The other type of file is called XAPK and these ones have the “.xapk” file extension. The Astell&Kern players can install compatible apps from within these directly. The files have a file extension of “.apk”. How to do itįirst, we need to understand that APK files come in two forms. We just felt that they needed some fleshing out. I got started on this by following the rather slight set of instructions on Astell&Kern’s own website. Note, what follows isn’t some kind of jailbreak. The app provided on the Astell&Kern A&futura SE200 pre-dates that.īut a more recent version of TIDAL, installable via APK, can address that. For quite a while, TIDAL has offered gapless playback of such material. That kind of thing does tend to drag you out of your immersion in the music.īut engineers tend to be both smart and responsive to consumer demand, so they developed ways in which music could stream from one track to another without any pause, interruption, hiccough or whatever. A track may end halfway through one of those constructs, leaving a gap until the next track starts. Digital audio tends to be a little uncomfortable with this, since it involves things like frames and blocks and such. The tracks on a significant minority of albums run on with each other, without a moment of silence between them. The defect was the lack of gapless playback. It, it turns out, is an old version of TIDAL. The reason my interest was piqued by this whole thing was because of a defect on the TIDAL app already installed on the DAP. Now, I’m not interested in the great majority of those apps. And that’s where the ability to download and install APKs comes in. Astell&Kern recognises that some users may like access to some of nearly three-dozen streaming services. So, what if you’d like some other streaming service? And the third is TIDAL, which allows streaming of losslessly-compressed audio, as well as some high-resolution material delivered via the somewhat controversial MQA folding/authentication system. Another is called Deezer – a Spotify-like Streaming service which is quite well-supported across many devices. One is called “V-Link” and provides access to YouTube and advertisement-supported Music Videos. It comes with three streaming apps already installed. You can read my review of it here and see how very impressed I was. This is an astonishingly good music player. In this article I’ll be using the Astell&Kern A&futura SE200 digital audio player as my example. Why you might want to install an APK onto an Astell&Kern digital audio player So there is no Google Play Store app on an Astell&Kern DAP.īut Astell&Kern has implemented something it calls “Open App” which allows you to install a number of streaming apps via their APKs. Android phones can, like computers, sometimes have priorities other than music playing. It has eliminated perhaps nine tenths of the Androidy stuff, providing a clean music-player-centric interface. Well, pretty much any app really, from the Google Play Store, although it would be silly to use an expensive DAP to do stuff that could be done better (let’s face it) on a cheap Android phone.Īstell&Kern has clearly decided to exercise close control its system. But it lets me easily install other streaming apps. It’s like a chunky Android phone with an out-of-date version of Android and no telephone functionality. I have a pretty good DAP from a different brand that uses an uninhibited Android implementation. But it’s a cut-down, heavily customised version of Android. Astell&Kern digital audio playersĪstell&Kern DAPs run on Android, just like most non-Apple phones. A malicious computer program can do all kinds of damage to your device. Remember, the APK will install an app, and “app” is just another name for a computer program. In either case, you should only download and install an APK file if you’re entirely confident about the source. It offers at least some level of checking against malware and other dangerous apps.īut some apps are simply not available there, and some devices do not support the Play Store. Should you use an APK to install an app? If possible, you should install apps onto your phone or tablet from the Play Store. (Apple iOS devices don’t allow this kind of work-around, unless you go to extraordinary lengths to jailbreak their operating system.) That automates the process of installing and updating apps, making it extremely easy.īut on most Android devices you can install apps independently of the Google Play Store by installing an APK. Almost all Android users get their apps from the Google Play Store. This article is principally about how you install an APK on an Astell&Kern digital audio player, but let’s first cover the basics. Well, that’s a kind of obscure title, isn’t it? What’s an APK and why would one want to install one on a digital audio player?
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