Hi all,
[[TL;DR: 128GB SDXC cards work well in the Ruizu X02/AGPTek A02]]
I've put a 128GB micro SDXC card into my AGPTek A02 and it is working fine with my entire music collection of ~12,000 tracks in ~1000 albums. For navigation by folder only, of course, as this is violating the 4000 track limit of the music database and, anyway, playing albums from the Music icon doesn't work as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, due to the random ordering of tracks.
I'm assuming that the Ruizu X02 will also be OK with a large card as it is the same device as the AGPTek A02 just with a different branding for the Chinese market.
In case it is useful for anyone, here are the steps I took, together with links to handy bits of software.
Step 1. Upgrade your player to v1.7 of the firmware. This is optional, but the user interface is better than some older versions. http://www.agptek.com/support/download.html. Read the supplied instructions and follow them carefully as there is always a risk of bricking your player if you mess up the firmware upgrade.
Step 2. Sort all of your music into folders on your computer's hard disk.
- I used <artist>\<album-title>\<track-number>-<track-title>, e.g. Sonic Youth\Goo\00-Dirty Boots.mp3. This means that once transferred to the player you can first scroll through artist names and then select the album. Track numbering with leading zeros is also important to ensure album tracks are played in order.
- I also decided to make some specific multi-track playlists in a new top-level folder, e.g. 00-playlists\<list-name>\<track-number>-<track-title> and just duplicated any tracks that were stored elsewhere, as there is plenty of spare room on a 128GB card.
- If you don't want to restructure the folders of your PC's music collection, copy it all to a temporary location first and then do the Tag-to-filename operation on the copy of your collection.
- I did this file sorting automatically using the Tag-to-filename facility of Mp3tag: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
I used Format string "F:\\tmp-music\%artist%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) - %title%" - but replace the "F:\\tmp-music\" at the start with the correct drive letter and folder name for your system.
Step 3. Format the SD card to FAT32 if is currently exFAT. I used fat32format, http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
Step 4. Copy all of your music files to the SD card (this can take several hours, depending on the speed of your USB ports and card reader).
Step 5. Sort the contents of the SD card alphabetically. I used DriveSort: http://www.anerty.net/software/file/DriveSort.php.
- This doesn't work with exFAT formatted cards, hence the format to FAT32 in step 3.
- Make sure you have the correct options: Long name sort, ascending order, directories before files (if you prefer this), tick the subdirectories option.
- After doing the sort, you need to save - this can take a while (several minutes), and the application looks as if it is non-responsive, but be patient - you could end up with a corrupted file table if you abort part way through.
Note, step 5 is important if you add additional music to your disk at at a later date so that the new folders are inserted in the correct alphabetical order with your original folders and not at the end of the list, which is what it will do if you don't reorder them.
So, after all of this I have a £45 DAP (£15 for the player and £30 for the SD card) that holds my complete music collection, and plays for up to 70 hours on a single charge. That's pretty good value for money!
There are some limitations:
1. You can't randomly play from your whole music collection. You can play any folder in a random order, e.g. one of your special playlist folders, or you can go via the Music icon and play randomly from all tracks, but this is limited to the first 4000 tracks that were read into the database.
2. The player automatically goes onto the next folder and starts playing the first track of the next album when it gets to the end of the current folder, so you can't just listen to an album and expect the player to stop at the end. I was thinking about adding a dummy track to each of my folders with several minutes of silence, but decided against this as it would mean that on the occasions when I want to play a folder randomly it would also pick this up.
3. Album art is a bit hit and miss. As mentioned on the AGPTek FAQ forum, progressive JPEGs are not supported (http://www.agptek.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=856335&start=40), neither are PNG files. I have a mixture of image formats which worked fine on other MP3 players, but not this one. Replacing all non-working images with compatible ones would be too time-consuming so I haven't bothered.
Cheers.
I like the style/shape of the ones I got with my Ruizu. I'm just listening to audiobooks, so I don't need really high quality bass, etc.
