- Re: Gapless playback: that is NOT a niche "audiophile" feature as many have already pointed. It's been around since the vinyl days, there are plenty of albums that expect it. I tried to listen to a live concert the other night, and having the whole thing hacked into pieces is &$^@ obnoxious, I just stopped. Yes I could turn the whole thing into a ~1hour track, but without cuesheet support that's rather annoying too, never mind duplicating all those tracks just for the the AK100. And I like the AK100 fine otherwise, I'm not a "hater"...
- Another basic feature that a lot of much cheaper devices offer is SEARCH. Even with everything lossless, at 160GB storage capacity, that can still be 10k+ tracks, and it would nice to locate a track/album/artist easily. If Apple can manage that feature with just a scrollwheel, there's no excuse for a touchscreen device.
- And not to mention the ridiculously finicky album art support as addressed below (which btw. I'm more willing to live with than the lack of gapless playback...)
- That's really my main gripe: that "audiophile" should be an excuse for poor UI design/ feature support, on any device. At the AK100's price a decent fully-featured UI (purely in terms of -music- access/playback!) should be a given, and all the extra cost should go towards what makes the device stand out from the cheaper competition...
- Update re: nuked internal storage: finally iRiver contacted me, they obviously couldn't come up with an end-user solution, so the whole thing is going back to them... reminder to everyone not following the whole thread:
do NOT attempt to reformat the internal partition or drive!! It will still show up OK on your computer but be non-existing to the AK100 which will only see the tiny, unusable, usually invisible OS partition...
- Things got real busy, so I didn't have time to fiddle around with the whole cover art issue, but before the thing is going back to iRiver, I did some final testing:
Quote:
Just my 2c, could be a file (not pixel) size limit. I've had one player (don't remember the model) that had an undocumented 100KB file size limit. Since JPG compression rates vary, some artwork would show and others wouldn't. Took me days to figure it out back then.
Edit: on second thought, those who don't show could also be progressive JPGs, which are rarely supported on DAPs. Try to open one in a picture editor and save it as a non-progressive JPG.
So here's what it comes down to after much tag-rewriting (I removed the cover art completely everytime & did a re-write between each test to ensure the new art was being used). In the end what worked was a combination of james444 comment above & Lee730's: JPEGs, 500x500px image size and ~100k filesize, that seems to be the only -reliable- format.
- progressive JPEGs: even if there were a couple of downloaded from the internet, it certainly wouldn't be ~85% of my collection (some are png, guaranteed not interlaced)
- 700x700px as per VisceriousZERO's post: maybe that's theoretical but since even lower sizes aren't showing up reliably, I wouldn't go by that...
- 600x600px works in some few cases, but mostly NOT, even when (re)compressed down to ~100kb filesize!
- 500x500px didn't work either at the default filesize in many cases, only when I compressed them down to the ~100kb filesize did it start showing up reliably on all the albums I tested...
This flackiness is just sad, I'm not going to go through the trouble of re-tagging my entire collection, esp. with lower quality art! Maybe it's just my collection, it will be interesting to see what will happen when I'll eventually dump it on a much cheaper FiiO X3...
