[thericochet]

Anyone know yet whether the new version supports folder.jpg artwork?
Don't want to have to embed the artwork if I can at all avoid it, on principle that it's fundamentally a waste of time (embedding) and space (~12x each artwork instead of 1x). Cheers

 

[AndrewH13]

   
You can also search (i.e. Google) for "GUI Format" and download a little 76kb app that gives you a GUI interface for the same. The nice thing with GUI Format is it lets you do a quick format for those times you don't need a complete wipe so it won't take so long.

 
Might be a little safer than that slip of the finger that put a 'c' mistakenly in drive letter

   Good to know about both though.
Out of interest, when is there a need to do a Full format rather than Quick?

 

[fiascogarcia]

   
thanks, sorry it will cause some trouble and we have not explain again and again, and too many unneccessary work to us.

 
Hey, after reading this thread, you guys are brave just to send out these beta units at all!!  

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Thanks for the info about the EQ. In that case it works fine. Sorry about reporting bugs, wont do it again. Keep up the great work! 

It's not that you can't report bugs, it's just that I didn't make it clear that it was a beta firmware that should be treated as such for bug reports (e.g. "Hi James / Joe, I've been trying the latest beta firmware (say 1.21) and I noticed that...) or better yet bug reports for beta firmware could be handled through pm to me.

Next time I'll make it more clear which firmwares are beta in my posts

 

[Age8E]

   
sorry not. the play all must be support by the database. anyway, we still have change to increase the maximum song number in the future. but it can't be unlimited.

 
I don't think anyone was wishing for the number to be unlimited; there's really no need for that, since memory card capacity limits the number of tracks we can have anyway. If you guys are working on ways to increase the number, that's great news as far as I'm concerned. With just one 64GB card filled, I'm already at over 3,000 tracks, mostly FLACs... so I think a ceiling of 5,800 is one many people will bump their heads against. Even just 2-3,000 more would probably alleviate most people's concerns, though.

 

[dacari]

Is there any plans to display album art not embedded? I mean cover.jpg, folder.jpg inside the folder.

 

[sandalaudio]

Latest firmware FW1.22 can be found here
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kjypmwp2p3y0f9y/x5FW1.22.zip
 

 
Great! The volume difference between the PCM and DSD files is fixed.
I have just tested it and is working fine. I can now play different format albums without having to deafen myself.
Thanks for the prompt update.

 

[AndrewH13]

Yeaa! X5 arrived from Amazon UK and had a 'quick' three hour seession! Wifes getting annoyed waving her hands at me and I cant hear. Had a 64GB card prepared with mostly hi-res but a smackering of MP3s and FLACs included.
 
Nicely packaged and have found User-Interface easy, but I had downloaded User Manual last night so was quite prepared for the layout. Wheel feels fine which was biggest concern having read some reviews.
 
Only mishaps so far are Previous and Next seem to have a mind of their own on the hi-res album I tried them on, but scroll wheel selecting to next track and previous is fine. And for most of my copied music, EQ doest not work, think someone else found this on hi-res material? It's fine on the one mp3 album, and one FLAC album I tried.
 
Now for listening, nice to have a full battery on arrival as still got to sort a charger, my wife's Samsung charger was less than an amp and a Kobo reader only 5v 1 amp. Guess these may work but slowly as a 2 amp recommended?
 
I first realized DAPS were a serious option again a few months ago after hearing a fellow Head- Fi-er's Sony ZX1 and JH16s. I come from a hi-fi background and although I had Minidisc and a Sony DAP years ago, had given up on portable music and used an iPhone/iPod for casual listening, mostly in the bath with a dock! This 1.5K system was a revelation, it was like the first time I heard 'proper' hifi, and so started this crazy new pastime.
 
ZX1 order from Sony UK never materialised and I decided to jump on the X5 train after the great reviews here and the fact that the company communicated with their audience, much like when I was a beta-tester for the now defuct Tag McLaren Audio.
 
A month ago while awaiting a DAP I demoed some IEMs in a shop an hours drive away, and chose the Westone W40s as the best alrounder amongst those I heard. Nice with my iPhone but this is the first chance they have had to shine, so Sound Quality-wise, I am really testing the Fiio X5 and Westone W40 together.
 
Firstly, tried Ice On The Motorway from Wilko Johnson & Roger Daltrey's great new album. Boy, these DAP boogie, and we have started with the sole mp3/320 album loaded. Great timing.
 
Next up, my current hi-res test track, Panic Station by Muse. Low bass lovely, separation great, only matched by the ZX1 combo I heard previously, definately in the same ball-park.
 
Neil Young's Heart Of Gold 24/96 sounds so pure and life-like for an old 70's recording.
 
Better try FLAC as that's what most playing will be, Jeff Beck's Brush with the Blues (another favourite test track since hearing in a Naim demo), so spacious, you can each each separate member of audience's laugh from The live Grammy Museum recording. Lovely fast finish of drums then you hear the cyballs sustain. The guitar sounds sublime on this, the drums fast, lovely club ambience. This is the track that most amazes me, a DAP can capture only what a top-flight audio system can.
 
Back to hires, this time worried about my Yes albums playing OK as someone reported a problem with 88 music and these are 24/176, a multiple. Played fine, amazing separation and tone on Long Distance Runaround.
 
But all so rosy? No. The screen is slightly skewed, higher top-right than bottom-left that was a big irritation when I first noticed. Only a bit out I guess. Anyone else have one slighty crooked? But after listening for a few hours, it's importance has waned.
 
Just got to get used to hitting top button to bring back to life, keep pressing other buttons but they either do nothing (Lock1) or pause song or skip a few (Lock2)!
 
Sorry for such a long first impressions! You can tell I'm happy, 64GB card ample and will have fun loading up every week from PC/NAS.
 
Now, do I update to 1.22 and try the handful of YES albums I have in DSD?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

1, this is a techincal issues, I have to ask someone to help me translate to English, and Joe gone to Singapore and just back to Hong Kong. but mainly , this issues is about the RAM resource , we have to limited the quantity

   in case the system crunsh.

2, Yes, new firmware will imporve this issues. but there are not perfect gapless playback, did I explain that the system need to load the next sound tracks into the RAM >

3, Not total understand the situation.

there are a thread about our firmware updated already.

Official plans for firmware updates for the X5 after version 1.10!
http://www.head-fi.org/t/707751/official-plans-for-firmware-updates-for-the-x5-after-version-1-10

Please PM to Joe, ID Joe Bloggs about the detail of the ID3tags

James has already posted at length about these issues after the quoted post but I would summarize the answers to the recent hotly discussed technical questions as follows:
1. The player has limited system resources (RAM and ROM for program storage and processing power). This is true for any system but the X5's system resources are more limited than, say, that of a generic android smartphone. The player was built based on the belief that nobody in this segment of the market needs or wants to buy a system that could power a smartphone just to play music--the money saved could be put toward a high-class audio section like the X5 has.

2. In return for such savings, the firmware for the X5 must be custom coded from the ground up and the resources available are not that different from "that Nomad Zen a decade ago" when you consider that the music the X5 has to decode are, say, 192k/24bit APEs which are much more CPU-intensive to decode than mp3s and have an uncompressed bitrate over 6 times that of the mp3. The X5 also needs to make room in its program storage for support for like ten times more file formats than those old players. The code for this alone would probably have eaten up all the program storage on the Zen, let alone leaving any room for the media library database

3. I have to check with the engineering department again tomorrow but I was told just now that the media library database in its current implementation has to be kept in RAM--perhaps to support the All Songs functionality--so moving it to an SD card is not an easy answer. Perhaps if one could accept significantly slower song browsing?

3. I have talked to engineering today and they told me the media database file is limited by size of internal storage, not RAM. Moving this database file to an SD card is still not as simple as flicking a switch. (e.g. If somebody removed the card with the database on it would the X5 crash hard?) We can't promise anything atm but

4. One could categorize and subcategorize songs into folders however one wants, so many see this as a workaround to the database problem. The remaining problem is shuffling among all songs in folder browsing is not possible. I can't say if there will be a workaround to allow this. If one had over 6000 songs on a card and only wanted to shuffle them on the X5 today, one could plausibly format it to FAT32 (which supports 65536 songs in one folder) and put all the songs in the same folder...

 

[Age8E]

James has already posted at length about these issues after the quoted post but I would summarize the answers to the recent hotly discussed technical questions as follows:
1. The player has limited system resources (RAM and ROM for program storage and processing power). This is true for any system but the X5's system resources are more limited than, say, that of a generic android smartphone. The player was built based on the belief that nobody in this segment of the market needs or wants to buy a system that could power a smartphone just to play music--the money saved could be put toward a high-class audio section like the X5 has.

2. In return for such savings, the firmware for the X5 must be custom coded from the ground up and the resources available are not that different from "that Nomad Zen a decade ago" when you consider that the music the X5 has to decode are, say, 192k/24bit APEs which are much more CPU-intensive to decode than mp3s and have an uncompressed bitrate over 6 times that of the mp3. The X5 also needs to make room in its program storage for support for like ten times more file formats than those old players. The code for this alone would probably have eaten up all the program storage on the Zen, let alone leaving any room for the media library database

3. I have to check with the engineering department again tomorrow but I was told just now that the media library database in its current implementation has to be kept in RAM--perhaps to support the All Songs functionality--so moving it to an SD card is not an easy answer. Perhaps if one could accept significantly slower song browsing?

4. One could categorize and subcategorize songs into folders however one wants, so many see this as a workaround to the database problem. The remaining problem is shuffling among all songs in folder browsing is not possible. I can't say if there will be a workaround to allow this. If one had over 6000 songs on a card and only wanted to shuffle them on the X5 today, one could plausibly format it to FAT32 (which supports 65536 songs in one folder) and put all the songs in the same folder...

 
Hi Joe, thanks for the answers. One question for you: has the company discussed adding support for ReplayGain volume normalization tags at some point in the future? My reading on the subject suggests that it's not resource intensive to implement this, though I'm no engineer.

 

[donwhee]

Thank you sandalaudio!  Great to know and thank you for taking the extra time to answer and also to illustrate.  Happy to know I can just keep it on high gain.  

 

[krayziehustler]

If only there were a way to create symbolic links or something similar so that i wouldn't have to duplicate my entire library just so i can shuffle/play all....

 

[nafran]

  If only there were a way to create symbolic links or something similar so that i wouldn't have to duplicate my entire library just so i can shuffle/play all....

I was thinking the same thing. Tried looking for a MediaMonkey script to do just that in a 'Playlists' folder on the card, but didn't find anything. Also had trouble making relative links in Windows so that the drive letter would be ignored.

 

[ptravel]

3. I have to check with the engineering department again tomorrow but I was told just now that the media library database in its current implementation has to be kept in RAM--perhaps to support the All Songs functionality--so moving it to an SD card is not an easy answer. Perhaps if one could accept significantly slower song browsing?

4. One could categorize and subcategorize songs into folders however one wants, so many see this as a workaround to the database problem. The remaining problem is shuffling among all songs in folder browsing is not possible. I can't say if there will be a workaround to allow this. If one had over 6000 songs on a card and only wanted to shuffle them on the X5 today, one could plausibly format it to FAT32 (which supports 65536 songs in one folder) and put all the songs in the same folder...

Joe, first thank you to you and James and Fiio.  I know of no other company that works so hard to meet customer expectations and to keep customers so well informed. 
 
Regarding accepting slower song browsing, I think that's a very reasonable compromise.  A broad demographic of listeners in this thread have expressed a preference for comprehensive search by ID tag, whereas I suspect that number of listeners that would use the X5 to play one song at a time by searching file folders if very small.  That smaller group would still be accommodated with a somewhat slower search, whereas the rest of us, who make up the vast majority of X5 customers would get a feature that we consider important.
 
I'd also note that moving the index to the SD card adds another benefit: it would be unnecessary to scan the card each time it was changed.  What first drew my attention to the X5 was its vast storage capability -- assuming Sandisk starts shipping 128 Gb cards again, the X5 can support a 1/4 terabyte library off-the-shelf.  Support for OTG makes possible carrying a music library of virtually unlimited size.  Though the FAT32 work around you've suggested would work for shuffle play, it would also preclude virtually all search capability by album, artist, genre, etc.
 
If, as you seem to suggest, the primary downside of moving the index to the SD card is slower song browsing on a song-by-song basis, I think it would be in the interest of the vast majority of X5 purchasers to accept that compromise in exchange for the considerably enhanced functionality of comprehensive and complete tag search and shuffle play.
 
Incidentally, in describing the fixes in the 1.22 firmware, I think you referred to gapless play as "improved."  It's much more than improved -- it's perfect!  Don't be modest -- you've done a great job! 

 

[sinky]

I have a lot of high res music including some sacd ripped to flac  .Has anyone tried 88khz and 176khz flac  these on their x5?
fiio supports 192khz and 96khz  I,m not sure about 88khz or 176khz though.will the device re sample and play these files or should I rip my sacd files to 96khz  instead?