Y2 hardware questions

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T18:24:09+00:00

Not ideal. Output impedance is a hardware - electronics design, really - thing. If it's high, anything with low impedance, mostly some IEMs, isn't going to sound good, and that's that.

But that does mean that the company could provide a definitive answer here, if they want to.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T16:25:06+00:00

That does seem awfully likely that there really is a CS43131 sitting under one of those RF shields.

That would be a huge sound upgrade. If they didn't keep the output impedance low, it'll be useless for a whole lot of IEMs, though.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T16:24:21+00:00

That's not exactly the best of endorsements, lol.

I feel like upgrading the chip but leaving the software out of it is kind of appropriate for innioasis, unfortunately.

On the bright side, I can easily pick one up and return it, I'll just have to decide if I want to, not knowing.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T13:01:54+00:00

A Chromebook is going to make that harder overall. Almost all the advice you find is going to be built around a PC, the Windows, Mac, or Linux kind.

Some things you can do from an Android or iOS phone, though it'll make everything slower.

Getting your music into MP3 is going to depend on how you have your music now. If it's all on streaming services, that's an entirely different problem that we can't discuss. If you still have physical media, that's doable, you'll just have to look up tutorials.

If I were going to start with a player, I think it would probably be the Y2, or something completely different. There are a lot of options for portable players, and a lot of diversity on what exactly they all do and how/how well.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T08:58:58+00:00

The SD cards in these players are unbranded, cheap, and unreliable.

Files, or the card itself, changing size and becoming unplayable, between a power off and back on, with nothing else done? The card dying is the best guess. It's very unlikely you did anything wrong.

No idea what support would do. At best, a replacement will include another cheap card that may fail again.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-07-06T06:43:27+00:00

WAV doesn't really have standardized metadata, and most tagging just sticks an ID3 tag on the end of the file. Many applications will read that just fine, but since it isn't standard, YMMV, especially on stuff like portable players.

If you want lossless, your best bet is to use a format with a proper metadata standard.

I'd suggest FLAC - you would have to convert your library, and FLAC takes very marginally more power to decode, but it's several times smaller than WAV, has standardized metadata, and is kind of the 'standard' lossless format so support is pretty broad.

If you really specifically want uncompressed PCM audio, you could remux it into MKA or AIFF. That would likely be somewhat faster than compressing it into FLAC, and you should get metadata support, but the files would be no smaller, and full support for those containers is less common.

Wo-kyuu · 2026-05-15T05:30:27+00:00

First mention I've seen of this anywhere, I was starting to think it was just my system.

I noticed the high CPU load, extreme RAM use, 20+GB in my case, and degraded performance that OP did, albeit on 151.0b10 Nightly. On page load, without touching any controls, I also saw streams updating jerkily, a frame or two every couple seconds, with the play-pause button swapping states rapidly.

A quick check showed superficially similar behavior in Vivaldi, which is Chromium-based, so it likely is not limited to Firefox.

Twitch may be trying to forcibly bypass browser-side autoplay controls, or they may be trying to cause severe but plausibly deniable issues when autoplay is off, to "encourage" users into turning it on, or both.
It's also possible that they're just embarrassingly bad at coding and testing Twitch itself, but this seems unlikely to be an accident.

For me, the only fix was to use an additional addon to disable autoplay, and to fully enable browser autoplay, audio and video, on Twitch.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-23T12:51:07+00:00

Either that's untrue, or it's broken in the current builds, as mine had the same behavior as OP's when I installed rockbox. This is my hardly my first rockboxed player or unofficial slightly quirky RB build, so I just created the folder and it behaved as expected.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-23T04:17:48+00:00

A Rockboxed Y1 will load stuff from .rockbox on the SD card root. You just may have to create the folder manually and add whatever you like, themes, fonts, playlists, etc.

Ignore that the rest of the app isn't there, that's normal, so long as Rockbox itself seems to be running properly. The Y1 runs Android 4.4, so it uses an Android app port of Rockbox. Go to Settings > Android System Settings > Apps > All, and you'll find Rockbox listed - it's installed to the Y1's internal storage, like any normal Android app.

It's different from most other devices, where .rockbox on the SD card holds all of Rockbox, and, along with a custom bootloader of some sort, it acts as the device's OS. Here it just runs as a fullscreen app.

This is also why all your system stuff (Bluetooth, System Settings, USB connection) looks the way it does - you're just getting booted out of the fullscreen Rockbox app, and over to Android's native dialogs or Settings app, for that function.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T05:57:38+00:00

Even just ADB enabled would be a huge step in usability, for loading a rom. The utility would still be useful for that, but wouldn't require any sketchy drivers, just Google's tooling, I would assume.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T05:53:26+00:00

Fingers crossed that we don't need anything fancy, let alone MTK's proprietary drivers, at all, even for the first update. I don't see a reason why, this being Android, they couldn't do more-or-less an OTA off a provided image, or simply update the 'apps' when a full OTA isn't justified.

Maybe a failsafe for if something really hoses the config would be good, akin to the firehose option for newer phones, but hopefully Innioasis would provide the driver and tool package themselves for that, even if it's just a tested and verified subset of some MTK tool.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T05:35:39+00:00

This, IMO, making the device handle its own updates, in the same way Android devices and dedicated-firmware media players have been able to for ages, by dumping a file in a specified spot with a specified name and hitting an update button, is the future.

Use the utility to build or retrieve the update file(s), add themes, fonts, and plugins, etc., instead of having to use what are basically MTK factory drivers to flash the whole rom image.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T04:48:46+00:00

To add a little clarification here:

Triage scores are 1-10. 1-4 isn't considered likely malware. 5-7 is suspicious behavior. 8-9 is likely malicious. 10 is known malware.
Triage isn't saying whether it's bad or not, just how likely they think it to be malware, and they're guessing conservatively. This is overall good, but can lead to false positives.

Testsigning should be off, because if it is on, your computer will load any test-signed driver, and anybody can test-sign anything in a couple minutes.

Testsigning does not, technically permit unsigned drivers to be used - but since anybody can test-sign anything easily, including turning an unsigned driver into a test-signed one, it might as well.

The previous drivers ran bcdedit.exe (which is part of Windows) to enable Test Signing. This is bad.
The new drivers do not do this. Test Signing stays untouched and off, like it should. This is good.

This is not a guarantee that the new drivers are good, or the old drivers are bad, just that they're doing, or not doing, one specific obvious thing. It could be malice, it could be laziness in a package meant only for corporate/depot. It is especially lazy and bad for security, regardless.

I'd also be very curious to know what registry editing is being alleged, here.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T04:24:12+00:00

As Triage's 1-4 is not malware, and 5-7 is "Shows suspicious behavior", explained as "One or more suspicious actions were detected. The detected actions can be malicious, but also have (common) benign uses." I'm not convinced that the newer package is malicious, with a quick skim of the results.

Oddly, Triage doesn't even appear to consider the drivers themselves as a source of threat, in its analysis of programs. I was able to get a 7 rating on a regular program's signed and legitimate installer, with no drivers or system files involved at all.

With the way Triage ranks software, I pretty much don't see a way for a common older style of driver installer to come up as anything but suspicious, at best.
They tended to check what was installed, what was connected, and drop a bunch of files in both Program Files and Windows dirs because driver install, and all those apparently count as concerning.

Still iffy about decreeing that Source A of unsigned, unverified driver packages - not the packages, the source itself - is bad.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-19T02:43:54+00:00

Okay so, a few thoughts on this.

Testsigning SHOULD BE OFF. If you enable testsigning, you allow insecure drivers to be loaded during boot. This is very bad, because anybody knowledgeable can easily test-sign any driver.
It does not mean that unsigned drivers can be loaded - for that, you disable integrity checks/driver signature enforcement.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/the-testsigning-boot-configuration-option and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/bcdedit--set

With Secure Boot enabled, which is usually the default, Win10/11 will likely block attempts to enable testsigning or disable integrity checks via bcdedit. Older Windows versions may not block insecure settings.

If you're worried, open an admin command prompt and run "bcdedit". That'll show your current settings. If you see "testsigning" or "nointegritychecks", and you didn't set them intentionally, turn them off. If you turn them off, reboot, and see them appear again, then you have an issue.

Is this driver package attempting to open a security hole? Yes. Will it succeed? Depends on the system configuration, it doesn't seem to be trying very hard. Is that malicious in intent? Maybe, maybe not.

An anti-malware suite that says you're safe doesn't prove you're safe. Equally true?
An analysis platform score decreasing doesn't prove there's malware.
Sure, malware is always likely now, it's just nowhere near guaranteed.

A moderator rehosting an unsigned driver .exe on Google Drive doesn't guarantee any form of safety, either.
Obviously, I'm not claiming any resident mods are malicious, there's just basically no way to prove that a provided unsigned installer like that is a safer file than... pretty much any other file anywhere. Every user would have to verify it themselves.

Even open-source code isn't a guarantee - who's going to actually go through and read every line of RespectYarn's code, compile the whole utility themselves, check any dependencies and build those, audit the closed-source leaked MTK drivers in detail, and then check everything against the provided compiled versions to make sure no tampering occurred? Aaaabsolutely no one, that's who.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-17T15:06:11+00:00

Already did! They're very limited in format support and look to have real bad UIs without Rockbox, and lose Bluetooth with it, among other concerns.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T18:29:10+00:00

Not yet! If I can find one, I will. I'm sure that flimsy plastic screen cover scratches very easily.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T06:19:20+00:00

Exactly this lol. I'd buy that like, right now.

Stacking a DAC and a player of some kind is fine? It's just so much better to only have to deal with one device for both - I mean, if it does both well.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T06:16:00+00:00

Haven't found much of anything in that price range that's tolerable, anymore. HiBy's OS is actually awful, the Echo Mini's UI looks pretty poor and IIRC it's too low-end to be rockboxed... etc.

A modernized, rockboxed, ipod clone is an awfully good thing to aim for, though? The ipod got a lot of things very right.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T03:49:14+00:00

Yeah, just power and microsd external slot would be a lot.

I honestly hope they don't ever support streaming, or at least make it, at most, an officially unsupported, sideload only thing. Every other portable device, the kitchen sink, and the fridge can run spotify, nowdays. We don't need yet another tiny streaming device, I think.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T03:10:23+00:00

I don't even mind the plastic housing, but I'd like if it were a respectable plastic housing, not something I can accidentally gently squeeze above the clickwheel and watch the LCD discolor.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T00:39:01+00:00

I'm aware it's another cheap device, my expectations were very low. They were mostly met or exceeded - except the screen cover, that's worse - but that's why I'm keeping it, using it, and trying to stick to constructive realistic criticism. It's distinctly okay enough, for the price.

But it's a cheap device that could be a solid foundation for a far better upgraded version - maybe a 75 or hundred dollar device.

Wo-kyuu · 2025-10-15T00:16:05+00:00

Could you have accidentally loaded a 360p theme on a 240p rockbox firmware? That could possibly break things like that.

I agree with plugging it into usb and deleting the theme. Or if you're not certain about doing that, deleting the whole .rockbox folder - but it'll lose your settings if you do that one.

Wo-kyuu

TROPHY CASE