Index Introduction Subjective Sound Quality And Handling Aune´s Got Limited File Handling Capability Improve File Handling Ripping, Compressing and Tagging With EAC File Name Generation And Tag Manipulation With Mp3tag File And Directory Sorting Using DriveSort Writing Files To the SD card Downloads

Picture source: https://www.auneaudio-europe.com/

Recently I had been looking for a possibility to rip CD´s to a medium other than yet another CD, which are frequently rejected by CD players. Being spoiled by using contemporary media like computers and mobile MP3 players, some visual track indication to aid track selection would be most welcome, since the information is inside the tracks´s META flags anyways.

These days mobile players abound, with an increasing trend towards high quality players beyond plain MP3. These range from user friendly price tags to incredibly ludicrous price tags in the 1000 Euro range.

Since I found the sense of using a mobile HQ player in a loud public environment questionable, besides trading in fragile interface connectors, I opted for a desktop model.

The best on price/performance ratio appeared to be the Aune X5s player that plays MP3 and FLAC compressed files (amongst others) with subjectively excellent quality and a price in the range of a medium HIFI CD player unit.

The files are stored onto a removeable SD card up to 128GB, which appears an enormous amount of music in practice.

Since handling such great amounts of music files can easily lead to a mess, and since the Aune´s META tag display capability is quite rudimentary (which will inevitably lead to a mess), some freeware programs have been devised that make life much easier.

Having tons of sound files crammed onto a single media of whatever property mandatory requires rethinking of your archivation method, or you will inevitably land in chaos.

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The sound is subjectively excellent. A direct A/B comparison with a CD player yields some subtle coloration, but it is hard to tell which unit adds this effect. It can, however, safely be assumed that both units add their own type of coloration.

The provided remote control works, although the infrared reception is not terribly hot. You have to aim towards the unit quite precise. But then the sorting and replaying works quite as expected with a functionality akin to a basic CD player: play, pause, next, previous. You would not be able to read the display from a few meters away, but the same will hold true für most other systems except an on-screen TV display. Similar to a CD changer, there is also a mechanism for selecting a directory, i.e. a different CD volume.

Using the stationary buttons is possible, but cumbersome, so don´t loose the remote.

The unit comes with Mandarin Language preselected for the on-screen menu, but just follow the instructions in the manual to change this to English. The manual is located on the small SD card supplied. Use this card to upload new firmware if needed.

The supplied wall-wart power supply appears more than ample. It stays cold to the touch and does not introduce any audible sound degradation. This is mentioned, since an allegedly upgraded supply is offered for respectable money. A phone call to the seller revealed that even they would not see a necessity for any other PSU.

The only thing I have to complain about the PSU is a slight mechanical vibration that is audible when the unit touches a rigid surface, such as an metal amplifier case. A piece of soft foam underneath stopped this.

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Contemporary players, particularly PC based, tend to scan all file´s META tags beforehand (probably due to their superior computing power and scanning speed) and then provide selection mechanisms based upon the collected information.

Even the meanest MP3 player will let you sort your music by tags like author, genre or the like.

Not so the Aune. It displays the files in the order they are written onto the storage medium and it displays only the file name. It does not currently utilize META information. After some sessions with writing files to the SD card you invariably will end up with files that appear in the display following no meaningful order (most people probably expect the files to appear in an alphabetically sorted order...).

There is some sorting number displayed, but this again is not coincident with the track number stored in the META tags unless the file writing order were the same.

The display will show the left bound file name letters first up to a certain number or characters, persist for a while, scroll towards the right, persist for a while, and restart.  So if the file name is garbage, so will be the display.

Directories are not shown during playing (i.e. the "CD" name), which you would not have on a real music CD either, but during "CD" selection. See later for meaningful naming conventions.

Although the unit can use SD cards up to 128GB, at some point you may want to change cards for another music collection. With a growing music collection the question of  purposeful archiving arises, possibly by genre or the like. This invariably raises the question of how much sense it makes to obtain such big cards, unless you want all your music on one physical storage medium. New technology, new problems.

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Note we are working our way backwards here. Before you start, be sure you have the current firmware installed (see download list).

There is no mechanism to change the file sorting order in the Aune. There is also no way to change it on the card via the operating system (such as Windows). We will find a way to change the file sorting order later to change the directory sort order to an alphabetical way (or other if desired) and make the tracks appear according to their inherent track number later on.

• The best archivation can only be as good as a careful tag assignment right after ripping, which at the best is done by using an online database, or at the worst by hand if no entry is found^[1].
  

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I used EAC for years, and despite some lengthy initial setup procedure this yields excellent results, provided some reasonable CD-rom reader is used. I always use some elevated quality setting over ripping speed. Many popular CD´s are in their online database, so meta tags can be assigned in a snap.

You can select to have them ripped to WAV or whatever compressed format on the fly, although in lieu of the Aune, .MP3 and .FLAC will be ideal. You can specify if you want uncompressed (.wav) files or on-the-fly .mp3 or .flac compression, although you also can do this externally.

Due to the sheer amount of storage FLAC will lend itself readily to this task, although nothing speaks against choosing MP3 with a high quality setting except for purists.

Most CD´s are known to the database, so before you start ripping, look up the database and if success, all META field entries inside the ripped files are filled up. This saves you from the hassle of doing this yourself.

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Although the Aune does not use the META information per se (due to its limited computing power), it displays the file name, which in turn can be generated automatically with the subsequent program.

With Mp3tag program you can

• edit the meta tags to your like, if you think something is wrong or missing or if you create files of your own. You can also
• create meta tags from the file name autmatically (in case of files imported from the internet), or, more often,
• create a file name from meta tags automatically.

The program is quite powerful but easy to deal with, once you get the hang of those tags.

Take care that the track information in the meta tags reflects the order of appearance on the CD, if you want this.

Although the Aune displays some track number, this is only the sequence of appearance on the storage medium and not the META tag´s track number.

It thus appears useful to make the track number part of the file name first place. Use two places for the number or a number 10 will appear right after a 1 as different to a 10 appearing in place 10 after a 01.

File ordering sample starting with one character place:

Using one character	Using two characters
1	01
10	02
11	...
2	09
3	10
...	11

So a file name composition of track number (two places) – track name – (optional) artist – (optional) volume name appeared useful. You can coax MP3tag into producing that easily. [Format string: $num(%track%,2) - %title% - %artist% - %album%]

The display will show the left bound letters first up to a certain number or characters, persist for a while, slowly scroll towards the right, persist for a while, and restart. Upon browsing through the files you would only see the leftmost characters.

• It is thus a good idea to keep redundant information as short as possible.

It is no problem for Mp3tag to work on a whole directory or even a whole card volume directly. It does it surprisingly fast.

• Be careful with special characters, the Aune might revert to Mandarin or invent a short filename if it cannot resolve the name.

I had used a ´  instead of an ' (apostrophe) - which looks deceptively similar:

01-Hear My Train A-Comin´ vs. 01-Hear My Train A-Comin'

• The file system has no problem with dots.
  

Note that you may have to update or complete the Meta tag information (such as the track number) within the .mp3 or .flac file. Be prepared for some work. And by the way... Mp3tag, despite its name, works on .flac and even .wav files too. What a great program.

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A PC based system is a full-blown operating system with enormous computing power. Although files are always added to the disk´s file table sequentially, a user interface usually can display files in any order desired by on-the-fly file sorting and displaying algorithms, such as alphabetically, although it normally does not change the file table sorting. Actual update of the file table thus makes no sense whatsoever.

But not so on the Aune. As mentioned earlier, the Aune does not read META information, it works with file names directly. Its file selection mechanism is very rudimentary and it displays files the way they appear on the SD card. So it does make a lot of sense to pre-sort the files on the SD card - usually alphabetically.

After generating meaningful file names with Mp3tag (as above), sort them with DriveSort directly on the SD card, using the following settings:

Start the sorting process by clicking on FOLDER>SORT and then on FOLDER>SAVE

You have to repeat this every time you add / delete files on the card. This takes some time, once your music library is growing. This is a bit cumbersome, but is in order considered how seldom you probably update your libary.

Naming of the directories currently is of little consequence, since the Aune ignores the directory names during playback. It does nevertheless display them in the sequence they have been added, when you are browsing directories (i.e. "CDs"), which is not necessarily alphabetical unless you have run DriveSort before. Don´t forget to store after sorting.

Enjoy your vastly improved file access and display experience on the Aune!

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Downloads

• EAC
• Mp3tag
• DriveSort
• AuneX5s Firmware

• SDformatter

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• Mar. 17, 2022:  major update
  
• Sept 13, 2017:  updating download section
  
• Sept 1, 2017:  first release