PixlBit

I had a blog all ready last week, but I decided against sharing it, and then on Monday I figured you good people really didn’t want to read about my random NBA games on the Switch but I should at least write something for this week, so here I am. It’s not like I don’t want to share the randoms in my life, I figure it was more cookie cutter than interesting. I’ll give you a Cliffs Notes (is this still a thing?) version

 

-I got a new toy (more on this in a bit)

-I started to re-rip my CDs (again more on this a bit)

-I hate the time change.

-No meat Friday’s…blah.

 

Ok so I got a new toy so…

Chris (Kinda) Reviews Stuff!

Two weeks ago I woke up, went to one of my shopping lists on Amazon, hit add to cart on both items, hit send and then went back to sleep. Sunday afternoon I got this in the mail

 

So I decided to take the step from iPod/Android Music Player/iPhone and back to dedicated music player but this time I was going full on FLAC files. I had a FLAC player before with my Rockbox’d Sansa Clip but I wasn’t a fan of the interface. I could have just used FLAC with the Android player and the Benjie S5 but I wanted to go with this guy because of it’s features. For $70 bucks the Fiio M3K has a lot of bang for the buck

 

Out of the box you get the player, a rubber case, the USB charging cable, and two adaptor heads for the cable (USB C and Micro USB). The M3K came with 70% charge and I used the player for almost a week before needing to recharge it. The battery on this thing is insane! I think you can use it for 22 straight hours or something crazy. The music player can also be used as an external DAC for you laptop. Changing the settings from Storage to DAC is a breeze, although I have yet to try this feature.

 

The Benjie S5 and the Fiio 

So I’ve had this player for over a week, and I filled it with music and I have some thoughts:

-Adding music to it is easy. It’s all drag and drop. Since I’ve been using iTunes I create playlists, I just create a folder on the SD card, copy the music in iTunes, and paste folder. Easy.

-It’s a no frills player. No bluetooth, no Wifi. You’ll get more enjoyment from this player if you use a good pair of wired headphones/IEMs.

-The sound is flat, which is good. The equalizers are terrible because they’re preset. In a message board Fiio said this will be updated with a firmware update.

-The face is nice. The top third of the player is the color screen. The rest is the touch buttons with a middle stripe that works as a touch scroll. You tap the middle of it and it is Play/Pause. On the side there are physical buttons for power, volume rocker, and another Play/Pause button that can be mapped to be used a button to repeat a section of music.

 

-There is a built in microphone on top and this DAP can be used as a digital recorder. Within the settings you can change the file format of the recording.

Overall I like this player. I used it when I went out for the day and it did a great job. I put my phone on vibrate and I spent time looking for CDs at Goodwill while listening to music, drowning out everyone around me.

 

Chris Rips His CDs…Again

I’ve been planing on getting the the M3K for awhile now and once I got my external music drive ready to use it was time to re-rip my CDs. The first time I ripped them into MP3 which was fine for my phone but when I used those files on my Benjie, it would just show the track number, and track title. This is iTunes’ format. It is a minor annoyance but it would be better. Since I did it backwards, this time I wanted to rip my CDs into FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). From this point I can convert tracks to MP3 or AAC formats for my phone, iPods, and the Android player. I’ve been using the travel version of Musicbee to do the converting and so far I have done almost 600 CDs. I have a long way to go but it will be nice to have all my music in this format. Once I’m finished I’m thinking about buying a 512 GB Micro SD card to be home to my entire CD library. It is crazy to think that I could have my entire collection in my pocket.

 

Pickups

Games

No games but I bought a replacement controller for my PC

 

I lost the detachable section on my generic 360 controller so I bought the blue version. The interesting thing is that the cable is now micro USB on one side so if something happens to this cable I could probably just use another micro USB/USB cable. We’ll give it a spin later this week

 

Music

I bought a bunch of stuff for the blog I was going to write but instead I will share my latest two CDs I bought on Amazon.

 

Since I’m going full on FLAC I needed to replace the iTunes copy of Common’s Be (damn good album). I also found a CD I haven’t heard since high school. I owned the Cassette Single of Domino’s Let’s Ride, and now I have the full CD. I think in total with tax it came out to $19 for both.

 

Alright Pixlpeeps I am off. Today is no meat, and well I need to find food that has no meat. Have a good weekend!

 

That’s all for now, more later!

-Chris