Yeah, I love that feature. Might pick one up before they’re obsolete.
I'm the developer of the Rockbox port to the Q1. Just would like to say, in case you're interested, I'm working on porting Linux to the Q1. It isn't very exciting right now - no graphics and no audio yet - but the most difficult parts are already done. Running Rockbox on top of Linux can enable USB DAC, Bluetooth, and even WiFi-related goodies... with full control over the OS the possibilities are endless. There is actually a decent amount of interest in these features for Rockbox, but progress is slow / non-existent because there are few contributors and not a lot of hardware can do this.
I am surprised you find the Q1 laggy! I have 12300 songs on mind and don't find it laggy at all. Do you have the latest firmware installed? I do notice operation is even smoother with the latest firmware. I demoed the A55 and found it noticeably laggier than my Q1
I agree with your assessment of the A55 stock sound and the better sound quality of the Q1 has kept me from investing in an A55. Some people don't like the Q1 UI but I have not issues with it, I love the simplicity, I just turn it on and press play. Being in my 50's I really like the bold fonts Shanling is using on the Q1. I have no problem reading the text despite the small screen size even outside. I found the A55 screen with it's much smaller fonts harder to read and I am sure it would be even harder outside.
I am interested, this sounds promising! Could you please point me to the instructions to try it out? I might be able to give a hand as well.
I did buy mine used and haven’t checked the firmware, thanks for the heads up.
There's a thread on the Rockbox forums and mostly complete build instructions on my github repo. The only thing that's missing from the build instructions is how to build the bootloader: you need to clone the Rockbox repo and apply this patch manually (if you've not used Gerrit before, click the "Download" button that's right above the diffstat). If the patch says merged, it's already in the repo, there's no need to manually apply it.Then follow the development guide to get your build environment set up and compile the Q1 bootloader. You then need to compile "jztool" found in utils/jztool, you can use that to either flash the bootloader or just temporarily load it. Either way is good enough for running Linux.
I love it when people try to improve on the DAP firmware like you and MrWalkman but in this case I am not exactly sure what benefits all of this effort will be? I mean the Q1 is a basic DAP and it does everything pretty well. For me it has all the features in the stock firmware already and I have used pretty much every feature at one point or another.
Not the one you quoted, but for me it's little niches such as the ability to sort e.g. by albums (folder skip is not the same thing, you can't use shuffle to jump to another random album), to use other file system or to choose the typeface. UX-wise multi-press like what done in Sxmo could also allow changing playlist ordering mode or toggling button lock.
Besides eventually adding Bluetooth support, I don't have any specific features in mind that are only possible under Linux - Rockbox already runs on the Q1 (just not under a Linux kernel) and serves my needs pretty well. Shanling's firmware is actually pretty good - before I had a Q1, I used the FiiO M3K, which is absolutely *terrible* in comparison. The M3K's buggy firmware is what motivated me to port Rockbox, and the Q1 port basically dropped out of that work "for free" since it uses the same SoC.
