What a strange little device. I'll run through my mini saga quickly and then I have a question (for those that don't like stories, jump to the question in bold below):
Parcel arrived in excellent condition, no courier maltreatment. Unpacked and X2S was completely dead (read about this and read manual).
Charged it for one hour, still dead. Did the 10 second reset button. Still dead. Charged if for another 2 hours, still dead. Then for a total of 4.5 hours, dead. Then did 10 second reset again. Left it -- it decided to come alive. There is no sense that any power is reaching the device, I had to test the cable with another device to see if any power was actually getting through. Anyway ...
Updated the firmware to 1.51 (using a smaller 16GB SD card), as apparently, firmware can only be updated with a FAT32 formatted card. The card with my music for this player is a brand new Samsung 128GB Evo Plus microSD and was formatted using NTFS (since I read that is can handle all 3 formats, but only one for firmware updates).
After firmware successfully updated, powered off (long hold), put in the Samsung 128 SD --- "Card Error" and player froze. No buttons worked, couldn't power off. Tried a 10 second reset. Didn't seem to work. Then it did seem to work. Took out card and reformatted to EXFAT via PC, added music via PC, put card in X2S -- didn't recognise any music.
Decided to let the X2S do the formatting itself (it must use EXFAT as FAT32 only goes to 32GB, I think). Then because the X2S seemed to have numerous weirdnesses, I decided it was safer to transfer files via the USB Cable with the PC seeing the X2S as external storage. That was slow but worked fine.
X2S then updated its library and all good. Set the player to play in shuffle mode. And we're off to the races - time to actually listen to music.
With DAPs I have around 1300 select FLAC files in 3 directories: Classical, Jazz, Pop (Pop = anything that isn't Classical or Jazz). So, we have 1300 FLACs in 3 folders ("Pop" being the largest).
--- onto the only major issue remaining ---
Here's what's strange. The time it takes the Xduoo X2S to select the next song in shuffle mode varies between around a couple of seconds to 50 seconds !!!! (yes, I measured it). I think one of the times might have been even longer - that's when and why I started measuring.
QUESTION: I know the X2S is not the fasted at reading SD cards, but I'm guessing the issue is that it's not expecting a large volume of tracks per folder. So it's jumping to a folder randomly then scanning all the tracks in the folder before deciding which to pick randomly in its shuffle mode?
I can't think of any other reason. The card is fine, the tracks are fine (they are identical to what's on my other Fiio player). The tracks play fine on the Xduoo. The ONLY issue is the time it takes to select the next track. After that, it's really good.
I really like the player (despite its quirks) - solid build and tested that it charges fine from my range of charging power packs. Sound is excellent (I can make out a little noise between tracks on IEMs, but nothing to really care about. But of course if you're waiting for a minute for the next track to play, it does give you more time to focus on the lack of pure silence between tracks.
None of the tracks by the way are odd or have long gaps after them. They are all 16bit, 44.1 kHz FLACs (ripped and encoded by foobar2000 - and they all play normally on all other devices).
Any help much appreciated.
C.
I'll update with my findings.
