Hiby R3 PRO II - Just wow!
I just got the HiBy R3 Pro II yesterday, and honestly, the experience has been terrible so far. The entire purpose of a dedicated DAP is to play music seamlessly, and this thing just can't do it.
Issue is when a song finishes playing from a playlist, the device either just stops, or it sits there loading forever until it completely freezes. To fix it, I have to hard reboot the device and start the whole process over again. I’ve had to do this about 15 times already in less than 24 hours.
When it does actually manage to change tracks without crashing, there is a massive 5-second lag between the end of one song and the start of the next.
Firmware: Fully updated to the latest version.
Album Art: All my embedded cover art is standardized to 600 x 600.
Files: Standard library. Majority are just mp3 files (not trying to play anything unusual).
SD Card: Formatted to exFat as suggested at https://guide.hiby.com/en/docs/products/audio_player/hiby_r3proii/guide
I knew there were some reported lag issues with the OS before buying, but I didn't expect it to be this completely unusable. Shouldn't a basic feature like sequential playback just work out of the box?
For comparison, my 5-year-old FiiO M6 has given me virtually zero issues, outside of a rare freeze on a massive 1-hour track. It changes and plays the next song instantly.
Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a specific setting in HiBy OS I need to toggle, or did I just get a defective unit?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!
UPDATE:
Thanks to the community. The following things helped improve my device drastically
- Formatted to exFAT
- Updated to latest firmware
- Cover Art Resized: 350 x 350
- Metadata Stripped: I removed non-essential tags (e.g., encoded-by, comments, and excessive ID3 frames) that often cause DAPs to lag or "hiccup" during song transitions. Used Gemini CLI to do this.
Starting to enjoy using this device now. If anything changes I'll update here. Thanks everyone!