file was perfect for an unrelated issue. I extracted the audio from plenty of YouTube videos of concerts. Not very good sounding but there's something about a good live performance that makes them still worth listening to for me. But I've always hated that it was just 1 long mp3 instead of being a collection of individual songs. Since a cue file is just text I could make my own for these concert mp3s and now I'd have a way to see the individual songs.

Its worked for me for the players I've tried it on with the exception of 1 player. So when I saw your comment about embedded cue files I was wondering if perhaps that was what this troublesome player needed. But the couple of mp3/flac tagging programs that I have don't have an option to embed a cue file. Searching for tag editor and cue file didn't get me anything. So I was hoping you'd have an answer along the lines of 'just use the xxx app and under the yyy menu select embed cue file' or something like that.

I do appreciate you answering my question though.

I saw you asked "how does one go about doing that?" and I answered that you could do it using Foobar2000. Now you said it was not your problem. So... what is your problem?

I never thought I would have to go into that kind of details like "use the xxx app and under the yyy menu select embed cue file". I already mentioned the name of the application, and honestly it wouldn't cost you a long flight to find the right menu.

 

[bsoplinger]

I saw you asked "how does one go about doing that?" and I answered that you could do it using Foobar2000. Now you said it was not your problem. So... what is your problem?

I never thought I would have to go into that kind of details like "use the xxx app and under the yyy menu select embed cue file". I already mentioned the name of the application, and honestly it wouldn't cost you a long flight to find the right menu.

But I'm not embedding a cue file into something I'm ripping from a CD. I'm wanting to embed it in a pre-existing mp3 file that has no corresponding CD.

 

[jiangzhenjerry]

But I'm not embedding a cue file into something I'm ripping from a CD. I'm wanting to embed it in a pre-existing mp3 file that has no corresponding CD.

From CD or not, it is not relevant to CUE embedding.

1. It doesn't matter whether your file is ripped from a CD or downloaded from Internet or ripped from Youtube or however you got it. As long as your file is FLAC/APE, the CUE file can be embedded with it.

2. You cannot embed CUE into MP3 files. Note: this is because MP3 files do not support such advanced tagging, NOT because there is no corresponding CD. Even if there is a corresponding CD with MP3, you still cannot embed CUE. This is just a limitation with the MP3 format itself.

Sorry I missed that you were asking about CUE embedded with MP3. I have abandoned MP3 files since at least 15 years ago, because they would make all my HiFi devices (headphones, amps, DACs...) meaningless.

BTW, we have detoured too far (sorry OP...) How about going back to the topic? I will receive AP60II soon and will try to leave my impression here.

 

[bsoplinger]

thx for the help with cue files.

BTW, we have detoured too far (sorry OP...) How about going back to the topic? I will receive AP60II soon and will try to leave my impression here.

Bet you're going to enjoy it. Its so obvious a huge step up from the nice for the price Benjie / AGPtEK players (the 8 Gb for under $25 ones) and almost as big from the $50-$90 ones that seem to be a great bargain until you have them in hand and find their foibles. Everything just works on this player. No weird key combinations to adjust the sound or other oddities of the cheap players. Great sound across the spectrum with no glaring additions or omissions. Reasonable menus with reasonable choices.

And, it handles cue files really well, even for mp3s. If you use folder view you see the music file (I've only tried flac and mp3) and you can select that and use the forward / back buttons to move from track to track and the correct track info is displayed on the now playing display. But it also shows every track from the cue file as a separate, selectable music file. It is the slickest implementation I've see on a player. I've seen even fancier in software for my computer but not on a portable device.

 

[jiangzhenjerry]

Bet you're going to enjoy it. Its so obvious a huge step up from the nice for the price Benjie / AGPtEK players (the 8 Gb for under $25 ones) and almost as big from the $50-$90 ones that seem to be a great bargain until you have them in hand and find their foibles. Everything just works on this player. No weird key combinations to adjust the sound or other oddities of the cheap players. Great sound across the spectrum with no glaring additions or omissions. Reasonable menus with reasonable choices.

And, it handles cue files really well, even for mp3s. If you use folder view you see the music file (I've only tried flac and mp3) and you can select that and use the forward / back buttons to move from track to track and the correct track info is displayed on the now playing display. But it also shows every track from the cue file as a separate, selectable music file. It is the slickest implementation I've see on a player. I've seen even fancier in software for my computer but not on a portable device.

Wonderful! Thank you very much for your brief review. I've heard a lot of good things about it and you doubled my confidence Yeah I do hope to have a DAP that has decent support for CUE files. Never figured out why Sony Walkmans opt to support CUEs only with the firmware released in mainland China... Your review has given me great hope.

 

[Blazer39]

anyone compared this to cayin n3 yet?
also how does it sound in a car? no line out is bit concerning

 

[IryxBRO]

anyone compared this to cayin n3 yet?
also how does it sound in a car? no line out is bit concerning

Line out usually ends up with output level limiter. Don't see any problems with using AP60II in a car. Tried mine with Pioneer AUX - fine. Approriate volume level (similar to tuner or CD output) is reached when AP60II set to 65.

 

[CactusPete23]

I just saw an "AP60-PRO" model on MASSDROP for $80. It uses a ESS9118C DAC, and has new rounded corners Aluminum case. Does NOT mention HIBY LINK. So seems like a variation on the AP60 that differs both from the original, and from the AP60II. No idea how the sound may be changed with the ESS9118C DAC. But would expect lower noise with this combined DAC/AMP? Looks like the new mechanical buttons from the AP60II (Corrected!)

(Would Love to see an "AP-60II PRO", ie an AP-60II with this DAC/AMP Chip and Aptx upgraded to HD.)

 

[actorlife]

Where is the cheapest price going for lately? Thanks.