FiiO Echo Mini, a cool retro-modern porable MP3 player

[PossiblyAxolotl]

I've been wanting to get a dedicated mp3 player of sorts for a while. I was gonna repair my iPod but it genuinely would cost so much with each upgrade and shipping to Canada that it didn't seem financially viable. I also really don't want one of those Android ones that's basically just a phone with an SD card slot and bigger audio jacks cause I want a dedicated music device that just plays the mp3s I give it. No more than that. I just recently found out about the FiiO Echo Mini which I ordered today and am super excited to try out when it arrives. It costed me $60 CAD with the nice welcome discount AliExpress gave me (yes FiiO officially sells their products on AliExpress) which is significantly cheaper than the literal hundreds of dollars it would cost to add some features to an iPod like bluetooth + new battery + upgraded storage. Thoughts on this lil thing? I'm pretty hopeful for it when it arrives, I've heard good things about FiiO overall. Some of the main criticism I've heard is just that you can't use Apple Music and other streaming with it but I never expected that. I've been building up a bit of a Bandcamp library and even have some CDs now. I'll be back here once it arrives to give a little update on it :)

[zirosi]

I've been wanting to get a dedicated mp3 player of sorts for a while. I was gonna repair my iPod but it genuinely would cost so much with each upgrade and shipping to Canada that it didn't seem financially viable. I also really don't want one of those Android ones that's basically just a phone with an SD card slot and bigger audio jacks cause I want a dedicated music device that just plays the mp3s I give it. No more than that. I just recently found out about the FiiO Echo Mini which I ordered today and am super excited to try out when it arrives. It costed me $60 CAD with the nice welcome discount AliExpress gave me (yes FiiO officially sells their products on AliExpress) which is significantly cheaper than the literal hundreds of dollars it would cost to add some features to an iPod like bluetooth + new battery + upgraded storage. Thoughts on this lil thing? I'm pretty hopeful for it when it arrives, I've heard good things about FiiO overall. Some of the main criticism I've heard is just that you can't use Apple Music and other streaming with it but I never expected that. I've been building up a bit of a Bandcamp library and even have some CDs now. I'll be back here once it arrives to give a little update on it

That seems to me like a modern iPod (almost) and I have been looking for how to fix my iPod and it has been like 6+ months I've been trying to fix it, but at this point I was just looking for inexpensive music players. So, I will check that out. Hope you enjoy it

[PossiblyAxolotl]

I've had it for a short bit now so I thought I'd give an update!

It's a very cool device, good audio quality coming out of the 3.5mm jack (I haven't tried the bal output cause I don't have anything that plugs in) and as mp3's I can fit my whole music library so far on the device's built-in storage. It's also got a very nice UI that receives occasional firmware updates you install by dropping a file in the disk and restarting it. I actually just installed the newest one that came out earlier this month and it adds some new system themes besides the default dark and light which is very nice. It did mess up my music library, but pressing the rescan button fixed everything. Just a little software bug from installation.

I do have some gripes with it, though. The main one being with how it lists songs. When you play a song it shows the name, artist, cover, and all that from the file metadata. When you are looking through the song list, it just shows the filename minus the extension. I ended up deleting a lot of stuff from the filenames to make it so I can actually read the song titles, and ended up going with the format of "SONGNUMBER SONGTITLE" since that's the format Bandcamp files use, but shortened. I wrote a little script that lets me convert all files in a folder matching the same structure to a shortened one like "tv room - The Big Big Deal - 02 So Beautiful" -> "02 So Beautiful". I just tested it and it and you don't actually need the numbers there. Despite the fact that it displays songs based on filename, it still sorts songs in order based on position in the album. I will be removing numbers from all my filenames from now on. I also think that at times the ui can feel slightly slow, but it's also in part due to the fact that it has to take a few ms to load in all the song titles when you select a menu. The Bluetooth is also not the best, like, some songs genuinely sound like that one video with the rotating fish, so don't get it just for Bluetooth. Despite these flaws, it's still a really nice device, feels solid even though it also feels very light, and still very usable.

I also got a case for it as I realized it could get scratched up and that also came with a screen protector, so it's looking like a pretty solid little thing I can carry with me.

[PossiblyAxolotl]

Also, these are the scripts I use to remove the file prefix stuff. I didn't want to include this in the main "review" post:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

for file in "$1"*;
	do mv "$file" "${file#$1}";
done;

To remove prefix, do the command: /path/to/file.sh "file prefix - "

Code: Select all

for f in *.mp3;
	do mv "$f" "${f#?? }";
done

Then just run this (can be done as one line in the terminal) to remove the number part. One line ver:
for f in *.mp3; do mv "$f" "${f#?? }"; done

[Crazyroostereye]

Also, these are the scripts I use to remove the file prefix stuff. I didn't want to include this in the main "review" post:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

for file in "$1"*;
	do mv "$file" "${file#$1}";
done;

To remove prefix, do the command: /path/to/file.sh "file prefix - "

Code: Select all

for f in *.mp3;
	do mv "$f" "${f#?? }";
done

Then just run this (can be done as one line in the terminal) to remove the number part. One line ver:
for f in *.mp3; do mv "$f" "${f#?? }"; done

There is a tool I can recommend called Musicbrainz Picard which is open source and can sort your Music in customized Fashion, while also being able to add missing Metadata to songs. It uses for that the Musicbrainz DB which is also Open.

[Fireye]

Ooh this is a neat convo! I've been looking at ditching Spotify recently in favor of actually owning my music, but my main problem at the moment is synchronization, in that I just want my music files to be added in one central self hosted media server then have my devices query that server when I tell them to. That probably locks me out of a lot of these dedicated MP3 players which is a shame, as many support Bluetooth and could probably do this if only their operating systems supported it.

Regardless, I also recently saw that the vorbis (.ogg) file format (the open source alternative) generally outperforms MP3 in terms of audio quality at the same compression size, or allows smaller compression at equal audio quality, which was super neat, as all I wasn't aware of other formats beforehand, let alone open source options.

[Crazyroostereye]

Ooh this is a neat convo! I've been looking at ditching Spotify recently in favor of actually owning my music, but my main problem at the moment is synchronization, in that I just want my music files to be added in one central self hosted media server then have my devices query that server when I tell them to. That probably locks me out of a lot of these dedicated MP3 players which is a shame, as many support Bluetooth and could probably do this if only their operating systems supported it.

Regardless, I also recently saw that the vorbis (.ogg) file format (the open source alternative) generally outperforms MP3 in terms of audio quality at the same compression size, or allows smaller compression at equal audio quality, which was super neat, as all I wasn't aware of other formats beforehand, let alone open source options.

So for Media Server I can recommend Jellyfin for general media Streaming and for Music specific I would recommend a Subsonic Server implementation. Both have a nice suite of Apps that People made to use them.

But I personally don't do it that way and rather have a Syncthing setup that sync my Music Folder across all my Devices so I can use whatever App as the Files are local.

I heard that Vorbis is pretty good, but haven't looked into Audio Codecs really that much. I tend to try to get my Music in FLAC or WAV which I then convert to FLAC, to get the best Audio Possible. As the Storage Consumption is still not to major.
I have around 230 Songs as FLAC in my Library, and it only uses around 7G. Which is a lot for just Audio Files, but considering that it is Lossless I can justify it.

[Fireye]

Syncing is probably the way I'll go as well with music anyway. I'm all open source these days, so syncthing certainly looks worth a star, thanks for the rec!

FLAC is certainly the way to go if size isn't a concern. If I recall correctly it's also foss & made by the same group as vorbis (xiph.org), which is pretty neat! If you are opting for a compressed format though I definitely recommend vorbis! I use it in game audio tracks & in publishing my music to my website both of which are more size sensitive than standard use. Honestly I should be taking more advantage of FLAC otherwise though; I just get a bit space paranoid every now and then XD