Tech Tips: July 2026

11 July 2026

Soundcore Sport X20 review

My LG tones (HBS-730) had several different issues:

I had to glue one of the earbuds back together
It would randomly power cycle itself while I was listening to music
Battery indicator only had High, Medium, and Charge Soon and most of the time it was on medium so it was hard to tell when it needed charged
Earbuds would work themselves out while doing yard work

I found a good replacement in the Soundcore Sport X20 (by Anker) for $55.99 (plus tax)

Review

I overall like the earbuds and the negatives are largely nitpicks, but they could be deal breakers for others

Pros

Comfortable fit
Ear hooks keep them in place while mowing
Noise Cancelling/Isolation works well

Next door neighbor's electric mower could not be heard
Cut the noise of my electric mower in about half
Didn't really silence electric string trimmer

Battery life seems good so far with 2 hours of yard work leaving the earbuds with 80% remaining
Battery life indicator is in 10% increments (but is software only)
Case LED turns red when it needs charged
Supports Bluetooth multipoint (pairs to 2 devices at the same time, but only audio from one at a time)
IP68 water/sweat resistance

Cons

Earbuds lost Bluetooth connection once while mowing
No way to turn off the earbuds without placing in case
Only one button per earbud

Default controls work well enough for me
Single press to play/pause
While music is off long press to toggle pass-through/noise cancelling

Lack of AptX Support (likely causes higher latency)

Other Thoughts

Had to add a -100ms Bluetooth delay for audio in VLC for audio/video to sync

Appendix

Sources

05 July 2026

Local Audio Streaming

My significant other wanted a local streaming option where they could control the songs. So I started adding our music to Jellyfin.

Rip a CD

Install abcde and its requirements:

sudo apt-get install abcde eyed3 lame flac id3v2

Modify abcde with the latest patch:

https://github.com/glanois/abcde/pull/2/files
Otherwise the mp3 files will not be tagged because eyeD3 will exit with the following error:

Unknown genre ID: 255

The options I use with abcde:

-o

output types
flac (lossless audio)
mp3 (small portable version)

-p

leading 0s on track numbers

-G

get album art

-B

embed album art

-V

verbose

-N

don't prompt

-d

CD/DVD/Bluray device to use

Create a ripcd.sh script to automate the rip:

cd Music
echo -e '#!/usr/bin/sh\n\nabcde -o flac,mp3 -p -G -B -V -N -d "$@"\n' >> ripcd.sh

Run the rip:

cd Music
sh ripcd.sh /dev/sr0

If you only want to rip a specific track:

cd Music
sh ripcd.sh /dev/sr0 1

Add Album to Jellyfin

Add a Library of Music type

Jellyfin was doubling up tracks as it listed both the flac and mp3. To solve this, I created a .ignore file that contained *.mp3 and placed it in each album folder that had this issue

Appendix

Sources

Patch:

From 5437ee1345d6c0fddee0edc65b32af43fe493922 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Gerard Lanois <gerard@lanois.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 22:56:29 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] #1 Omit genre ID 255 (no genre).
---
abcde | 5 ++++-
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/abcde b/abcde
index b53593a..2f06a43 100755
--- a/abcde
+++ b/abcde
@@ -912,10 +912,13 @@ do_tag ()
${COMMENTOUTPUT:+--comment "$COMMENTOUTPUT"} \
);;
esac
+ if [ "${GENREID}" != 255 ]; then
+ addopts+=( -G "$GENREID" )
+ fi
run_command "tagtrack-$OUTPUT-$1" nice $ENCNICE $TAGGER $TAGGEROPTS \
-A "$DALBUM" \
-a "$TRACKARTIST" -t "$TRACKNAME" \
- -G "$GENREID" -n "${TRACKNUM:-$1}" \
+ -n "${TRACKNUM:-$1}" \
${TRACKNUM:+-N "$TRACKS"} \
"${addopts[@]}" \
"${ABCDETEMPDIR}/track$1.$OUTPUT"