This thing is amazing! I barely used my phone at all in the morning and all through the afternoon as I went about my business. I got sucked in for the evening onwards, but baby steps.
… I’ll need to download more music, and get a bigger SD card. I’ve already played and replayed every single one of them I had loaded onto my Echo Mini these past 2 days.
Nice!!
I found the Creative Zen at an opshop for £1, but it had no charger. Got one off Amazon for about £8. Turned out it was the 20gig model and the battery still holds a charge for a good week! Couldn’t get it accessible with any OS I had (tried Windows 10 and 11 and Linux Mint), but at least it came preloaded with 4,261 songs that I’m still going through (not all are good). Any suggestions to get songs on the Zen would be appreciated lol
Hmm mine was a different model but it could connect as a standard usb storage device
Mine only connects as MTP, and only after the layer installation. : /
Does it work with Winamp? Winamp Just Works with a surprising variety of old media players (still) including the ability to load files onto them. It even works with ancient iPods.
Oh… that’s a good point! I haven’t tried, since the og winamp died long ago. I need to give this one a try. Maybe the translation layer to get the device recognized plus winamp for transfers… Thanks for the tip!
Yeah…you need a Win XP machine or vm. Then find the software suite online (Internet Archive mainly)
OneCoreAPI is super helpful for using old apps on new windows and vice versa. Dramatically improves compatibility with ReactOS as well.
It is a project to unify the NT ecosystem.
Source: https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries-Canary
Website: http://shorthornproject.com/onecoreapi.html does not support HTTPS, connection not secure to this site
That’s what I’ve been able to find so far, too. I tried a few compatibility layers, but the farthest that got me was to allow the OS to “see” which device was connected, without being able to communicate with it.
I may spin up winXP on my old IBM ThinkPad R21 and make, essentially, a single purpose machine lol
Whatever you do don’t put it on the network! I sneakernetted everything to my XP machine.
Oh hell no! That thing won’t even know my flat has a network lol!! That is a really good point, though.
Maybe you can try to use Rockbox custom firmware? I learned about this project just the other day watching this video on YouTube: This iPod is built different | @WolfgangsChannel. It made me want to go pick-up my Creative Vision:M at my parents and try to revive it !
Thank! I actually looked into this project when I first got it, but it’s not stable-ported, and I’ll lose all the songs currently on it (songs I can’t back up, because of driver incompatibilities).
I love mine. It was so hard to choose a color. I’m looking at yours thinking “I like that more” :)
I took way too many hours just comparing the different colors when I was considering buying it, but I’m glad I did. Pink really is the best color out of the lineup.
Those both look great, but sky blue is the right answer.
Reviews on Amazon seem pretty mixed, complaining about the UI and issues crashing (may be resolved by various firmware updates). How has your experience been? Have you used any other DAPs that you could compare to? I’m interested in something for the same reason - to hopefully use my phone less.
This is my first DAP actually, but the sound quality seems to be pretty good. My ANC Sony Ult Wear headphones wired and off do also sound clearer, more natural and open (no fake sounding bass muddying everything else) with the Pop Eq on the device. Compared to having the headphones connected to my phone via Bluetooth.
There’s no crash issues with the current firmware (v2.4.0) I’ve experienced, the Echo Mini has been dead on predictable in a way no Android phone could. However, it would load larger album images rather slowly, which would affect the wake up speed. There are tips out there about lowering the resolution of the album art to compensate, but I haven’t done that just yet.
There are preset EQs you can select on it, as well as a custom fixed frequency slider EQ that you can tune to your liking. The base acoustics is a bit lacking on the low end, making it sound a tad bit flat there, but the Pop EQ option did fix that for me. Due to the simplicity of the cpu however, EQ only works for “Standard Quality” 16 bit depth FLAC, not for 24 bit if you are going for lossless.
Do note that I have only loaded up a 16GB SD card with mostly FLAC files, when they are 16 bit depth, so I haven’t quite stressed it the same way some users have. I do know that it has a song limit of 8192, so do take that into account.
The battery is very good, a single charge has lasted me a whole day of listening with 2/4 bars left when I got home.
It can also function as a DAC if plugged into a phone/computer via the USB C port, but I haven’t had the chance to try that out yet.
I have gone with all FLAC too, but since failing the ABX test miserably I might switch to 320K MP3. It seems I cant tell the difference (on Bluetooth headphones, anyway). https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
That was a fun article! I played the comparison game a few times.
It was an eye opener for me :) How did it go for you ?
I’m a classically trained musician and I was a bit of a virtuoso, so I’m trained to hear those differences. Even then, I liked the higher ratio MP3 format, the wav had too much hiss or echo for my liking. I did well on the test, apart from the Katy Perry track, it’s so overproduced! Multiple layers of her own voice, honestly that sounded best in lowest quality, lol.
some time ago I realized just listening to mp3 vs flac that even in a blind test I couldn’t tell anymore. sucks getting old, but, sure means less music storage space with lame v0 or 320…
Really helpful information… I may have to look into one. Thanks for posting and sharing!
Here’s an update. The DAC works wonders, though it doesn’t apply any eq that you’ve set beforehand (for now). In other news, I found out I was compensating for bad mixing of certain songs with the Pop EQ. I am now back to no EQ.
I mean, I only connected my phone to the Mini to demo some new bandcamp music, and I was completely blown away by how open and large the instrument separation was. I thought the amazingness was due to Dolby atmos (it was off) or the phone’s equalizer (it was also off) or even my headphones’ DSP (my headphones was also off). It was none of that. I was simply getting it worse with the increased bass level of the EQ. The Ult Wear just muddies all the mids when the bass is out too strong, no matter where that tuning is coming from I’ve learned.
Tl;dr: this is an amazing device in terms of audio fidelity, with some understandable limitations that doesn’t detract from it’s wonderful audio quality. Sony’s sound engineers should be ashamed for pushing the Ult in a direction it’s not meant to be taking (lots of bass literally blowing everything else away). I think I now know why the Ult button is there, it’s not a feature, it’s a compromise.
I really like the look of the black one with the one little red accent button
I’m a sucker for punchy accent colors lol.
I remember the push to merged all devices into one. I was resistant then because break 1 thing, they all break. glad we’re coming back to separating the devices again
We are not. A few might use this but not the masses.
I will admit that I foolishly thought it was a good thing, because it reminded me of a tricorder—which I wanted more than anything.
It looks honestly beautiful! I’ve been looking for a device like this one for some time, but I don’t know if it plays OPUS files. The web says it plays OGG, so it should play OPUS as well…? Do you mind trying one in your player?
I’ve uploaded a song to litterbox with an expiry time of 3 days: https://litter.catbox.moe/6dw2j7hxh4hme2gg.opus
Also, if you don’t want to trust a file some rando on the internet sent you, here’s an
ffmpegcommand to convert any mp3 file to opus:# Opus 190kbps is the format I use for transparency bitrate ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -c:a libopus -b:a 190k song.opusIf you can try it, I’l be very grateful!
And here I am repairing my Dell Digital Jukebox
Guess what came in the mail yesterday?
I did. It was kinda awkward with the neighbors watching and all, but we made it happen. Go team.
Gross. This is why other countries have stopped sending mail to us.
I’ve been looking at this kind of thing a lot lately and it really only makes me want to get an older iPod and shove a terabyte and a new battery into it
Yes. Do eet. There’s even FOSS firmware for them now, in the form of rockbox.
Rockbox has been around for ages, I was using it back in like 2010. Great little firmware
Rockbox was around back when I had a click wheel iPod. Crazy that it’s still around.
That was great! I still have an mp3 player floating around somewhere with rockbox on it. It really revolutionized mp3 players for me because the included software/apps to transfer music to them were usually such trash. I had a Microsoft mp3 player, a Zune. What a pain in the ass trying to put music on that thing.
I tried rockbox on my ipod mini with 256GB flash mod and it just would not work.
Bluetooth on something like this seems nice though… With one of these and a UE BOOM speaker or something, and you can blast your entire music library anywhere. Or even just BT headphones.
Damn, I kind of want one now.
Check-out this video that came out recently on Youtube: This iPod is built different | @WolfgangsChannel
Well shit, I didn’t know devices like this existed. Time to do some research!
Edit: Holy shit, the higher end ones go for upwards of $3k. That’s wild.
Well, at least this one only goes for $60.
I just ordered a mid-range (Sony) one. Cost about $400, which is kind of a lot imo
Sadly, there are only so much models without touchscreen. I can use my phone if i want to touch glass.
Can someone explain the screen? Does it just have huge bezels or what?
Yes, it has huge bezels around. The actual screen is tiny.
How does it deal with scrolling through large music collections? I bought a Fiio X1 years ago, only to find that the scroll wheel did not accelerate, meaning that if I put my entire collection on it, I’d be scrolling for many minutes to get to anything in the middle of the alphabet. I switched to a second-hand iPod after that.
Press once. Scroll by one song once. Don’t, err, browse by all songs if you have a decent collection.
I see. So it’s only for “normal users”, who might have two dozen albums at most?
Hmm, I guess I’m a “normal user” then. I’m looking to be more intentional with my music consumption after all, else something with the ability to stream music would’ve been a better deal otherwise.
Besides, just browse by artist or genre. The Mini would happily organize your music into genres>artists>albums anyway. Unless you have literally hundreds of albums, it shouldn’t be too big of a hassle I feel.
This thing needs an OSS firmware.
Yeah, that would be great! It can’t support rockbox due to CPU limitations though, so we’ll likely have start from scratch, or at least make an overhaul for there to be OSS support for this.
What a coinkydink, I’ve just bought an MP3 player and now this community pops up in my feed. People are finally wising up that putting your entire life onto one device is a baaad idea.
That looks like those on Ali, let’s check it out… Ooh it’s Fiio! Gotta cost an arm and a leg right?
Nope, I think this one is like $50?
Capabilities are a bit disappointing, no gapless playback is pretty terrible
Wow, well can’t get everything I guess? I have a btr3 (a fiio BT DAC) and it’s good but not that good, was a hundred IIRC.
How’s the sound otherwise?
It sounded really good to me. But this is my first wired audio device in a very long time, so I’m not the best judge of that. It is very likely I just didn’t like Sony’s DSP.
Edit: I do know that the logic board is where they cheaped out to get to that price point, with most of the effort going into the DAC with 2 CS43131 chips. It has both a 3.5mm, and also a 4.4mm balanced headphone jack like most FIIO products out there recently.
I guess?
Huh, in all the excitement, I’ve appeared to have actually left out the name of the device.
It’s a FIIO Snowsky Echo Mini. It’s their budget sub-brand lineup featuring their expertise in audio fidelity in as cheap a package everywhere else they could get away with. Not that the product isn’t otherwise good. The support (dev communication) is swift on the official forum and firmware is being updated very regularly—about monthly with new features each time.
