The A20 will also play M3U playlists exported from any of a number of tools. The catch here is that you have to apply Windows conventions to those M3U files: It’s looking for CRLF line terminators, and backward slash (‘\’) path separators. So pulling over a collection is a simple matter of copying or rsyncing. The internal drive mounts seamlessly on my (Arch) Linux laptop and exposes the MicroSD card as well, which is nice. That’s ultimately why I’m posting this, to confirm compatibility and record a couple notes for other users searching around.
It also works reasonably well with my Linux laptop, in a barebones way. In any event though, the player does have the basics covered. A larger improvement would be unifying the internal memory with the MicroSD card to present a single collection, rather than somewhat implicitly requiring the user to mode switch between them. A small example would be parsing song and artist names to present the song list, rather than just showing filenames… Welcome to 1999! Except, you know, you can only ready about 9 characters. Just a little bit more polish would help a lot.
Physically the device is fine, and the software is functional… but the emphasis is on functional.
It does though have FM radio and a recording feature for taking notes.Įarly impression is that the A20 is… somehow a bit less impressive than you would expect even for $28, but no doubt on par with all the other obscure players in this class.
As it turned out, I was correct in my surmise that in these commodity players it would be a pain to have music divided across both the internal and removable cards. Big tradeoff for this player that knocks about $10–15 off is that it has no Bluetooth support. I wound up with a AGPTEK A20 because it’s cheap and would take a MicroSD big enough to cover my collection, without paying for somewhat redundant larger internal storage. This was much more bewildering than I expected as there are hundreds of models from dozens of unknown manufacturers, all with cryptic names and minor differences. Recently I wanted a super cheap MP3 player to use in settings where it was likely to get messed up or lost: DJing at bike races, hiking in iffy weather, etc.