Looking for a new media player(Ipod suggestion not welcome)

[x88x]

I am about to purchase the device, but Amazon is offering a three-year coverage plan, to protect the player in the case of damage, for only an additional $16. Should I purchase that, as well? Is the insurance worth the price?

I assume this is moot at this point, but just my own personal take on stuff..

I very rarely opt for retailer coverage plans for consumer electronics unless the item is very expensive and either the manufacturer does not offer any sort of warranty or the manufacturer requires shipping the product oversees (this is why I got the Microcenter plan for the Auria monitor I bought a couple years ago). The main reasons why I rarely get these coverage plans are, in no particular order: most manufacturers offer a decent warranty in which case the retailer coverage plan would just save me some time, most modern electronics are actually pretty solid these days, and most coverage plans are voided by any tampering (ie, modifications).

[DemonDragonJ]

The micro SD card has arrived, today, and I am very surprised by how small it it; I knew that it would be small, but I did not know that it would be only 1 centimeter/1/2 inch in size; I shall need to be careful that I do not lose it! Hopefully, the player itself shall arrive, soon, so I can test it out.

[x88x]

Yup, they're pretty tiny alright. It still amazes me that you can get them up to 200GB now...

[DemonDragonJ]

The player arrived, today! I shall now share my impressions of it.

First, it is a very attractive device, physically; it feels solid and is a shiny, but not too shiny, silver color. The buttons are easy to use, and the interface seems intuitive, as well. It did have a black rubber casing, but I removed that, since it made it difficult for me to push the buttons.

The packaging included a USB cable, which is used for charging the device and connecting to a computer for transferring data to it. This device uses micro USB, which means that the mini-USB wall charger that I purchased for my previous .mp3 player is useless for this device. However, I just remembered that my cell phone also uses a micro-USB interface, so I can use the charger from that device for this device.

The first thing that I did with the device was to update its firmware, to ensure that it has the best performance. I have not yet added any songs to it, since I have over 13 gigabytes' worth of music, and the device's interface is only USB 2.0, so transferring that much music shall take longer than I have, now; I shall add my music to it on the weekend.

The device does not have any software; it is merely recognized by the computer as an external storage device, but that does not bother me, since I still have the media organizer from my previous player on my computer, even if it cannot recognize the new device.

Very thankfully, the device does have a custom equalizer, but I do not yet know if it allows for the creation of custom playlists; I sincerely hope that it does, since I have eleven custom playlists in my music collection, and I wish to be able to listen to all of them with this device.

Soon, I shall transfer my music to the device, and give it a proper test, and I shall post the results of that test, here.

[x88x]

It might be worth it to invest in a USB 3.0 media reader, and just read/write the card through that. Many years ago I picked up a crappy basic little mp3 player off of dealextreme, and had to do that with the SD card it used...because the mp3 player only had a USB1.1 interface...but hey, it was $15 shipped in 2006.

Re the charging, yeah, microUSB-B is pretty much the standard power interface now for small electronics. I love it because it means that almost any of my random stuff that I want to charge, I can just use the same charger. I actually found some awesome little USB power bricks[1][2] with several ports on them. Great for keeping on the desk with cables[3] already plugged in. Need to charge something, just grab a plug and go. Also great for the workbench if you're like me and are constantly futzing with various little SBCs.

[1] 5-port 45W
[2] 6-port 60W
[3] 6 inch USB A to micro-B

[DemonDragonJ]

I still have not yet added my music to the player, to test it out, since I am re-encoding many of my songs from their original CD's before I do that; many of them, I encoded years ago, before I became aware that higher bitrates equal better sound quality, so I now am upgrading them from 128 Kbits/second to 256 or 320 Kbps.

The device does not seem to have an FM receiver, as did my previous device, which is regrettable, but hardly a major loss, since I can still use my car's normal radio receiver for that.

With that being said, I wonder if I should purchase an aftermarket receiver for my car, one that has an auxiliary input, so that I can forgo using an FM transmitter to play music from my device in my car. I plan to keep my current car for as long as possible, but I am not certain if it would be worth the cost of purchasing a new radio receiver.

I have decided that I shall keep the rubber casing on the device; while it is regrettable that the device's shiny body shall be covered, I wish to keep it intact for as long as is possible, given that I spent $100.00 on it.

The device requires that the SD card be formatted in the FAT32 format, which I find to be rather odd, given that the FAT file system was rendered obsolete by NTFS many years ago. Why would this device still be using such an old file system?

[x88x]

With that being said, I wonder if I should purchase an aftermarket receiver for my car, one that has an auxiliary input, so that I can forgo using an FM transmitter to play music from my device in my car. I plan to keep my current car for as long as possible, but I am not certain if it would be worth the cost of purchasing a new radio receiver.

Depending on what you have now, there might be other options as well. When I was looking a while ago, I was able to find someone selling a special board that would plug into the existing head unit in my car, providing an aux connector that the board feeds into the tape deck connector on the head unit. Basically, it pretends that it is a tape deck.

[EDIT]
Found the board[1]. It is a bit more expensive than I was remembering ($60), but that's still probably cheaper than a new head unit. I use mine in conjunction with a bluetooth-to-aux adapter[2].

[1] http://www.sylfex.com/products/AuxMod
[2] http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MJMV0GU
[/EDIT]

The device requires that the SD card be formatted in the FAT32 format, which I find to be rather odd, given that the FAT file system was rendered obsolete by NTFS many years ago. Why would this device still be using such an old file system?

A few reasons. FAT has three very important features: it is very simple, the specification is open source, and it has been around for a very long time. The first of these means that it is (relatively) simple to implement. Most microcontrollers that implement any mass storage use some form of FAT (in fact, last I looked, the only commonly available filesystem libraries for common microcontrollers are for FAT16/FAT32). The later two are important in providing cross platform compatibility. Yes, you could build a product around NTFS or ext3, but then you could only guarantee that it would work on Windows (NTFS) or OSX/Linux (ext3). It has only been within the last 4-5 years that NTFS support in Linux and OSX has become really stable, and Windows still has no native support for any *nix filesystems. But because FAT predates most modern filesystems, was widely used, and has an open spec, you can be pretty well guaranteed that any computer you encounter will be able to read and write FAT.

All that aside, for what this type of device is actually doing with its filesystem, FAT32 is perfectly fine (if the volume were less than 4GB I would even say stick with FAT16). It wouldn't really see any benefits from using a different filesystem. In fact, it would suffer due to the increased system complexity needed to handle that filesystem.

[DemonDragonJ]

I finally loaded my music into the player (all 1,708 songs that I presently have) and tested it. First, I shall list the few complaints that I have about the device, before I say what I do like about it.

Most notably, while the device does allowing browsing by artist name, album title, genre, and all files, when viewing the media in the device, the device does not offer the ability to scroll by letter of the alphabet; one must manually scroll through each item in the list, which can become annoying, especially when one has as many files as I have. However, this is not a major problem, and it has not taken me long to learn to scroll very quickly with the device.

Also, some of the artists, albums, or songs had letters with accent marks in their names, and, apparently, the device did not know how to handle those characters, as it instead displayed Asian letters (Fiio is a Japanese company) in placed of the accented Latin letters. However, I fixed that problem simply by replacing the accented letters with their unaccented counterparts. Also, some songs were never on any albums, so I had the file tags labeled as such, but the device randomly assigned albums to several of the songs that were not supposed to have albums. I shall work on fixing that problem.

Now, for the positive traits: the device does indeed have the ability to have custom playlists (for which I am very thankful), although those need to be created with an external program (Fiio's own website recommends a program called Foobar 2000), so I shall sometime install such a program on my computer and use it to create my own custom playlists on the device.

Finally, for the most important part, the sound quality of the device; I tested it with numerous songs, and it seemed to me that the sound quality was very satisfactory. The volume of the device ranges from 0 to 100, and I needed to turn it to between 40 and 50 before I could hear the music well, so I hope that it shall be deafening loud when I use headphones with it. After turning up the bands on the equalizer, the sound quality greatly improved.

Overall, I am very pleased with the Fiio X1 media player; it definitely has worked well, thus far, but I hope that it lasts for many years, considering that I paid $100.00 for it. I do believe that it is worth the cost, and would recommend it to anyone else who is seeking a new media-playing device.

[DemonDragonJ]

Today, I used my new player in my car as I drove, and I was very impressed with its performance; I could hear details in the songs that I played that I would not have been able to hear if the songs were played on a normal radio signal (although my computer still has the best sound quality of all my electronic devices). There are so few vacant frequencies in my area, but I was able to find several that worked adequately well with my FM transmitter. I am not certain if I shall use my player in my car every day, to avoid needing to constantly purchase new batteries for the transmitter (since the AC adapter for the transmitter broke, or, more accurately, its cord snapped), but I shall definitely use it on occasion, when I wish to hear songs that I know I shall enjoy.

[TheMainMan]

Just had a duh moment while reading your post. Don't know why I didn't think of it sooner but an FM modulator might be useful in your situation. They are usually a lot more reliable than FM transmitters but cheaper than a new head deck. If you're comfortable swapping your own head deck, you shouldn't have much difficulty installing a modulator. An example would be: this. Wal-mart may have them even cheaper (at least in Canada, Wal-mart is usually cheapest). They hook up inline with your FM antenna, similar to how old Nintendo consoles connected to TVs, and pass all channels through except the one you designate. As they are wired in, they can typically provide better sound by being less susceptible to interference. If you want to go this route, keep me posted and I'll be glad to offer any advice you may need.