New Purchase: Oakcastle 8GB MP3 Player w/BT 4.0.

Ever the optimist, particularly where failure is assured, I took the plunge once again and ordered another mp3 player from Amazon - the Oakcastle 8GB mp3 player with Bluetooth 4.0.

I'm still in pursuit of the 'perfect' mp3 player with Bluetooth, namely, one that not only supports the Ogg audio format in name, but will also stream the damn thing via BT - not too much to ask I think!  But despite setting the bar this low, I find once again that my aspirations are being confounded by the same cretins behind the Ruizu mp3 player, reviewed here in another post.

In my defense, there were none of the tell-tale signs that this was the case, having read before hand that, 1) this was a relatively new model, launched in Nov/Dec 2019, and 2) that it had been designed in the UK.  There was also the English-sounding name - Oakcastle.  I was aware though that it was manufactured in China - but then, isn't most electronics nowadays!

On powering it up, it was immediately obvious that firmware-wise, this was another Ruizu in all but name, and it quickly proved that the underlying software that powers the thing is all but identical.  The same curious affliction persists, where neither Ogg or Aac will stream via BT, just the bog-standard mp3, Flac, Wav & Wma.

Anyone wondering about my insistence on Ogg BT-streaming - I use the Ogg  format with all of my (Natural Reader-made) audio-books, numbering at a rough guess, 700-800 by now.  Add to that, I have many online-radio 'stream-ripped' sessions (using 'Streamripper' naturally), whose session-lengths often exceeds 24hrs and many of these are recorded from Aac radio-streams.

But what about the mp3 player itself I hear you say.  Well, despite having a hissy-fit and vowing to return it to Amazon, after playing with it for a while, I've decided to hang onto it.  Shortcomings aside, it has definite improvements over the Ruizu.  First off, the User-interface is imo, much improved, plus the keypad entry, far more intuitive.  'Stupid' omissions like the ability to fast-forward/reverse while in BT-mode have finally been rectified.  There has also been an Ogg-specific bug-fix, where files encoded at a certain bit-rate, would lock up the Ruizu, which was gratifying to discover.  BT pairing & (re)connections seems pretty much flawless.  This drives me to distraction at times with Linux distros.  For example, with Linux Mint 17.3, still my OS of choice, BT in general works well once 'paired' to my headphones.  The problem arises when I then pair the headphones to one of my other (3) Linux boxes, then try getting a reconnection with 17.3 - suffice to say, it can be a frustrating affair!  But nowhere near as frustrating as using BT on my Raspian-powered Pi 3B or with Deepin 20.  BT on the Pi is pretty much unusable, whereas with Deepin, it's a case of continuous disconnections, so just more hassle than it's worth.  Hell, even with Win7, while BT streaming works ok, it is sometimes impossible to 'seamlessly' re-connect my headphones to it once they have been paired to another machine.  I experience none of these problems with the Oakcastle mp3 player, it reconnecting to my headphones with ease, irrespective of what machine they had previously been connected to.

The radio function, though almost universally criticised in reviews, has a Record function that produces a stereo track - or a 'fake-stereo' track rather - like the Ruizu, it produces a two-channel Wav audio track, each channel comprised of identical data, so a mono-track in practice.  Therefore no improvements on the radio-hardware side of things either, no doubt because it is almost never used.

Despite its tiny size, it is purported to provide 30hrs of listening with headphones and 9hrs with Bluetooth, though given its weight - 27g compared to the Ruizu's 40g - and the Chinese tendency to wildly inflate run-time figures, I'll take these figures under advisement.  I might even post my own battery run-times here at some stage, God willing.

 [Well, that didn't take long, Divinely Inspired, no doubt - on earphones, with a volume of 10, it ran for 29+hrs (checked at hour 29, had powered off when I checked again at hour 31).  With Bluetooth on, it ran for 8 hours, 15 minutes precisely, which surprised me.  But I wasn't happy with its battery's state of charge so did a BT re-test - 8 hours, 10 minutes! - drat, marginally less than the 1st test, though still not bad. Maybe it goes to show that not all Chinese manufacturers are the world's biggest fibbers :)].

[Some Time Later: Runtime-test 2.  I ordered a few replacement batteries from China, 6 to 9 months ago, as the original battery's run-time seemed lack-lustre.  Recent testing confirms this.  The original, fully-charged 300mAh 3.7V Li-ion battery had a measured capacity of just 180mAh (test-setup: 50mA current-draw, with a cut-off  voltage of 3.0v).  The replacement batteries had stated 350mAh capacities, though after multiple test-cycles, the average measured capacity was closer to 320mAh.  A single run-time test was done, using earphones, with a new fully-charged battery, at volume-level 10 (of 31), resulting in a run-time of a little over 18 hours.  I'm left a bit bewildered.  I cannot fathom how I got a 29 hour runtime initially, but only 18 hours now, despite using a battery of higher capacity.  Doesn't make sense, something's not right].  

Summing up, it was not what I had hoped for, but given that the Chinese company behind this player has apparently decided that, cosmetics-aside, the firmware 'as-is', is good enough for the throng of cheap mp3 players that it's cornering the mp3 market with, I guess there's not much I can do about it.  It's not awful, it has even got double the memory of the Ruizu, it's just that it could easily have been so much better.