[hAbIrAbI]

from what i am used to do, album artist and artist mean the same thing, and as most of us do the tagging ourselves, there is little to no difference. And, for not keeping a lot of tags as it slows down the play and can create bugs, i only tag song name, artist, und album name, year ang genera.

EDIT::   comment, album artist, composer and discnumber and covert art embbeded in file seem to slow down the player and create certain bugs. I am using mp3tag, so i should be error free.

Anyways, if say a song is linkin park - in the end, artist is linkin park, and album artist is linkin park, for example, why would you have different album artist from artist?

It's most important for compilations. There you have different artists but you'll likely want it to be surmised under "Various Artists". For that using album artist is great.

Also I prefer to just run Discogs and/or Musicbrainz for tagging in foobar2000. Much less work.

 

[olddude]

When I do a compilation folder I tag the tracks with the name of the folder where the tag Album would go.  And use the same photo for all, embedded.  Then I just number the tracks consecutively.  Then it all matches up and I can play the songs in the folder in order or on shuffle/random.  
 
So... a folder called Walking has all tracks listed by song name and artist's name from the album named Walking.  Numbered 01, 01, 03 etc.  

 

[freddy315]

I have one tag issue that I'm wondering if some one can suggest the solution?  I've got all my 3000 songs loaded and organized.  Playlist set up. Mixture of flac, m4a and mp3 files.  All my folders and artists are correct but one.
 
I have a number of Allman Bros Band albums and have them in the folder "The Allman Brothers Band".  One song from the album Beginnings shows up there but all the other songs from the album show up in a folder simply called "Allman Brothers". All are MP3 files.   Have checked tags with MediaMonkey, Foobar, MP3 Tag and Tag Scanner.  All show Artist and Album Artist as "The Allman Brothers Band".   In no case can I find any place that they are listed as simply "Allman Brothers" but thats where they end up once loaded into the X5.
 
Doesn't happen with "The Rolling Stones", "The Beatles", "The Pretenders", etc.   All of which were at one time in folders that did not have "The"  and were moved.
 
I know its a small glitch but it bugs me that everything else is read by X5 properly but this.  Any idea where I might have made a mistake?

 

[Brooko]

  I have one tag issue that I'm wondering if some one can suggest the solution?  I've got all my 3000 songs loaded and organized.  Playlist set up. Mixture of flac, m4a and mp3 files.  All my folders and artists are correct but one.
 
I have a number of Allman Bros Band albums and have them in the folder "The Allman Brothers Band".  One song from the album Beginnings shows up there but all the other songs from the album show up in a folder simply called "Allman Brothers". All are MP3 files.   Have checked tags with MediaMonkey, Foobar, MP3 Tag and Tag Scanner.  All show Artist and Album Artist as "The Allman Brothers Band".   In no case can I find any place that they are listed as simply "Allman Brothers" but thats where they end up once loaded into the X5.
 
Doesn't happen with "The Rolling Stones", "The Beatles", "The Pretenders", etc.   All of which were at one time in folders that did not have "The"  and were moved.
 
I know its a small glitch but it bugs me that everything else is read by X5 properly but this.  Any idea where I might have made a mistake?

 
Use MP3tag, and use the option to show extended tags.  This shows all the tags which are embedded.  Chances are that there will be several different Artist or Artist Album tags.  You want to reduce this to just two - one for Artist and one for Album Artist.
 
When I'm tagging, I always view "extended options", and basically delete all tag categories except for 8 > Album, Title, Track #, Genre, Year, Album Artist, Artist, and Album Cover.  These are consistent across my entire 350+ album library.  I've never had an issue scanning, and never had a freeze.

 

[AndrewH13]

I recently moved from Westone W40s to Shure 846s and posted in the DX90 thread, think its only fair I posted here as well as I use each DAP for a week then swop!

I didnt think it possible the X5 could sound THIS GOOD!

Until last year I've been a HiFi chap, only meeting a fellow member and hearing his ZX1 with JH16s convinced me it was time to go back to portables which I hadnt enjoyed since a gold Minidisc portable.

Have loved both DAPs finding the X5 faultless for my needs. Copy 20 or so albums on at a time, have a NAS drive full of music so dont quite get this 'need 10,000 tracks at once', but everyone to their own. I do think though that the X5 deserves better quality than what thousands cramped in would give you. To my surprise a bit, it is more iem or phone related than I would have thought.

I like the W40s with the Fiio and play a wide range of mp3(320s), Flacs (from my CDs) plus Hi-Res. Now though, the better Shures are sublime with some DSD from SACDs (Yes albums, Howe and Squire never sounded more enjoyable even on previous Naim, Linn and Tag gear) but mp3s sound flatter and worse than on the Westones.

I come from a HiFi age where source was all important, this has now changed, with a bargain like the X5, it seems better iems just show how good the X5 really is.

Just listened to a Jeff Beck live track, Brush With The Blues which has sounded good before, but never better than through my X5.

Enjoy the X5 for what it can do, not fret over what it can't. Going to have a glass of wine then play Floyd's latest then Zep 2 re-master. Cheers.

 

[BubbaBob]

... What I was referring to was that, if I personally wanted to down convert a DSD to 24/192 I could do so (and I have).  The X5 does down convert DSD to either 24/88 or 24/192 (Brooko is very likely correct about the latter, though I'm sure I read somewhere about the former).  Everything else HD plays as is.

That's what I thought. There's some confusion caused by people referring to DSD as HD and vice-versa. As I understand it, HD is everything above Redbook 44.1/16 and DSD is a special case.
 
 

 

[BubbaBob]

   
Both specs and the fact that DSD plays in up to 24/192 is listed on the website.
 
There has also been discussion here on it.
 
What is your problem?

 
My complaint about the manual is that it doesn't cover downsampling (apparently only of DSD) or include any specs. I have no idea what else wasn't covered in it. The playlist limitations certainly weren't.
 
Specs are almost universally included IN the users manual, I shouldn't have to go to their website for this info OR dig through 920 pages of Head-Fi posts with a search engine of dubious quality to find them.
 
At this price level, I expect a more complete user's manual.

 

[BubbaBob]

  When I do a compilation folder I tag the tracks with the name of the folder where the tag Album would go.  And use the same photo for all, embedded.  Then I just number the tracks consecutively.  Then it all matches up and I can play the songs in the folder in order or on shuffle/random.  
 
So... a folder called Walking has all tracks listed by song name and artist's name from the album named Walking.  Numbered 01, 01, 03 etc.  

 
I leave Album Artist blank except for compilations, where I tag it Various. This keeps Foobar happy and doesn't seem to screw up any programs or players. It would be a disaster if I had to go back and fill in the Album Artist tag on 7000 albums with essentially redundant information. For compilations, I also put the artist for each track in parentheses after the track name.
 
For the X5, I have 27 Alphabetic folders on each card (the 27th for Artists that start with a number, like 3 Mustaphas 3) in which I place Artist name folders. In these are Album folders and within these, of course, the actual tracks. This makes it easy to find them without using the Library functions which, even in the beta, can't handle what I've put on one 128G card of FLACS and one 128G card of MP3's.

 

[BubbaBob]

  I have one tag issue that I'm wondering if some one can suggest the solution?  I've got all my 3000 songs loaded and organized.  Playlist set up. Mixture of flac, m4a and mp3 files.  All my folders and artists are correct but one.
 
I have a number of Allman Bros Band albums and have them in the folder "The Allman Brothers Band".  One song from the album Beginnings shows up there but all the other songs from the album show up in a folder simply called "Allman Brothers". All are MP3 files.   Have checked tags with MediaMonkey, Foobar, MP3 Tag and Tag Scanner.  All show Artist and Album Artist as "The Allman Brothers Band".   In no case can I find any place that they are listed as simply "Allman Brothers" but thats where they end up once loaded into the X5.
 
Doesn't happen with "The Rolling Stones", "The Beatles", "The Pretenders", etc.   All of which were at one time in folders that did not have "The"  and were moved.
 
I know its a small glitch but it bugs me that everything else is read by X5 properly but this.  Any idea where I might have made a mistake?

Try using a tag stripper on them and retag them from scratch. I had a similar problem once and that fixed it. There seem to be tags that almost no software will show to you. I don't know why the X5 would read them in preference to the Artist tag, though.

 

[freddy315]

Thanks all.  I was unable to find any stray tags looking at the extended listings.   Strip and retag seems to have done the trick.

 

[Dobrescu George]

we should all ask fiio if in the next software update they could include more high freq bands for eq...

 

[Brooko]

  we should all ask fiio if in the next software update they could include more high freq bands for eq...

 
Why?  You realise between the 8 kHz band and 16 kHz band in the current settings, you have very little information that will actually drastically affect what you're hearing during playback? If you're not sure - try it on a PC (Foobar is good for this sort of thing).  Play some of your favourite music, enable the equaliser, and then raise the 10kHz slider by 6dB or drop it by the same amount.  It's mostly harmonics or overtones up there.  Might affect the shimmer on cymbals a bit - but you'll get far more effective EQ concentrating on anything 6 kHz and below.

 

[Dobrescu George]

   
Why?  You realise between the 8 kHz band and 16 kHz band in the current settings, you have very little information that will actually drastically affect what you're hearing during playback? If you're not sure - try it on a PC (Foobar is good for this sort of thing).  Play some of your favourite music, enable the equaliser, and then raise the 10kHz slider by 6dB or drop it by the same amount.  It's mostly harmonics or overtones up there.  Might affect the shimmer on cymbals a bit - but you'll get far more effective EQ concentrating on anything 6 kHz and below.

There is a LOT of difference with bad headphones/IEMs...With my ie8 i must tweak very detailed with foobar/graphic eq to get the sound i want...
 
What you said seems ok with good headphones, like ultrasone dj one pro, they don't seem to need tweaking.
 
But a LOT of people might be using x5 with cheaper iems than ie8, and might need tweaking...
 
I never understood why on head-fi people are recommending eq to be used on 1-8khz range. ok, that range is what is most heard, most instruments and voices, but, there most headphones/iems do a pretty good job already. most headphones/iems i have/had/tested seem to have problems in either bass [too much or too little, mid bass problem on a LOT] or have problems on highs [way too low, roll off, or too much/ harsh / metallic]
 
Like hd800, they do need some tweaking on fine highs before sounding best.

 

[Brooko]

Must be my hearing limitations. I personally think people talk (and worry about) upper treble without realising how little it contributes.
 
And playing a round with poorer quality headphones at the upper and lower limits is more likely to introduce distortion than anything else.  Did you actually try my suggestion and play with an EQ to see what it is contributing?

 

[Flomet]

For anybody on a Mac, I have been using this app for cleaning the files left behind by the Mac OS.

Its called USBclean by a developer that is based in Australia, Russell the developer give a first class service for any questions you may have, I know this as I have been using his Cookie software for a long time.

In the UK App Store the price is £0.69, this is cheap enough to try and works without fault on my Yosemite Machine.

Here is a link to the app.

http://sweetpproductions.com/usbclean/