[originalsnuffy]

Final observation on MP3. Rip your favorite complex piece of music to MP3 and FLAC. Try both. If you can’t hear a difference then stay with MP3

 

[Shanling]

@Shanling

Another request: I noticed that the M0 scales album cover art to full screen. Thus, all too often covers get cropped. This can look pretty ugly when the lettering is involved. Maybe you can make the scaling optional?

Will ask if can this be improved, but not planning to add such user settings.

I have a question on playing music by folders. I assume that the folder tab shows top level folders and then the various layers of sub folders. For instance, my top level folders are classical, jazz, new age, etc. Then under classical the sub folders are by composer and then under each composer are the pieces of music folders, like Symphony No 4. With my phone or FiiO X3ii, the screen shows the top level, then when I click on classical it shows the composers, etc. Am I correct in assuming this is how the M0 works in folder view. I have it in my Amazon cart and are about to check out.

Yes, folder browsing on M0 works exactly as any other folder browsing on PC/phones.

I know this an old post, but I have an m3u playlist that contains 495 songs on my M0. I use this playlist on other DAPs without any problems. On the M0, on shuffle or straight play, only the first 100 songs are played. The rest of the list is ignored. Is there a limit on m3u playlists that exists that I missed somewhere?

Tried to recreate problem, made new 150 files playlist and files above 100 normally plays. If I choose them, get to them slowly through previous songs or in shuffle, no problem.

Will try again with something closer to your 495.

 

[ColdsnapBry]

Couldn't re-find this with a search, is the battery bug still in version 2.3 where the battery will show red but still have a ton of life?

One more, checked the manual and couldn't find this. What files trigger the 'HR' icon in currently playing? 24bit rips?

 

[Shanling]

Couldn't re-find this with a search, is the battery bug still in version 2.3 where the battery will show red but still have a ton of life?

One more, checked the manual and couldn't find this. What files trigger the 'HR' icon in currently playing? 24bit rips?

Battery indicator still can do that sometimes.

HR should be showing at 24/88 and higher.

 

[fish1050]

Agreed. You cannot go back from lossey to lossless. Digital storage is cheap. If your spending the time to RIP. Do it once. The current crop of audio managers (mediamonkey, foobar.....u pick) makes it so easy to give you what you need for a given situation. I see way too many people stating they took the time to re-rip to get their library back to lossless. Do it right the first time and be done.

Well digital storage is cheap relatively speaking. If am spending $110.00 on a DAP chances are my budget is limited. To then turn around and spend $90 on a 400 GB seems counter intuitive. I mean if $200 is your budget for example then I would spend $150.00 to get a better DAP and get a smaller microsd card for say $40.00 which would get you maybe a 200 GB card. Once I have a card do I want to go and buy another card a few months later and retire a perfectly good card because I need more space. To me it makes more sense to do what I did, identify older tracks that won't suffer from compression convert them and save some space and save some money. Sure rip your CD's to flac like I did and then convert some music to mp3 or ogg which can be done quick and easy with a batch conversion. It might take 30 minutes out of your life but save money in the long run. When I start to entertain getting a new DAP I start a fund and add extra cash to when I can. If I then dip into that to buy a bigger card then it takes me longer to save up for another DAP.

Being married and running a business I can't just run out and drop $90 on bigger microsd card whenever I feel like it. If you have the disposable cash to do that more power to you but some people don't. To me compressing some tracks when needed makes more sense to me than dropping more funds on bigger and bigger cards. I understand the desire to not want to go lossy at all, and I thought that way when I was younger. But having listened to music for 40 years and selling audio gear for 15 years I am comfortable in the fact now that if you can't tell the difference then don't worry about compressing tracks if it makes sense to do it.

Okey I am done with the whole lossy vs lossless discussion and won't comment anymore about it.

 

[salla45]

Well digital storage is cheap relatively speaking. If am spending $110.00 on a DAP chances are my budget is limited. To then turn around and spend $90 on a 400 GB seems counter intuitive. I mean if $200 is your budget for example then I would spend $150.00 to get a better DAP and get a smaller microsd card for say $40.00 which would get you maybe a 200 GB card. Once I have a card do I want to go and buy another card a few months later and retire a perfectly good card because I need more space. To me it makes more sense to do what I did, identify older tracks that won't suffer from compression convert them and save some space and save some money. Sure rip your CD's to flac like I did and then convert some music to mp3 or ogg which can be done quick and easy with a batch conversion. It might take 30 minutes out of your life but save money in the long run. When I start to entertain getting a new DAP I start a fund and add extra cash to when I can. If I then dip into that to buy a bigger card then it takes me longer to save up for another DAP.

Being married and running a business I can't just run out and drop $90 on bigger microsd card whenever I feel like it. If you have the disposable cash to do that more power to you but some people don't. To me compressing some tracks when needed makes more sense to me than dropping more funds on bigger and bigger cards. I understand the desire to not want to go lossy at all, and I thought that way when I was younger. But having listened to music for 40 years and selling audio gear for 15 years I am comfortable in the fact now that if you can't tell the difference then don't worry about compressing tracks if it makes sense to do it.

Okey I am done with the whole lossy vs lossless discussion and won't comment anymore about it.

you make a valid point. At the end of the day you pays your money and takes your choice, so to speak

its getting to the point where the card sizes are getting so large that to fill one completely and pop it in a small player becomes largely irrelevant, i mean from the point of view that there's so much music on there that you can get lost for days going through it all, and the devices like the M0 aren't really ideal for such huge amounts of music, for locating and sorting, and such, anyway.

Ref the FLAC/Lossy debate... for me, the direct listening A/B, flac vs lossy is a non-sequitur in the sense that for me, music is about emotional connection, and SQ is a means to an end only, not an end in and of itself. I just find that i get more emotionally involved when listening to good flacs on a relatively good system, be it large or small. As soon as i listen for difference to the sound, the connection is lost and I can't really hear differences in sound facets. Alot of this is likely psycho-acoustic, and placebo, but that's OK. It's all part of the equation.

Whatever the case, we're living in great times when we have so much choice musically, and ample space at relatively affordable prices to exploit our hobby to the full.

 

[barondla]

Rather have fewer albums in the highest quality. Would a "better" dap, with only mp3 files, sound better than M0 with lossless files? Doubtful, unless spending hundreds more.

 

[fish1050]

Rather have fewer albums in the highest quality. Would a "better" dap, with only mp3 files, sound better than M0 with lossless files? Doubtful, unless spending hundreds more.

I no longer think of DAP's as really sounding better just different at least within a few hundred dollars difference. My M0 and A17 aren't that far apart cost wise but they probably sound as different as any two DAP's I have ever tried. Sony definitely has a distinct sound that you won't mistake for any other DAP's.

I guess it really depends on your situation. If you only have a DAP as your listening source I could see wanting to have the highest quality tracks available and I would probably go for the largest microsd card I could. But as long as I have my home system and server my DAP's will be more about having all my music with me when I travel vs needing the highest quality tracks. When traveling I just can't appreciate the listening experience as much so very high quality tracks are overkill.

 

[ColdsnapBry]

The one thing I was thinking was battery live on mp3 vs flac. So before I spend two days A / B testing anyone can ballpark playback time on a 320 MP3 vs a 24 bit Flac driving Koss Porta Pros (which seem to be low powered)?

 

[paddler57]

its getting to the point where the card sizes are getting so large that to fill one completely and pop it in a small player becomes largely irrelevant, i mean from the point of view that there's so much music on there that you can get lost for days going through it all, and the devices like the M0 aren't really ideal for such huge amounts of music, for locating and sorting, and such, anyway.

Well, if there was an app on our phone that made player management easy and intuitive with a big touchscreen and user friendly interface, using the M0 with big gig storage would make for an ideal solution. Just saying.

 

[salla45]

Well, if there was an app on our phone that made player management easy and intuitive with a big touchscreen and user friendly interface, using the M0 with big gig storage would make for an ideal solution. Just saying.

Now there's a thought. What a great idea. Can use Bluetooth from the phone to control the shanling and keep SQ high by playing from source on the shanling via the sabre DAC. @Shanling - get on this immediately

It would be a game changer for folks with low quality phone output and/or no expandable storage on their phones.

 

[fish1050]

The one thing I was thinking was battery live on mp3 vs flac. So before I spend two days A / B testing anyone can ballpark playback time on a 320 MP3 vs a 24 bit Flac driving Koss Porta Pros (which seem to be low powered)?

Keeping mind that both mp3 and flac are compressed formats even though flac is lossless and have to be decompressed during playback I would say flac might drain the battery a little faster. This is just a guess but given the larger file size it might take more power to decompress and play flac files. Perhaps someone else would have a better idea but that would be my logical guess.

 

[fish1050]

So it appears Shanling did nothing to address the battery meter accuracy with firmware 2.3 and it seems worse now at least for me. After I fully charged my M0, installed the 2.3 firmware and did a reset. I played the unit until the battery died. My unit played for over 4 hours after the meter went red with zero bars before the low battery message came on and the unit shutdown. In the past I was getting 1.5 to 2 hours at zero bars to low battery and shutdown ( have done 3 full drains).

It would seem the only way to get decent battery life you need to let it play until it shuts down or sacrifice several hours of playing time with each charge. I understand the meter isn't accurate but it needs to be better than this. I know it can be done because my 4+ year old Sony has a much more accurate meter even after years of use.

@Shanling is this issue going to be addressed at all in the future or do we just ignore the battery meter all together?

 

[Natsume]

the paint around the bezel of the screen obscures the edges of the artwork it cuts off about 18 pixels around the edge. I have fixed some artwork by adding a black 20 pixel border around artwork that has text cut off. So all of the artwork shows and the artwork border is covered by the paint. I used photoshop elements to add the border. A bit of a pain but it works in a pinch vs trying to get Shanling to mess with the scaler.

Good to know, thank you. It is sad that the M0 has this little cover issue. When it comes to recognizing different image file types it's the best DAP I've ever had. Not even Sony is able to deliver an acceptable cover art support. They are even worse: the A 45 only displays baseline JPGs. What a shame...

Sony definitely has a distinct sound that you won't mistake for any other DAP's.

True, but this is not necessarily a good thing. I would always prefer the clear and wider sound of the M0 to the indistinct and somewhat muddy sound of the A 45. Sony is messing around too much with exotic sound enhancers. A DAP with the build quality of the A 45 and the sound of the M0 would be great though.

MP3/FLAC discussion:
I didn't hesitate for a second buying a 400 GB SD card and stuffing my whole lossless digital music collection (mostly FLAC) onto the M0. A lifelong dream coming true! I think this DAP is great for handling huge collections. The scrolling in the folder view is really fast and it is even possible to shuffle through the entire collection using one gigantic playlist. And all that, surprisingly, without significant performance issues - great work, Shanling!

 

[davidcotton]

One observation to make on this mp vs flac thing that seems to be brewing. A lot of the mp3 players seem to do flac gapless without hiccup, mp3 not so much. So if gapless playback is important to you flac is the way to go.