[guitarjorge24]

Hi, I'm thinking of getting the X3 or X5. Could someone test to see if FiiO devices can read M3U playlists with tracks whose file name contain non-alphanumerical characters (e.g. Japanese and Chinese characters like 西楚霸王 or シルエット)?
 
I currently own an AGPtEK (Ruizu) player which supports M3U playlists. However, the tracks that contain Japanese, Chinese, or other unicode characters in their file name don't show up in the playlist and can't be played. I'm hoping that FiiO supports them...

 

[Citizen Zombie]

Is fully supported, filenames and ID3V2.3 tags. Tested with 伊東ゆかり (Yukari Ito) - 小指の思い出.mp3 and other files with my X1. But you have to use M3U8 instead of M3U, because your use of unicode isn't part of the M3U standard. This is different to other, more uncommon European characters like Eivør Pálsdóttir - Randaðu Rósur.mp3. They are still part of the code tables included in M3U playlists.
 
Not every tag type can handle unicode characters, make sure to check this before you use certain tags like ID3V1.x.

 

[guitarjorge24]

Thanks for replying. Do you know if it can read ID3v2.4? That's what I use now.
Also, does it recognize M3U8 playlist with M3U8 extension such as "playlist.m3u8"? or do I need to change the extension of my M3U8 playlist to "m3u" like "playlist.m3u"?

 

[Citizen Zombie]

It can. I converted Yukari Ito from ID3V2.3 UTF-16 to ID3V2.4 UTF-8 and did not experience a difference playing these files. But ID3V2.4 has some unusual features like padding at the end of the files and I didn't test every possible variant. The program used to switch between these two tag versions was MP3Tag, other software may lead to different results.
 
There are two important differences between M3U and M3U8. Obviously the file name, but more importantly the code page you are allowed to use. M3U is bound to ANSI, M3U8 supports at least UTF-8. UTF-16 and ISO-8859 should be possible as well, I just don't know anymore. I tested all this a few years ago when I dived into the topic to find a configuration for my tools. It is possible that today's programs are more flexible and tolerant with these details, but with my choices I could use the files on the vast majority of hardware I tested it with. The files itself use the same structure.
 
M3U8:
#EXTM3U
#EXTART:伊東ゆかり (Yukari Ito)
#EXTALB:全曲集 (The Best Song Collection)
#EXTINF:242,伊東ゆかり (Yukari Ito)  -  小指の思い出
伊東ゆかり (Yukari Ito) - 小指の思い出.mp3
 
M3U:
#EXTM3U
#EXTART:Eivør Pálsdóttir
#EXTALB:Eivør Pálsdóttir
#EXTINF:205,Eivør Pálsdóttir - Ástarstund
Eivør Pálsdóttir - Ástarstund.mp3

 

[JBachkurinskiy]

Is it possible to add songs to an m3u playlist with the player itself? I know you can with internal playlists, but you can't rename those.

 

[Chrinz]

I am still not having any luck getting a playlist working on my original X3 (FW 3.3)
 
I've tried M3U and M3U8. 
 
I tried a couple different formats. with and without #EXTM3U in the first line
 
TF1:\path\path\filename.mp3 
and
path\path\filename.mp3
 
I can save the playlist on the internal storage, but I get the message that the file cannot be found. I also tried saving to the root of the SD, but it appears i cannot because the file never shows up. it just disappears. 
 
And ideas would be great. 

 

[Lourens]

I am still not having any luck getting a playlist working on my original X3 (FW 3.3)

I've tried M3U and M3U8. 

I tried a couple different formats. with and without #EXTM3U in the first line

TF1:\path\path\filename.mp3 
and
path\path\filename.mp3

I can save the playlist on the internal storage, but I get the message that the file cannot be found. I also tried saving to the root of the SD, but it appears i cannot because the file never shows up. it just disappears. 

And ideas would be great. 

Hi, quickest way for me to help you is if you could upload say the first ten lines of one of the playlists you are trying to load. Also did you take note that a playlist created outside of your X-player cannot be accessed via the playlist tab?

 

[Chrinz]

Hi, quickest way for me to help you is if you could upload say the first ten lines of one of the playlists you are trying to load. Also did you take note that a playlist created outside of your X-player cannot be accessed via the playlist tab?

I'm not sure what you mean by playlist tab, I don't see any playlist tab on the player itself. I've been trying to play them via browse files. And when I say the playlist disappears from the SD card, it really disappears meaning it is no longer on the SD card even when viewed in Windows.
 
Playlists were created in Windows using Foobar. Below are two examples. 
 
#EXTM3U
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\15-Love Song-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\04-Amber-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\05-Come Original-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\06-Beautiful Disaster-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\10-You Wouldn't Believe-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\09-I'll Be Here Awhile-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Grassroots\04 8-16 A.M.mp3
TF1:\MP3\311\Transistor\02-Prisoner-311.mp3
TF1:\MP3\Albert Collins\1985 - & robert cray & johnny copeland - showdown\01.T-bone Shuffle.mp3
TF1:\MP3\Albert Collins\1986 - cold snap\05 - I Ain't Drunk.mp3
TF1:\MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\03 Gasoline.mp3
TF1:\MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\01 Cochise.mp3
TF1:\MP3\B. B. King\Blues Summit\B.B. King - Hooker, Joe Lee - You Shook Me.mp3
TF1:\MP3\Barry White\Staying Power\08 - Low Rider.mp3
 
and
 
#EXTM3U
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\15-Love Song-311.mp3
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\04-Amber-311.mp3
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\05-Come Original-311.mp3
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\06-Beautiful Disaster-311.mp3
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\10-You Wouldn't Believe-311.mp3
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\09-I'll Be Here Awhile-311.mp3
MP3\311\Grassroots\04 8-16 A.M.mp3
MP3\311\Transistor\02-Prisoner-311.mp3
MP3\Albert Collins\1985 - & robert cray & johnny copeland - showdown\01.T-bone Shuffle.mp3
MP3\Albert Collins\1986 - cold snap\05 - I Ain't Drunk.mp3
MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\03 Gasoline.mp3
MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\01 Cochise.mp3
MP3\B. B. King\Blues Summit\B.B. King - Hooker, Joe Lee - You Shook Me.mp3
MP3\Barry White\Staying Power\08 - Low Rider.mp3

 

[Lourens]

I'm not sure what you mean by playlist tab, I don't see any playlist tab on the player itself. I've been trying to play them via browse files. And when I say the playlist disappears from the SD card, it really disappears meaning it is no longer on the SD card even when viewed in Windows.

Playlists were created in Windows using Foobar. Below are two examples. 

#EXTM3U

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\15-Love Song-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\04-Amber-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\05-Come Original-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\06-Beautiful Disaster-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\10-You Wouldn't Believe-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\09-I'll Be Here Awhile-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Grassroots\04 8-16 A.M.mp3

TF1:\MP3\311\Transistor\02-Prisoner-311.mp3

TF1:\MP3\Albert Collins\1985 - & robert cray & johnny copeland - showdown\01.T-bone Shuffle.mp3

TF1:\MP3\Albert Collins\1986 - cold snap\05 - I Ain't Drunk.mp3

TF1:\MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\03 Gasoline.mp3

TF1:\MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\01 Cochise.mp3

TF1:\MP3\B. B. King\Blues Summit\B.B. King - Hooker, Joe Lee - You Shook Me.mp3

TF1:\MP3\Barry White\Staying Power\08 - Low Rider.mp3

and

#EXTM3U
MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\15-Love Song-311.mp3

MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\04-Amber-311.mp3

MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\05-Come Original-311.mp3

MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\06-Beautiful Disaster-311.mp3

MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\10-You Wouldn't Believe-311.mp3

MP3\311\Greatest Hits '93-'03\09-I'll Be Here Awhile-311.mp3

MP3\311\Grassroots\04 8-16 A.M.mp3

MP3\311\Transistor\02-Prisoner-311.mp3

MP3\Albert Collins\1985 - & robert cray & johnny copeland - showdown\01.T-bone Shuffle.mp3

MP3\Albert Collins\1986 - cold snap\05 - I Ain't Drunk.mp3

MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\03 Gasoline.mp3

MP3\Audioslave\Audioslave\01 Cochise.mp3

MP3\B. B. King\Blues Summit\B.B. King - Hooker, Joe Lee - You Shook Me.mp3

MP3\Barry White\Staying Power\08 - Low Rider.mp3

As soon as I am back home I'll be able to check everything with my player and we should be able to figure out what is wrong. Troubleshooting is merely a process of elimination! I'll be home in 7-8 hours.

 

[Lourens]

  I am still not having any luck getting a playlist working on my original X3 (FW 3.3)
 
I've tried M3U and M3U8. 
 
I tried a couple different formats. with and without #EXTM3U in the first line
 
TF1:\path\path\filename.mp3 
and
path\path\filename.mp3
 
I can save the playlist on the internal storage, but I get the message that the file cannot be found. I also tried saving to the root of the SD, but it appears i cannot because the file never shows up. it just disappears. 
 
And ideas would be great. 

Hi Chrinz,
 
I am back home and just looked at everything again.
 
1. My playlist file is saved in the root of the SD card of my player.
2. It is saved as FLAC - classical.m3u
3. The structure of the file is the same as your second example:
   #EXTM3U
   FLAC\Philip Wesley\Dark Night of the Soul\01 Tears of the East.m4a
 
   Where FLAC would be the first directory in the root of the SD card.
 
****** So far it seems that both of our files are the same, thus we have to move on to HOW you copy the file to your SD card as you mentioned the file never shows up. This part I don't understand. 
 
1. Put the SD card into your player, and connect your player to your computer. The drive is mounted just like any other removable storage device. Open the drive and you are in the root folder of your SD card.
2. Put the SD card into a card reader and plug that into your computer. Same as above.
 
 
******* The only time I couldn't see a playlist I created was after I changed the file attributes to "Hidden". The SD card functions exactly the same as a removable hard disk or USB flash drive. Let me know if anything is unclear. Next step would be screenshots
 
.

 

[Chrinz]

 
****** So far it seems that both of our files are the same, thus we have to move on to HOW you copy the file to your SD card as you mentioned the file never shows up. This part I don't understand. 
 
1. Put the SD card into your player, and connect your player to your computer. The drive is mounted just like any other removable storage device. Open the drive and you are in the root folder of your SD card.
2. Put the SD card into a card reader and plug that into your computer. Same as above.
 
 
******* The only time I couldn't see a playlist I created was after I changed the file attributes to "Hidden". The SD card functions exactly the same as a removable hard disk or USB flash drive. Let me know if anything is unclear. Next step would be screenshots
 
.
 

 
Thanks for your response.
 
I've tried both connecting the player to my PC via USB to copy the file to the SD root, and putting the SD card in my laptop to copy the file. Both had the same result. The file shows up as long as the drive is mounted in Windows, but it seems that as soon as the player mounts that SD card the file disappears. Even when I reconnect the player to Windows the file is no longer there. 
 
I've verified that there is no hidden attribute on the playlist file also. 

 

[Lourens]

Let's try this.
 
Just create a blank text file (with notepad for example  - test.txt) and copy the "test.txt" file to the root of your SD card. Eject from your computer. Mount the drive in the player again. You shouldn't be able to see the file via Browse files.
Connect the SD card to your computer again. Is the file visible? If so, double click to open with Notepad - directly from your SD card. In Notepad, click File - Save As... The root contents of your SD card should be visible. SELECT "Save as type:" change to "All Files". Now in the "File name:" box type: test.m3u 
 
Save and eject from your computer.
 
Is this file visible via the Browse Files on your player? It should be.
 
Because it doesn't have any content once you try to open it on your player it will say "File not found". But if you can see the file on your player, victory is close at hand.

 

[Chrinz]

After messing around with this again tonight I think I may have been missing the obvious. The issue may be with the Micro SD itself. I tried copying a text file with no luck and I've tried copying more music also with no luck. 
 
I've taken the card out of the player and put it into my laptop. I copy files eject and mount it again in Windows and the files are gone without the player ever being involved. 
 
It's a little strange because I have 80+gb of music which all seems to still play fine, it just doesn't allow anything new to be written. No errors copying files either...It will be a pain to copy everything again to a new card, but i'll have to at least try a new one. 
 
Thanks for the help

 

[Lourens]

No problem!

 

[jdeblese]

  Well my x5ii has arrived and I've tried JRiver (I have version 19) to create a playlist and after a little messing with the settings it works fine apart from:
 
.\Music\Brian May\Back to the Light\06 Driven by You.mp3
.\Music\BØRNS\Electric Love (Oliver Remix)\01 - Electric Love (Oliver Remix).mp3
.\Music\Caro Emerald\Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor\03 Riviera Life.mp3
 
 
The second file can't be read - I'm assuming it's something to do with the funny character. If anyone knows who to get around this it would be much appreciated.

 
So, I ran into a similar problem with é characters and I've found a fix in my case: it has to do with unicode normalization, and the fact that é has multiple unequal ways of being encoded in unicode, either as the character 'é' in two bytes, or as an ASCII 'e' followed by two bytes indicating an accent on the preceding character. As far as I can tell the FIIO uses NFC normalization (two-byte é), which is why my tracks showed up correctly when I copied them over under Linux. OS X uses NFD normalization (three-byte e\'), however, so when I made a playlist on my Mac the file name as a string of bytes in the m3u didn't match the file name on disk, despite the fact that they looked identical on my Mac. When viewing the playlist in the FIIO the file names in the playlist showed up incorrectly ("Cafe??" instead of "Café"), despite that I'd saved the m3u8 in utf-8 encoding and that the actual files did show up correctly.
 
The fix: run "cat test.m3u8 | iconv -f utf-8-mac -t utf-8 > test_fixed.m3u8" in a terminal, assuming that all your files are actually stored on the FIIO using the NFC convention. If they're not, then you may first have to do something tricky with "rsync --iconv ...." first. It's also possible it works fine if you write an NFD playlist having copied the files directly to SD on a Mac, assuming the FIIO doesn't do any later normalization, but I haven't tested this and doubt the accents would show up properly on the FIIO. I also haven't tested which normalization Windows uses, but seeing as that has worked fine for most, I'd assume it's NFC.
 
Sorry for posting such obscure Unicode details here, but I hope it can help others who run into the same bizarre problem I did. Can't say I'd heard of normalization until today.