First the hardware: very chic and very well made. In your hand, it feels like a slightly shrunken and redesigned/improved iPod Classic. Great hardware and excellent build quality. However, on the software side. Spring. it covers almost all basic requirements. nearly. Now I organize my music by albums, with a separate folder for each album. which works on this device but doesn't work quite right. For example, one of the albums is "A Long Drink Of The Blues" by Jackie McLean, where the filename of each track starts with the track number ("01.A Long Drink Of The Blues (take 1).flac", "02 .A Long Drink Of Blues (take 2).flac", "03.Embraceable You.flac", etc.) Now when I navigate to that folder on the device, I find that the Files are NOT in alphabetical/numeric order as expected, but in the order 05, followed by the cover .jpg, followed by 01, 02, then 04, then 03. you can't change the order of the tracks, that's the order in they are placed on reading the directory and you just have to accept them so this album will play in the order 5-1-2-4-3 well i have no idea why just very very badly written software. Next, when I play the album described above, track number three follows at the end of McLean's album track 7 "Swing Swing Swingin" because di it is the next folder/album in the random device order for albums in my Jackie McLean catalog (same again, the folders are unordered, not sorted alphabetically). It is not possible to simply play all tracks in a directory and then stop or repeat. no It will continue to play all your folders from wherever you start, in the order you chose. Now there is a "repeat mode" in the player, which means it will offer to repeat whatever you expect to go through all the tracks in the current directory, right? nope There is a note in the booklet that accompanies the device that the repeat should be set to "no repeat" and. Yes. it must. Apparently they realized that this "feature" was so poorly implemented that the user should be warned against using it. folder. Press forward/backward and the track simply repeats. but go to the second/third track (again in the order they were selected) in the folder and now you can press forward and backward and skip everything but the first track (forward to subsequent folders, of course). but if you go back to the first track (with a mistaken repeat of everything) then you get stuck on that track. Yes. Just don't try to use repeat modes, it should be non-repeat. Another problem, the screen resolution *would* be perfect if it wasn't for the software again. When viewing a folder, only 21 characters of the file name are visible. No problem, it just loops through when selected, right? nope ONLY 21 characters of the filename are visible - the rest doesn't scroll. So it's pretty crappy, but not as bad as not following the alphanumeric order. But to make it even more absurd, if you don't have spaces in your filenames, then it will scroll the entire name on the screen. Next to. It performs the action but doesn't actually control it. In this case it actually scrolls through the first 22 characters (hey, we got one) along with the spaces for the rest of the name. So we've actually lost our footing because now it's still only showing the beginning of the filename, but it's still scrolling off the screen. Yes. The software is really SO badly written. General. Five star hardware, downgraded to three stars for absolutely amazingly poorly implemented software - if it only knew how to sort things alphanumerically I'd give it five stars across the board as that would actually be good enough (although additional features like the ability to , just play a folder, or just repeat a folder and maybe show the full filename would be even better). Simply knowing that a file beginning with "01" must come before a file beginning with "02" in the same directory will fix the most egregious and annoying design flaw. ------------------------------------------------ -- ---------------------------------------------- ---- ---------- ------------------ Here's a long-range shot. To the manufacturer: You have *great* hardware and the existing software needs minimal fixes to make it work well enough - if you post the source code and flashing instructions (put it on GitHub) then lots of volunteers will be happy to do the work for you You and you can use the received corrected and improved firmware on your devices and get a REAL winner. Also, by releasing the code and documentation, you'll be making TONS of purchases from open source folks, DIYers, and hardware hackers around the world. They never really change or look at the firmware code, but so do others who want to write games for it and the like. I'm serious about this - post all available documentation and source code - put it on GitHub or some other site like this and your software will be taken care of and your hardware will be taken care of because physically it is a very nice device indeed. -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------
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