r/DigitalAudioPlayer

If you find any bugs, feel free to let me know!

The next update will add Tidal and Qobuz streaming and other things but for now everything is working nicely from my own tests.

But keep it mind, it's a beta.

Just flash the upt file and you're good to go!

Find it here: https://github.com/mr-f0xx/sonix-player-tempotec-v1

PS: This firmware will be constantly evolving, for a while so make sure to check often my repo to ensure you have the latest version, which is designed to improve our experience.

After enough lurking on here and r/iems, I decided on the combo of a Fiio M21 and Kiwi Astrals.

The world sounds crooked to my ear now.

Basically i really want a mp3 player that looks like the "pill" shape. Ive heard some not great things about the echo nano so im a little hesitant on buying it.

Im looking for/fine with:

~6-8 hours of battery life

Decent amount of storage (can work with like 10 gb honestly)

Not too expensive (im willing up to ~$50)

Bluetooth would be a plus but not necessary

Same as title

Keeping it ultra-minimal. New FiiO Echo Nano joined the stealth-black EDC rotation.

After months of lurking this sub, I decided to use my birthday as an excuse to spend a little on myself...

This little thing is AWESOME!

(Tempotec V1 + Tamgzu Red Lion II + Linsoul Tripowin Zonie)

A few months ago I bought the TempoTec V3 Blaze and absolutely loved the way it sounded. For me, it is easily one of the best players for the money in terms of sound quality.

The firmware, however... it's bad.

I came from Sony players, so the Blaze firmware felt pretty rough in comparison. Around four months ago I started messing with it as a personal project, initially just trying to fix things that annoyed me and see what else could be enabled or improved.

Then TempoTec released the official v1.3 firmware. It finally fixed the random crashes I had been experiencing and added PEQ, which was great, but it also introduced new problems when using the Blaze as a Bluetooth receiver, especially with LDAC.

So I decided to go further, fix those problems myself, clean up the other modifications I had been working on, document everything and finally make the project public.

https://github.com/carmine-bin/tempotec-v3-blaze-mod

There are currently two versions.

Stock + Fixes

This is basically the official TempoTec v1.3 firmware, keeping the stock UI and features, but with the Bluetooth Receiver fixes.

The two main fixes are:

LDAC audio artifacts: official v1.3 introduced digital artifacts when using the Blaze as an LDAC Bluetooth receiver. I tracked the problem down to the decoder and applied a one-byte correction that removes the corruption.

LDAC dropouts / Bluetooth Receiver stability: BlueZ was continuing to scan while the device was already receiving audio. This made high-bitrate LDAC unnecessarily unstable, to the point where forced 990 kbps could drop even at very short distances.

After changing the Bluetooth configuration so it stops scanning while receiving audio, 660/990 kbps is dramatically more stable, and 990 kbps now works at distances where it previously failed.

I documented the testing and technical details on GitHub.

Full Mod

This includes all of the fixes above, but is based around a HiBy-style UI originally adapted for the V3 Analog.

I ported it to the Blaze and spent quite a bit of time fixing and completing it.

Includes things like fixed battery/charging indicators, fixed gain icons and related crashes, restored missing UI elements, a working brightness slider in Quick Settings, SD-card image and music database cache, Theme Color settings, restored About/developer mode access, multiple Now Playing fixes, shutdown screen fixes, album-view performance fixes, and a few storage/system tweaks.

It still keeps the official v1.3 PEQ, real-time Bluetooth search, TempoTec stability fixes and official kernel.

There are a lot of smaller changes and fixes as well, so instead of making this post enormous, the full changelog and technical documentation are available on GitHub. Both versions install through the normal microSD firmware update process.

This is ONLY for the TempoTec V3 Blaze (V3_ANALOG_2025). It is NOT compatible with the older V3 Analog.

Flashing custom firmware always carries some risk, so please read the installation and recovery documentation first.

I'd really appreciate it if other V3 Blaze owners could test it.

So far most of the testing has obviously been done on my own unit, and getting results from more devices would help confirm the fixes and find bugs or weird edge cases that I may have missed.

Bug reports, test results and contributions are welcome either on GitHub or in the Telegram group.

And finally, a huge thanks to the people behind:

https://github.com/hiby-modding

Their work and Discord helped me understand how this system works and what the firmware is actually built around. Without the existing reverse-engineering work from that community, figuring all of this out would have been significantly harder.

Thanks as well to everyone listed in the project's credits.

AI disclosure: this project originally started without AI assistance. As it grew, however, I used AI tools to help with parts of the reverse-engineering and repetitive workflow, especially because many changes require unpacking, modifying, rebuilding and comparing files repeatedly.

The released modifications were still reviewed and tested by me on actual V3 Blaze hardware.

TLDR: Japanese NW-A829, homebrew player booting next to Sony's firmware. Drag and drop, 24-bit FLAC, Sony's DSP and EQ, podcasts downloaded over my phone's Bluetooth, and Game Boy/NES/GBA/Doom. Delete one folder and it's a stock Walkman again. Credits and open questions at the end.

On a trip to Japan I found a pristine NW-A829 and bought it on the spot. At home I remembered why Japanese models are a pain outside Japan. There's no drag and drop, everything has to go through SonicStage, and mine was on firmware 1.01 with a Japanese-only menu.

I spent most of a weekend going down the rabbit hole with Claude. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a firmware person. Claude wrote most of the code, and a lot of this stands on work the community did long before me. Credits are below.

Cheap fixes first, for other A820 owners

• Firmware 1.02 unlocks the language menu. I lost a whole day hacking around the Japanese menu before noticing the official update had already solved it.
• On a non-Japanese Windows, the Japanese SonicStage 4.4 shows "????" everywhere. SonicStage CP 4.3 in English, with the region set to OpenMG Japan, imports MP3s with covers via File > Import > M3U.
• Don't bother cross-flashing the international firmware. It boots, but MTP mode needs a factory WMDRM certificate the Japanese unit doesn't have. I tried for a day so you don't have to.

The homebrew part

Under the hood, the A829 is a small Linux box: an ARM9 that tops out at 248 MHz, about 20 MB of RAM, a 240x320 screen, and a separate audio DSP. Sony's firmware stays as it is, apart from two small patches. One is a hook that runs a script from the user storage at boot, and the other is a 3-byte patch that removes the "Simple Mode" popup. The script launches my player in place of Sony's UI. Delete the folder and you're back to stock, with the SonicStage library untouched.

What it does now:

• Drag and drop, music by artist and album with covers
• FLAC up to 24-bit, plus MP3, AAC, WMA 2 and non-DRM ATRAC
• Synced lyrics, plus audiobooks and podcasts that remember where you left off
• Playback speed from 0.75x to 2x without the chipmunk effect, plus silence trimming and a voice boost for podcasts
• Bluetooth headphones and speakers, with auto-reconnect
• A focus mode with interval bells and white, pink or brown noise
• Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, Doom (Freedoom), and GBA (early, but it runs), with save states. The HOLD switch doubles as turbo. Pokémon Crystal runs at full speed, or at a less dignified frame rate if music is playing at the same time.
• Switch back to Sony's UI from the menu, no reboot

I wanted it to still feel like a 2008 Walkman. The UI uses Sony's own fonts, icons and zoom animations, read straight from the firmware. Sony's DSP decodes MP3, AAC, WMA and ATRAC, so DSEE (on MP3), Clear Bass and the Sony EQ all still work. The DSP decodes MP3 at about 4.6x real time while the main CPU barely notices. There's also a "max battery" mode where the DSP feeds the DAC directly and the main CPU stays out of the audio path entirely. Oh, and my player boots in 3.7 s. Sony's takes 4.4.

Podcasts, or how a 512-byte buffer ate my evening

The Walkman has no Wi-Fi. My stubborn idea was to have it pair with my phone over Bluetooth tethering, check my feeds and download new episodes, chapters and transcripts in the background while something else plays. The phone only provides the connection. The whole network stack runs on the Walkman.

It worked on the first try, at 1 KB/s. At that speed, a 55 MB episode takes about 15 hours.

The culprit was a tiny waiting area inside the Walkman, where data from the phone sits for a moment before it gets processed. It was designed in 2008 and only holds a few hundred letters' worth of data. It kept overflowing, and about half of everything the phone sent was quietly lost and had to be sent again. Changing one setting fixed that, and downloads got about 50 times faster. A bit more fine-tuning, plus letting the processor run at full speed while downloading, made them roughly twice as fast again in tests. That 15-hour episode now takes about 7 minutes. I just hit "search for new episodes" and keep listening.

Bluetooth, the hard way

The Walkman could already play music on Bluetooth headphones, but only from Sony's own menus. The part that handles Bluetooth is sealed shut, and there's no manual for it. To use it from my player, I borrowed a testing tool Sony's factory left inside the Walkman and changed a tiny piece of it, so it reconnects to your last headphones or speaker by itself. At first, every attempt failed with a mysterious "error 151". It turned out the Walkman hangs up right after pairing, so you have to call back immediately or lose the connection.

That same Bluetooth connection is how the podcasts get downloaded. It can also make the Walkman show up on your phone as a remote control, so the Walkman's buttons can play, pause or skip on the phone. I haven't fully tested that part yet.

Credit where it's due

• Rockbox's nwztools (Amaury Pouly and contributors) reverse engineered Sony's UPG update format and the SCSI commands these players use for firmware updates. The whole flashing workflow builds on that.
• Sony's GPL source release for the NW-A808, the closest sister model, was the reference for the kernel and the audio driver.
• Emulators: gnuboy (Game Boy), agnes (NES), gpSP with Normmatt's open-source BIOS (GBA), and doomgeneric running Freedoom.
• Audio and networking: libmad, dr_flac, FAAD2, TJpgDec for cover art, zlib, lwIP, mbedTLS, Sonic for playback speed, AutoEq for the headphone profile, and the Podcasting 2.0 spec for chapters and transcripts.
• I don't know everything Claude drew on while working. If you recognize something from your project, tell me and I'll add it.

Where I could use help

1. The Walkman-as-remote mode pairs and connects to my phone, but I haven't confirmed that key presses get through yet.
2. Has anyone done homebrew on the A820 series before? I couldn't find much, but I may not have looked in the right places.

If there's interest, I'm happy to put the whole thing on GitHub: the player, the boot hook, and notes on the hardware and the DSP.

I'd also like to make it easy to try for people who aren't into firmware: one installer that patches the official Sony update on your own PC and copies the player over, with the stock firmware always one step away. Fair warning: so far it has run on exactly one unit, mine, a Japanese 16 GB A829.

Would you try something similar on your "old" device?

Not enough people are talking about this, custom firmware has landed on the echo mini. RECHO. Really easy to install, same as a firmware update. GAPLESS is here and the firmware is substantially faster, everyone please give it a go, not made by me. The firmware is NOT vibecoded, real project from a real programmer. If you like it, please tell others and support to project on ko-fi.

RECHO: https://recho.atzkey.workers.dev/
ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/miauk

I finally got the chance this week to sit down and do some real ripping and loading onto my F20 Pro. I had to start with Queens Jewels.

Spinning “I was born to love you” in 24-bit/96kHz lossless of the memory card hits completely different through the little brick. Freddie’s vocals truly come alive!

There is something deeply satisfying about pairing a physical media collection with a dedicated retro style DAP - holding the CD jewel case in one hand and flipping through the library with physical buttons on the other… just hits different.

Show me your best collection! Drop your favorite albums or setups here!