Suunto Run Music format support - fixed bitrate MP3, no FLAC, inconsistent variable bitrate MP3

zrooo

Interesting progress today. I was able to connect via an android device and capture a debugging trace of Bluetooth communication between the watch and the phone. Slowly working my way up to building a utility which will create a playlist in a slightly less frustrating manner.

Egika

aybe I don’t get it, but you can easily create playlists in the Suunto app after copying files to the watch.

zrooo

@Egika thanks for joining the conversation.

I am trying to bridge the gap between how most people manage their music externally, and reducing the friction to using that music on the watch.

For example, I have a whole collection of music (every CD I ever owned) on a local file system, organized by folders like “Artist/Album/TrackNumber - Title”, and each Album has a fairly open standard playlist file alongside the song files. When I want to use an entire album on the watch, right now I have to:

connect the watch via USB to my computer (filesharing from phones / tablets is its own problem to solve)
navigate in my OS to copy the files to the watch
hope that my files are supported by the watch (avoid the variable bitrate problems, the FLAC problems, etc.)
disconnect the watch from the computer
open my Suunto app on the phone / tablet
navigate to the Offline Music widget
create a playlist
name the playlist
select the songs for the playlist using only their titles from the selection of All Songs (which can be a long, randomly populated list)
re-order the songs in the playlist to match the album order
save the playlist
repeat for every playlist you want
go run

For those of us who use US services like Amazon Music or the iTunes relics, the pattern is similar, but adds a “download my playlist or album” step.

So, I’m on a slow journey to do something relatively trivial. I already have playlists, I already have song files, I want a very simple single tool with minimal steps to replicate those on the watch.

connect watch via USB
execute tool with selection of playlists
disconnect watch
go run

If the native watch media player supported something simple like default sorting by file name, then this would be trivial by just renaming files as they are copied. But it doesn’t, so it isn’t.

Happy to provide more detail if helpful.

Davijen57

I ran into the same FLAC issue and honestly just gave up and re-encoded everything to fixed bitrate MP3. Not ideal but it works every time. Really hoping they fix this in a firmware update since the manual clearly lists FLAC as supported.

zrooo

@Davijen57 thanks for joining the conversation.

Part of my motivation of starting this thread was to document the reality for future users. All of the workarounds are simple enough, but it is even more frustrating to have to discover them on your own. So thanks for contributing.

bisuunto

I’m experiencing exactly the same thing with the Run 2.
My solution: run while wearing my old Garmin Fenix 6 on the other arm and use it for music

mich heller

FLAC is nice, but can be demanding to decode, especially on limited HW, such as watch.
I wouldn’t hope for anything fancy, especially not 24bit, 96kHz
Maybe try with basic CD quality, low compression level, strip artwork, any metadata and use ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.wav -c:a flac -compression_level 0 -sample_fmt s16 -ar 44100 -map_metadata -1 -fflags +bitexact output.flac

I would expect that file encoded with such settings should work.
Of course such file will be big, because of compression level set to 0. I would not expect anything above 5 to work.

Preteen

@zrooo one data point on formats: FLAC played fine on my Run back in April – 16-bit/44.1 kHz stereo, encoded with libFLAC 1.5.0. I’ve since returned the Run because of the track order issues

@bissunto could you say a bit more about the Run 2 – do you mean the playlist order, the format issues, or both? I’m considering the Run 2, but album playback in the right order is a must for me.

snow*

@Preteen said:

album playback in the right order is a must for me.

fwiw I’ve a couple of playlists in FLAC format, and the order is preserved (Run 2)

zrooo

@snow @bissunto @mich-heller @preteen

Thanks for jumping in the thread. I will do some more experimenting with FLAC on my Run and report back.

I have made good progress reverse engineering what the music widget does (AI is tremendously helpful with this.) I now have the ability in my own code to read the All Songs playlist and write new playlists directly to the watch over Bluetooth. I have a bunch of rough edges before it is useful but the research has been fun and I am learning.

My personal app will likely be a Linux program that combines downloading entire playlists local to my computer (including a good old .m3u file), pushes the music files to the watch, then recreating the playlists on the watch via Bluetooth and the existing protocol the Run uses with the Suunto app. It won’t ever be polished or full featured and may never be useful to anyone else, but as soon as it is a coherent thing I will share it open source and post a GitHub link. Hoping in the next few weeks I will get the time to clean it up.

bisuunto

@snow @preteen I’ve even tried using FLAC files, but there’s just no way to keep the order. Every time I add new music and perform a sync, the order gets lost. It is so annoying to reorder the playlists every time…
Another issue I found is that the watch does not remember the point at which playback of a track was stopped. This is a big problem when listening to audiobooks.