Fiio playlists

For the past while I've just been tending to the many needs of my technology.

For instance, I picked up a Fiio X1 (2nd gen) a while back. And, well. When it works, it does work beautifully. The sound is great, and it even responds to the media controls on my bluetooth headset. However, it doesn't always work. Good news is they are actively developing the firmware and respond promptly to support questions.

Still, every so often you'll run into something very non-intuitive. Like, playlists.

There is a Category > Playlists menu option. But the only way to get playlists in there is seemingly from the Now Playing screen, which would mean adding song by song. And the playlists are named; Playlist1, Playlist2, etc, with no means of editing.

To get more useful playlists you must create them externally, on your computer. They are basically just a txt file with .m3u extension. Though you may prefer to use a music player program. You may, or may not, need to add #EXTM3U to the first line of each file. Then the songs are listed one per line, as relative paths, to the file-on-device. These playlists must be placed in the root directory of the player, and can only be accessed through the Browse Files menu option (not Category > Playlists).

But, in their limited function, they do work. So, um, okay?

Sailfish X, part 5

The other time sink was my Sailfish X smartphone.

Saturday morning I attempted to check my email. The phone became unresponsive. I turned it off. It took a very long time doing this, as demonstrated by the red LED staying lit for, it seemed, an age. I left it alone for a while, then tried to turn it back on. Nothing. I attempted to charge it. Nothing. Utterly unresponsive.

Well, since I'd paid for it I contacted Jolla Support. The automated email reminded me that they don't work weekends.

Monday morning I get a reply telling me the whole system seems unstable and that I should reflash with the latest image (it also appears the ota update didn't take). This confused me, as my device was still refusing to either turn on or charge.

The crucial bit of information was that the holding down Volume-Down or Volume-Up while plugging in to your computers USB port requires less power than even charging the battery directly from mains.

So after it had siphoned off a trickle of power I could charge it from mains once again. The battery was 0%. (It had been somewhere around 80% before all this happened.) Once charged up enough I could boot into the unstable system and get a data backup. Once fully charged I'll reflashed with the newer image.

I am extremely disappointed that this happened after I followed all Jolla's and Sony's official instructions. But hey, software does strange things. Here's hoping it was a once-off.

In related news, life without a smartphone is really pleasant.