G
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The Basics
I was getting fed up with about 15Gb of usuable storage for playing music on my phone, so I figured it was time for something with a lot more capacity.
I duly toddled off to Amazon and bought
Fiio X3 2nd gen or 'ii' £159
As has been noted, it appears that the UK distributor undercuts their own RRP thus making it difficult for anyone to compete.
SanDisk Class 10 128GB micro SD card £57.99
Annoyingly these bad boys have come down to £39.99 in the few weeks since I bought.
What's in the box?
Some cables, and some, errr, WTF?, really? Some kind of cheesy plastic sticker 'skins' intended for plastering over the case. You can have stars & stripes, or your Mum's kitchen wood effect melamine circa 1976. Just put these straight in the bin.
The actual device comes wrapped in a further rubber skin which is of better quality but I can't stand these kind of things so that got the bum's rush as well.
Plugging In
Plug in the micro SD card. This slots into a hole in the side of the device, with no cover - appears to be asking to fall out and/or get smashed, but this hasn't happened so far.
I just formatted the card without question using the Fiio itself (rather than plugging it into a PC etc.). I understand that cards need to be formatted as FAT 32 and it's debatable what format cards ship with, so I didn't mess about with seeing if it already worked.
Plug the Fiio into your PC with a micro USB -> USB cable, and it appears as an SMB / mass storage protocol device, and you can just dump music on it. Later on in the game you can change the Fiio's USB behaviour and make it appear as a DAC, but sensibly it behaves as storage by default.
Getting music on
I use MediaMonkey for this.
I configured the external device (which appears on a PC as 'X3') to copy mp3 files as-is, transcode FLAC to mp3 320kbps, and copy album art as 'folder.jpg' in the same folder.
I organised the music as
Music/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track Number} {Track Title}{Format}
so you end up with
Music/Billy And The Boingers/Debut Album/01 Loud Noise.mp3
This was a mistake. I'll go into exactly why this was a mistake later.
After this it's just a case of telling MediaMonkey to sync albums to the Fiio.
Turn It On
The front screen of the Fiio is a bit of a train wreck. To western eyes the first thing you look at it is the top left. There's a little speaker icon with a number '50' by it. OK, that's the volume. Next comes 'G=L'. After some googling it appears that this means that Gain = Low - there is a variable gain setting of Low or High, depending on the load your headphones present. Does this really, really need to take pride of place in the interface?
Control is with a fairly positive click wheel.
The top-level menu gives options of
Drilling into 'Category' I see
That's right, the easiest option to get to is to play every single freaking track on the device, all 5800 of them, in order.
I've actually managed to hit this twice now accidentally. The whole device gets a bit sluggish with 5800 tracks in the queue.
Going into 'Artist' the first thing I see is '2 Bad Mice' and '2 Body's'. At this point I realised I'd bought the wrong thing. Yes, '2 Bad Mice' is indeed the name of an artist on a Renaissance mix album mixed by Sasha & John Digweed.
But the 'Album Artist' for this album is set to 'Sasha & John Digweed'. I don't want to see every single poxy one-track-wonder on mix albums, I want to browse by the Album Artist tag. The Fiio has precisely no capability of doing this.
Sonos can browse by Album Artist and hide contributing artists, Google Play Music can do it. They are both market leaders in their respective fields. But the Fiio only knows about the Artist tag. If I had realised or though about this before buying I simply wouldn't have bought the Fiio.
See here for a tutorial about the Album Artist tag.
OK, all is not lost, I can just browse the file system under 'Browse Files'
I'm presented with
after some googling it looks like 'TF Card' means 'TransFlash card'. No, I hadn't heard the term either.
Clicking on OTG I get 'No music found!'. Well why did you show it to me then, you muppet? Shades of Douglas Adams 'do not press this button again'. I later found out that it stands for 'On The Go'; I'll go into more detail below.
Under 'TF Card' I get
MediaMonkey is just MediaMonkey metadata from the sync process. I get 'No music found!' under that too. Jesus.
So I have to step over MediaMonkey every time to get to Music. Should have called it Aardvark, or just dumped all the music at the top level.
Finally you get to walk the files you've set up and at this point I realise I have set up the file names incorrectly. For multi-disc albums I use the track number and disc number tags, as you would. But I forgot to include the disc number in the file name, and if you're just playing the raw files the Fiio will play in alphabetical order.
Jah Wobble's 5 disc opus Redux has now been dumped in as
01 Track Name.mp3
01 Other Name.mp3
01 Different Name.mp3
01 Heterogeneous Name.mp3
01 Blah Name.mp3
02 etc. etc
If I try to play it I get track 1 from each disc, then track 2, and so on.
So now I have to go back and change my sync name pattern to
{Disc Number} {Track Number} {Track Title}{Format}
and re-do things.
Actually Playing Music
Well once I start playing, the album art does actually appear.
The screen is a pretty tatty 2" 320*240 pixels and it's pretty dim. It looks like a relic compared to any modern smart phone.
Sound? Yep, it sounds good. Much better than my phone.
After listening for a while, particularly to one album Anastasis by Dead Can Dance I get a bit of a feeling of distortion when notes are held. Might be my imagination?
Maybe lets try flac.
On The Job, sorry, On The Go
In the immortal words of Screamin' Jay Hawkins introducing 'On The Job' (a song about, err, bodily functions), 'This is a song about real pain'
The Fiio supports USB On The Go
Basically it can act as a host for a USB stick, hugely increasing storage capacity.
Let's go and buy some more stuff.
No-name OTG cable £1.07 from eBay including shipping.
How does anyone make any money on this?
SanDisk 48MB/s read speed Cruzer Blade 128GB USB stick.
£19.99 from Amazon.
I decided to go full-fat and copy music onto the USB in its native format, either flac or mp3.
There was no involvement from the Fiio at all, just plug the stick into your computer.
It has an advertised read speed of 'up to' 48Mb/s. There's no mention of write speed, but my experience was somewhere between 'slow' and 'slow as shite'. Much, much slower than writing to the Fiio / SD card. I guess the important thing for these cards is a camera dumping large amounts of data onto them very quickly so write speed is good, not so with the USB stick.
Actually using the OTG USB stick was a cinch. Once you've connected it to the Fiio and dug into 'OTG' it just appears like the onboard storage.
I listened to Dead Can Dance's Anastasis again, but this time in flac. Maybe it was my imagination but it did sound better. None of the 'he might be a underwater' feeling. Switching back to the mp3 version he didn't sound underwater there either. However the treble was definitely splashier than with the flac version. No real surprise there, then. I guess I was having a bad day on the previous listen to have such difficulty.
I then went off for a meeting leaving the Fiio as it was. I think it goes into some kind of sleep mode when you simply leave it alone. And hour later I attempted to carry on listening where I left off, however the Fiio had a major seizure at this point. It said that it couldn't find the external storage and flashed up an error for every single track in the queue. I took the time-honoured IT support approach of turning it off and on again, and everything started working again. It would appear that sleeping makes the Fiio dismount external storage. This is a bit crap, and basically makes the OTG unusable for me.
Gah! I just did it again! I've now had to sit through it flashing 'File not found' for almost the whole of 'The Way Of Curve' that I had queued up, and I was only away for 10 minutes. That's it, OTG is unuseably shit.
Conclusion
Well that's it really. There's not a huge amount to report about something so commonplace as an mp3 player. In summary about the Fiio X3 ii
The interface is abominable.
I wouldn't have bought it if I had realised that it doesn't support the Album Artist tag.
Sound quality is good, particularly compared to a phone where I guess the DAC is basically as cheap as possible.
128Gb of storage with an appropriate card is a huge amount of space.
There's not a lot of difference between 320 kbps mp3 and flac, particularly with my headphones.
The screen and the clickwheel are like something from 10 years ago.
This is a geek's device, where tweakability and overall sound quality trump useability every time.
The OTG facility is next-to useless.
I was getting fed up with about 15Gb of usuable storage for playing music on my phone, so I figured it was time for something with a lot more capacity.
I duly toddled off to Amazon and bought
Fiio X3 2nd gen or 'ii' £159
As has been noted, it appears that the UK distributor undercuts their own RRP thus making it difficult for anyone to compete.
SanDisk Class 10 128GB micro SD card £57.99
Annoyingly these bad boys have come down to £39.99 in the few weeks since I bought.
What's in the box?
Some cables, and some, errr, WTF?, really? Some kind of cheesy plastic sticker 'skins' intended for plastering over the case. You can have stars & stripes, or your Mum's kitchen wood effect melamine circa 1976. Just put these straight in the bin.
The actual device comes wrapped in a further rubber skin which is of better quality but I can't stand these kind of things so that got the bum's rush as well.
Plugging In
Plug in the micro SD card. This slots into a hole in the side of the device, with no cover - appears to be asking to fall out and/or get smashed, but this hasn't happened so far.
I just formatted the card without question using the Fiio itself (rather than plugging it into a PC etc.). I understand that cards need to be formatted as FAT 32 and it's debatable what format cards ship with, so I didn't mess about with seeing if it already worked.
Plug the Fiio into your PC with a micro USB -> USB cable, and it appears as an SMB / mass storage protocol device, and you can just dump music on it. Later on in the game you can change the Fiio's USB behaviour and make it appear as a DAC, but sensibly it behaves as storage by default.
Getting music on
I use MediaMonkey for this.
I configured the external device (which appears on a PC as 'X3') to copy mp3 files as-is, transcode FLAC to mp3 320kbps, and copy album art as 'folder.jpg' in the same folder.
I organised the music as
Music/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track Number} {Track Title}{Format}
so you end up with
Music/Billy And The Boingers/Debut Album/01 Loud Noise.mp3
This was a mistake. I'll go into exactly why this was a mistake later.
After this it's just a case of telling MediaMonkey to sync albums to the Fiio.
Turn It On
The front screen of the Fiio is a bit of a train wreck. To western eyes the first thing you look at it is the top left. There's a little speaker icon with a number '50' by it. OK, that's the volume. Next comes 'G=L'. After some googling it appears that this means that Gain = Low - there is a variable gain setting of Low or High, depending on the load your headphones present. Does this really, really need to take pride of place in the interface?
Control is with a fairly positive click wheel.
The top-level menu gives options of
- Now Playing
- Category
- Browse Files
- Play Settings
- System Settings
Drilling into 'Category' I see
- All Songs
- Album
- Artist
- Genre
- Favourites
- Playlists
That's right, the easiest option to get to is to play every single freaking track on the device, all 5800 of them, in order.
I've actually managed to hit this twice now accidentally. The whole device gets a bit sluggish with 5800 tracks in the queue.
Going into 'Artist' the first thing I see is '2 Bad Mice' and '2 Body's'. At this point I realised I'd bought the wrong thing. Yes, '2 Bad Mice' is indeed the name of an artist on a Renaissance mix album mixed by Sasha & John Digweed.
But the 'Album Artist' for this album is set to 'Sasha & John Digweed'. I don't want to see every single poxy one-track-wonder on mix albums, I want to browse by the Album Artist tag. The Fiio has precisely no capability of doing this.
Sonos can browse by Album Artist and hide contributing artists, Google Play Music can do it. They are both market leaders in their respective fields. But the Fiio only knows about the Artist tag. If I had realised or though about this before buying I simply wouldn't have bought the Fiio.
See here for a tutorial about the Album Artist tag.
OK, all is not lost, I can just browse the file system under 'Browse Files'
I'm presented with
- TF Card
- OTG
after some googling it looks like 'TF Card' means 'TransFlash card'. No, I hadn't heard the term either.
Clicking on OTG I get 'No music found!'. Well why did you show it to me then, you muppet? Shades of Douglas Adams 'do not press this button again'. I later found out that it stands for 'On The Go'; I'll go into more detail below.
Under 'TF Card' I get
- MediaMonkey
- Music
MediaMonkey is just MediaMonkey metadata from the sync process. I get 'No music found!' under that too. Jesus.
So I have to step over MediaMonkey every time to get to Music. Should have called it Aardvark, or just dumped all the music at the top level.
Finally you get to walk the files you've set up and at this point I realise I have set up the file names incorrectly. For multi-disc albums I use the track number and disc number tags, as you would. But I forgot to include the disc number in the file name, and if you're just playing the raw files the Fiio will play in alphabetical order.
Jah Wobble's 5 disc opus Redux has now been dumped in as
01 Track Name.mp3
01 Other Name.mp3
01 Different Name.mp3
01 Heterogeneous Name.mp3
01 Blah Name.mp3
02 etc. etc
If I try to play it I get track 1 from each disc, then track 2, and so on.
So now I have to go back and change my sync name pattern to
{Disc Number} {Track Number} {Track Title}{Format}
and re-do things.
Actually Playing Music
Well once I start playing, the album art does actually appear.
The screen is a pretty tatty 2" 320*240 pixels and it's pretty dim. It looks like a relic compared to any modern smart phone.
Sound? Yep, it sounds good. Much better than my phone.
After listening for a while, particularly to one album Anastasis by Dead Can Dance I get a bit of a feeling of distortion when notes are held. Might be my imagination?
Maybe lets try flac.
On The Job, sorry, On The Go
In the immortal words of Screamin' Jay Hawkins introducing 'On The Job' (a song about, err, bodily functions), 'This is a song about real pain'
The Fiio supports USB On The Go
Basically it can act as a host for a USB stick, hugely increasing storage capacity.
Let's go and buy some more stuff.
No-name OTG cable £1.07 from eBay including shipping.
How does anyone make any money on this?
SanDisk 48MB/s read speed Cruzer Blade 128GB USB stick.
£19.99 from Amazon.
I decided to go full-fat and copy music onto the USB in its native format, either flac or mp3.
There was no involvement from the Fiio at all, just plug the stick into your computer.
It has an advertised read speed of 'up to' 48Mb/s. There's no mention of write speed, but my experience was somewhere between 'slow' and 'slow as shite'. Much, much slower than writing to the Fiio / SD card. I guess the important thing for these cards is a camera dumping large amounts of data onto them very quickly so write speed is good, not so with the USB stick.
Actually using the OTG USB stick was a cinch. Once you've connected it to the Fiio and dug into 'OTG' it just appears like the onboard storage.
I listened to Dead Can Dance's Anastasis again, but this time in flac. Maybe it was my imagination but it did sound better. None of the 'he might be a underwater' feeling. Switching back to the mp3 version he didn't sound underwater there either. However the treble was definitely splashier than with the flac version. No real surprise there, then. I guess I was having a bad day on the previous listen to have such difficulty.
I then went off for a meeting leaving the Fiio as it was. I think it goes into some kind of sleep mode when you simply leave it alone. And hour later I attempted to carry on listening where I left off, however the Fiio had a major seizure at this point. It said that it couldn't find the external storage and flashed up an error for every single track in the queue. I took the time-honoured IT support approach of turning it off and on again, and everything started working again. It would appear that sleeping makes the Fiio dismount external storage. This is a bit crap, and basically makes the OTG unusable for me.
Gah! I just did it again! I've now had to sit through it flashing 'File not found' for almost the whole of 'The Way Of Curve' that I had queued up, and I was only away for 10 minutes. That's it, OTG is unuseably shit.
Conclusion
Well that's it really. There's not a huge amount to report about something so commonplace as an mp3 player. In summary about the Fiio X3 ii
The interface is abominable.
I wouldn't have bought it if I had realised that it doesn't support the Album Artist tag.
Sound quality is good, particularly compared to a phone where I guess the DAC is basically as cheap as possible.
128Gb of storage with an appropriate card is a huge amount of space.
There's not a lot of difference between 320 kbps mp3 and flac, particularly with my headphones.
The screen and the clickwheel are like something from 10 years ago.
This is a geek's device, where tweakability and overall sound quality trump useability every time.
The OTG facility is next-to useless.