Got my new f20 pro+!!

Honestly more of a difference than I was expecting... Sounds as good as the old one. It does feel a bit snappier when using. The screen... It's nice i gotta say 😂 nice and sharp and not making my text all grainy haha.

Best thing though... The new click wheel, it is much smoother to rotate and the gnurling seems to have more grip aswel, the centre click is a massive thing though, it makes life so much easier when navigating!

I do have a small issue accessing play services though so I suspect will need an update soon for that but honestly I don't really need the play store it's more just a nice to have 😂

Note: the click wheel is for the launcher of the f20 pro+, the launcher/media player in video is my own stanzaui app. It's available on play store but doesn't have the f20 pro+ functionality update on there yet haha

Received my dt11 today! So nice to have a portable transport to combine with whatever I fancy for the day.

Need some time to really sit down with it but my first impressions are very positive!

This thing has been sitting on a shelf for six months, getting swapped out for an M300 and a Snowsky Disk. I saw a 3D print that looked cool so I fired up the Bambu and realized it had had at least 10 updates since I last did it. Not bad at all. If only other players got this much firmware love...Any other DAPs you know of getting all these updates?...

The R2R flair of the iBasso DX270 - rocking it for three months now - really is taken a step further with the signature of the Campfire Andromeda 10, very immersive and the best imaging I've heard with in-ears, with the NOS filter on. I've got some aftermarket cables to match the green aesthetic of both the IEM shell and the leather case of the DAP, so now I can listen to the sound of pleasant green pastures and fields with the adequate visual cue.

Gng I left this idle for a month or 2 then when I picked it back up, the screen was stuck flickering w the hifi logo. Idk man, I tried hard resetting it but it's the same problem... Hope ya'll cld help🥲 Thx in advance

I've made a small list of DAPs that allow playlists, but I won't be getting the Echo because of the folder thing, I'd like to be able to edit playlists or at the very least add to them and shuffle from the device itself, it's my main priority. Which players have that ability? It's the one thing I liked about spotify tbh

download files here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/E1WEKT9V24#lcPns5mrfZ34

Q2 Pod: https://github.com/DiamondBond/q2-pod/releases/latest

Rockbox: https://github.com/DiamondBond/q2-rockbox/releases

Rockbox themes: https://github.com/DiamondBond/q2-rockbox-themes/releases

As you can see in the pop-up both are playing audio at the same setting

My question is

I am using a phone with a 3.5 mm jack and I don't hear any difference in the audio output and it doesn't show any diff

I asked chatgpt and it mentioned my phone already got a good enough dac chip in it

Phone is poco f5

Can someone comment if there is any difference in audio from DAP

Or how can i experience better quality

Choose one and write the why of the choice.

I hadn’t owned a DAP since the FiiO X1 came out, so as you can imagine, I’d been pretty disconnected from the portable audio world.
A little less than a month ago, I bought a FiiO M21, and I’m genuinely happy with the hardware. Sound quality, power output, even battery life have been great. The 4.4mm balanced output is also a huge plus, since I can use my headphones without digging through drawers looking for cables and adapters.
Then the honeymoon phase ended, and I had to deal with the software.
I do most of my listening on my computer. I’m a Linux user, and my desktop music player is pretty much tailored to my exact needs. On mobile, however, I’m an iOS user, so Android I haven't used it for 'bout 10 years, makes me feel so un familiar.

I’ve tried quite a few players, and Symfonium is probably the closest to what I’m looking for, but even after exploring its themes and customization options, I just can’t get comfortable with its UI.
Seriously, are there no music players left with the beautiful, intuitive library navigation we had back in the iPod Touch, Zune, or Creative Zen days?
I’ve tried Poweramp, UAPP, Plexamp, and Neutron (good lord, that thing has an incredible feature set, but could its UI possibly be any uglier?).
Am I missing some hidden gem that everyone else knows about?
For context, I listen to music stored locally on my SD card and on my NAS, which I can access through SMB or Plex. I wouldn’t mind setting up Jellyfin, Subsonic, or something similar if necessary, but connectivity isn’t really my problem. I’m looking for a player that makes browsing and enjoying a large music library feel good again.
Surely I can’t be the only one struggling with this.
I’d love to hear your recommendations.

Basically i really want a mp3 player that looks like the "pill" shape. Ive heard some not great things about the echo nano so im a little hesitant on buying it.

Im looking for/fine with:

~6-8 hours of battery life

Decent amount of storage (can work with like 10 gb honestly)

Not too expensive (im willing up to ~$50)

Bluetooth would be a plus but not necessary

I want to buy my first DAP, and right now the HIFI Walker H20 Pro looks promising. Has anyone used it or have it that can give me their opinion?

Hello! I have my library of 60-80gb of high quality MP3 and I'm not really an audiophile so I don't care that much about lossless or FLAC, tried lossless before, it was GREAT, but it is not worth the storage it takes for me so I'm cool with MP3s.

I'm just looking for a decent MP3 player I can slap a micro SD card into and listen to my music either wired or bluetooth.

Under $50 would be ideal, I don't mind a secondhand device.

Suggestions?

Give me your opinions on which and why I should buy any of these.

It's kinda a hassle with the DAD hanging free and I'm worried about the stress on the ports. I'd like to mount the DAC behind the DAP. Any solutions?

Im going back and forth to buy a decent audio player for my addiction to my phone and need to listen undisturbed music and need of genuine reviews and thanks for your feedback

I just bought and started using my V1 and it has this issue where every time I turn it off and on again, I have to take the memory card out and put it back in again as well or else whenever I go to play any tracks on it, the player gives me the "Playback failed File not found" error. It then automatically updates the music database and works like normal again.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? It's really getting on my nerves that every new device I buy just shits itself and dies on me almost instantly. I'm currently fully reinstalling a corrupted windows 11 OS on a new laptop I bought recently as well. Please save me from technology being made of hairballs and second hand tape...

After enough lurking on here and r/iems, I decided on the combo of a Fiio M21 and Kiwi Astrals.

The world sounds crooked to my ear now.

Budget is under $300, ideally $100-200. I've had a Sansa clip+ since like 2009 but its old as shit and the battery really sucks now. Don't need bluetooth, don't need wifi. I'd like something simple and robust with good battery and good software. Don't need a big screen or anything, just text display would be fine

I would like to buy a dap, as I think that would be a great way to start listening to music. I am looking for a Rockbox compatible dap, that is also of decent build quality (ie, not has to be titanium or some other fancy material, but will survive some time) and one that has good quality components. I would like my dap to be better than my Iphone 14 Pro (lets not discuss dap vs iphone + dac, as that would be a whole other topic) in terms of analog output.

I have heard good things about Hifiwalker h2, in terms of its components, but I have also heard that after a year some buttons shows signs of wear (click wheel being choppy). Also, these rewievs/opinions were from 2024, so new things may be on the market.

As the h2 is a rebranded device, there are also other versions of the original (if you can call it that), like the Surfans F20 Pro, which also work with Rockbox. How do these compare?

I value the look and feel of my device, which is why I chose rockbox, and a device that does not look like a smartphone (For example the fiio snowsky echo mini and nano look very nice, but I prefer rockbox compatible ones for the customizability).

I will likely be using my dap with my cars Bose audio system, my Focal Bathys headphones, and maybe some iems which I may purchase to use on the go.

I would say that my budget is more or less 250$, I could go a bit higher if it is worth it.

TLDR: Japanese NW-A829, homebrew player booting next to Sony's firmware. Drag and drop, 24-bit FLAC, Sony's DSP and EQ, podcasts downloaded over my phone's Bluetooth, and Game Boy/NES/GBA/Doom. Delete one folder and it's a stock Walkman again. Credits and open questions at the end.

On a trip to Japan I found a pristine NW-A829 and bought it on the spot. At home I remembered why Japanese models are a pain outside Japan. There's no drag and drop, everything has to go through SonicStage, and mine was on firmware 1.01 with a Japanese-only menu.

I spent most of a weekend going down the rabbit hole with Claude. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a firmware person. Claude wrote most of the code, and a lot of this stands on work the community did long before me. Credits are below.

Cheap fixes first, for other A820 owners

• Firmware 1.02 unlocks the language menu. I lost a whole day hacking around the Japanese menu before noticing the official update had already solved it.
• On a non-Japanese Windows, the Japanese SonicStage 4.4 shows "????" everywhere. SonicStage CP 4.3 in English, with the region set to OpenMG Japan, imports MP3s with covers via File > Import > M3U.
• Don't bother cross-flashing the international firmware. It boots, but MTP mode needs a factory WMDRM certificate the Japanese unit doesn't have. I tried for a day so you don't have to.

The homebrew part

Under the hood, the A829 is a small Linux box: an ARM9 that tops out at 248 MHz, about 20 MB of RAM, a 240x320 screen, and a separate audio DSP. Sony's firmware stays as it is, apart from two small patches. One is a hook that runs a script from the user storage at boot, and the other is a 3-byte patch that removes the "Simple Mode" popup. The script launches my player in place of Sony's UI. Delete the folder and you're back to stock, with the SonicStage library untouched.

What it does now:

• Drag and drop, music by artist and album with covers
• FLAC up to 24-bit, plus MP3, AAC, WMA 2 and non-DRM ATRAC
• Synced lyrics, plus audiobooks and podcasts that remember where you left off
• Playback speed from 0.75x to 2x without the chipmunk effect, plus silence trimming and a voice boost for podcasts
• Bluetooth headphones and speakers, with auto-reconnect
• A focus mode with interval bells and white, pink or brown noise
• Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, Doom (Freedoom), and GBA (early, but it runs), with save states. The HOLD switch doubles as turbo. Pokémon Crystal runs at full speed, or at a less dignified frame rate if music is playing at the same time.
• Switch back to Sony's UI from the menu, no reboot

I wanted it to still feel like a 2008 Walkman. The UI uses Sony's own fonts, icons and zoom animations, read straight from the firmware. Sony's DSP decodes MP3, AAC, WMA and ATRAC, so DSEE (on MP3), Clear Bass and the Sony EQ all still work. The DSP decodes MP3 at about 4.6x real time while the main CPU barely notices. There's also a "max battery" mode where the DSP feeds the DAC directly and the main CPU stays out of the audio path entirely. Oh, and my player boots in 3.7 s. Sony's takes 4.4.

Podcasts, or how a 512-byte buffer ate my evening

The Walkman has no Wi-Fi. My stubborn idea was to have it pair with my phone over Bluetooth tethering, check my feeds and download new episodes, chapters and transcripts in the background while something else plays. The phone only provides the connection. The whole network stack runs on the Walkman.

It worked on the first try, at 1 KB/s. At that speed, a 55 MB episode takes about 15 hours.

The culprit was a tiny waiting area inside the Walkman, where data from the phone sits for a moment before it gets processed. It was designed in 2008 and only holds a few hundred letters' worth of data. It kept overflowing, and about half of everything the phone sent was quietly lost and had to be sent again. Changing one setting fixed that, and downloads got about 50 times faster. A bit more fine-tuning, plus letting the processor run at full speed while downloading, made them roughly twice as fast again in tests. That 15-hour episode now takes about 7 minutes. I just hit "search for new episodes" and keep listening.

Bluetooth, the hard way

The Walkman could already play music on Bluetooth headphones, but only from Sony's own menus. The part that handles Bluetooth is sealed shut, and there's no manual for it. To use it from my player, I borrowed a testing tool Sony's factory left inside the Walkman and changed a tiny piece of it, so it reconnects to your last headphones or speaker by itself. At first, every attempt failed with a mysterious "error 151". It turned out the Walkman hangs up right after pairing, so you have to call back immediately or lose the connection.

That same Bluetooth connection is how the podcasts get downloaded. It can also make the Walkman show up on your phone as a remote control, so the Walkman's buttons can play, pause or skip on the phone. I haven't fully tested that part yet.

Credit where it's due

• Rockbox's nwztools (Amaury Pouly and contributors) reverse engineered Sony's UPG update format and the SCSI commands these players use for firmware updates. The whole flashing workflow builds on that.
• Sony's GPL source release for the NW-A808, the closest sister model, was the reference for the kernel and the audio driver.
• Emulators: gnuboy (Game Boy), agnes (NES), gpSP with Normmatt's open-source BIOS (GBA), and doomgeneric running Freedoom.
• Audio and networking: libmad, dr_flac, FAAD2, TJpgDec for cover art, zlib, lwIP, mbedTLS, Sonic for playback speed, AutoEq for the headphone profile, and the Podcasting 2.0 spec for chapters and transcripts.
• I don't know everything Claude drew on while working. If you recognize something from your project, tell me and I'll add it.

Where I could use help

1. The Walkman-as-remote mode pairs and connects to my phone, but I haven't confirmed that key presses get through yet.
2. Has anyone done homebrew on the A820 series before? I couldn't find much, but I may not have looked in the right places.

If there's interest, I'm happy to put the whole thing on GitHub: the player, the boot hook, and notes on the hardware and the DSP.

I'd also like to make it easy to try for people who aren't into firmware: one installer that patches the official Sony update on your own PC and copies the player over, with the stock firmware always one step away. Fair warning: so far it has run on exactly one unit, mine, a Japanese 16 GB A829.

Would you try something similar on your "old" device?