I love the sound out of this player. I mean it. I am just using it for lossless 44.1k/16-bit and it is the best sounding DAP I have owned. So much potential. Fabulous hardware and design. I use it alone with a set of LiveWires Trips custom-molded IEMs and also paired with an E12 and a set of HiFiMan 560s when at home.
But the user experience in the firmware needs a lot of work. I have 2.5 FW installed, with 2x128GB (formatted FAT32 by the player). I presently have 7333 songs loaded on the device, with about 10GB remaining free on each card.
The two biggest things I would like to see both involve better handling of the Genre tag. I have observed a couple of things that make the genre tag almost-useless as-implemented - and just a bit odd. And for larger collections, the Genre tag can get pretty important.
To be clear. I have an iTunes Lossless collection of about 500GB. I have selected and moved >200GB of these onto the X5.
I am completely anal when it comes to tagging - and every one of the songs in this collection is tagged properly. Their tags show correctly on 5g, 6g, and 7g iPod/classics, in iTunes in Windows and Mac, in JRiver Media Center on Windows and Mac, in Foobar2000 on Windows, in Tag&Rename on Windows, and on a Logitech Squeezebox Duet unit (with Logitech Media Center running on a Mac). It suffices to say that I will NOT be open to the idea that tag problems in my files are somehow the source of these issues.
1) For some insane reason, the X5 is actually assigning genres that don't exist anywhere in my collection to some of my songs. Yes, that's right. It's as though the X5 pre-decided which genres are legit and starts with an internal list, rather than dynamically building a list of genres from the file tags of the files that are present on the device in the same way that it builds the album or artist lists. I have no idea why this happens, but I have no "Chorus" or "Psychedelia" tags in my collection and so, ideally, those items should not even show up in the genre submenu - and CERTAINLY the file list presented when those Genres are selected should be empty. And yet, somehow, I have Chorus and Psychedelia genres and songs to play in both on my X5. Will miracles never cease.
2) The "Artist" music menu is very well done. The programmers realized that someone might have, say, the entire Pink Floyd back catalog on their unit and doing "Artist-Song" navigation would be really stupid. Good for them. Well - guess what they did with "Genre", which has categories that are generally even bigger than "Artist". "Genre-Song" for navigation? Really? Can we please have at least "Genre-Album-Song" and preferably "Genre-Artist-Album-Song" for navigation from the Genre submenu? I have a genre for "Progressive Rock". It has all of my Pink Floyd in it, all of Porcupine Tree in it, all of my Yes, all of my Steven Wilson. HUNDREDS of albums. Can you imagine how many songs that is. How useful do you think the "Genre" navigation is as currently implemented?
I can see that the X5 firmware has been making great strides from release to release, and so I am hopeful for continued improvement. The migration from having a "file-based" user experience, which is a logical starting point, to a "Tag-based" user experience, which is actually what most users want, is well underway - it just needs to keep going, because "it ain't soup yet."
Last request -
Where is the library "database" stored? (The one "created" when you "Update Media Lib") Is it stored on a card, both cards, or internally? The reason I ask is that I'd like to see an option to sacrifice a little space on the cards and place the database there rather than in the unit. Fine, make caveats that once you pair two cards they have to STAY as a pair - or find a way to have card-specific partial databases on each card and then just merge them when they are loaded. But then you can put other pairs of cards in the unit without having to re-scan. My collection, for example, needs another pair. I could put some genres on one pair of cards, and another set of genres on another pair of cards and carry my entire collection with me without having to rescan every time I swap. And then there is my rather large DSD collection - which might go on yet ANOTHER pair of cards. You get the picture. Not nearly as important as getting the tag-based navigation working better though.
