Trying Out the FAKE_POD_NANO

Why?

So, I've been trying to effectively de-centralize my music listening for years and years now. That includes Funkwhale, but there's been a lot of reliability issues there while the software matures. It works great when it's not down though. (Thanks @gravitas@pl.ugh.im so much for hosting my tunes all this time!) What has worked much more reliably has been... the good old mp3 player. Or DAP (digital music player), as they call it these days. Makes sense, all I put on there are .flacs files afterall.

Many years ago, I bought a used Shanling Q1 off eBay, and put Rockbox on it. It sounded great and had plenty of battery life, and my modest collection doesn't come close to pushing the storage limits on SD cards these days. It saw me through a lot of bad times and good, but one day it finally broke... I failed to repair it, as did several friends and a professional. Shanling did send us some free replacement parts, but honestly shame on them for making such an unrepairable product and not supporting it longer.

Looking for a suitable replacement was a challenge. Most of the proprietary options that have been Rockboxed are either getting pretty old and rare these days, or else are brand new and cost a fortune. OR, are brand new but don't have a decent dedicated DAC inside? Really?? Innioasis does say they might rectify that in the future though.

In the open source realm, there seem to be even fewer options. The Tangara woulda been absolutely perfect, but the CrowdSupply batch ran out and there's no way I'm competent enough at soldering to build one myself. (I still really want one though, @jacqueline@chaos.social and co, y'all rock!!!) That led me to what really seems to be the only other open source DAP out there... The FAKE_POD_NANO.

It's a Chinese project, and the more technical aspects of the documentation really do not auto-translate well at alllll, but a seller on Tindie had a really cool CNCed aluminum case version for sale. I went for it, and a month of shipping later, here we are!

The Hardware

It's great. Case is really well made, nothing feels fragile or poorly aligned or anything. The AMOLED screen is super crisp, and the perfect size for album art. Looks easy enough to disassemble and repair too, but I'm not popping it open unless I have to. The SD card slot is such that the card itself will sit slightly inset into the case, once fully inserted. So, you'll need some kind of pokey to remove it. This makes sense but does worry me a bit, as my last player would occasionally get the card stuck on the inside edge of the case.

Also, completely randomly, this thing has a mic, gyroscope, and accelerometer in it! Why, I dunno. Maybe those come built-in on some component it uses, haven't looked that up. It doesn't use those features for much, but I'm sure it could if somebody wanted to mod it. Somebody told me the ESPv3 might be sluggish for a music player, but it super isn't. The thing responds plenty fast enough.

The battery life is modest but fair. More importantly for me, given what happened to my last player, the 603035 battery it uses seems easily replaceable. I'd estimate it gets around 8 hours or so of constant play time with the screen off.

Now, the sound quality... It's absolutely blowing my MIND!!! And that's in an old, cheap, well-used pair of Sennheiser Urbanites. Way better than my Q1 had everrrrrr been. This thing comes in two versions, and in my HiFi version that CS43131 DAC is reallllyyyy putting in the work!!

The Firmware

For the most part it works fine. I mean, the menus are navigable and everything more-or-less does what it's supposed to do. I can actually use it, and have been, regularly.

However... Here's where things get dicey.

With a song paused, the browse menu closes WAY too fast. My file names are (too) long, and it takes them a sec to scroll across the tiny screen, so sometimes the browse menu times out before I can read the song titles I'm looking at. Gods forbid you be indecisive about what you wanna hear next!

Next, if I'm understanding correctly, You can only have up to 255 folders, each with no more than 255 tracks inside. On top of that, it can only read one subfolder deep. So if you have your music organized “Artist folder > Album folders > Tracks”, that's not gonna work. It can't see them. Obviously these two things combined present a problem if you have a lot of music, compromises have to be made somewhere. I opted to make 27 folders, “A” through “Z” plus “Other”. Then I made sure my tracks were all named in the format [Artist] [Album] [Track no.] [Track title], and collapsed them into the appropriate lettered folder by name. If I ever surpass 255 in any particular letter, I'll just have to split it into something like “A1” and “A2”.

About playlists, that's what it seems to interpret each of these folders as. Not sure if there's a way to do more complicated things with playlists, like .m3u or .xspf files. It also generates one big so-called “playlist” file upon first scanning your SD, and that file can be updated with new additions from the menu. However, you're better off deleting the “playlist” file and rescanning the SD, because otherwise it puts any new stuff at the bottom of the list, instead of alphabetical... Plus rescanning is like LIGHTING fast anyway.

It can see and properly display metadata, but doesn't use it for literally anything else... So if you were thinking you'd just use a script to copy all your tracks into the root directory, good luck ever finding the one you're looking for afterwards. You can't sort by artist. You can't even play an album in order, unless the file names start “01, 02...” and are in the same folder.

And finally, certain songs fail to play. Sometimes re-transferring it over works, so I thought at first maybe it was just write errors to the SD card. But some don't. On the songs that don't, they generally play fine on my Linux desktop. If I force re-encode those files from .flac to flac, that seems to fix it. So, I'm guessing the files themselves must have some encoding issues that the desktop players are more tolerant of than the firmware on the device.

Finally, and most importantly... I can't (or else maybe don't know how to) update it! There's an OTA (over the air) update method using Bluetooth, but it doesn't seem to work for me. There's a firmware flasher with all the rest of the docs and files, on OSHWhub, but it's impossible to download anything from there without a Chinese phone number. This is all a shame because it does appear to be very actively developed. Maybe all my issues have been solved already and I just don't have access to the solutions? It does appear my current firmware version is close the very first one.