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Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com)
Linux.com uses MP3FS
to play FLAC files on an MP3 player. "I don't know if the folks at
Xiph.org can live day-in and day-out using only the free Vorbis, FLAC,
Speex, and Theora codecs, but the rest of us routinely run into consumer
devices that don't recognize and support them. But with a little help from
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) and MP3FS, you cross one incompatibility off
that list. MP3FS lets you mount a directory hierarchy of FLAC audio files
and transparently present them as MP3s to software and hardware devices
alike."
(Log in to post comments)
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 1:55 UTC (Sat) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link] Hey, this is nice. Seems to work with the flac directory exported with NFS from another machine too (my fileserver has feeble CPU for transcoding). Now if I can re-export the mp3 directory with samba... hmm.
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 10:24 UTC (Sat) by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500) [Link] Or you could increase your music archive by 20-30% and just store the MP3s.
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 11:22 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Personally I store both. I keep oggs to play back (I use rockbox on all myportable media players, and all the non-portable ones I use can handle oggs).
I keep FLACs to allow for perfect re-encoding should I move away from ogg
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 12:08 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] "I don't know if the folks at Xiph.org can live day-in and day-out using only the free Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, and Theora codecs, but the rest of us routinely run into consumer devices that don't recognize and support them."
This was definitely true five years ago, but it's not so true now. Cheap portable audio players can now play Ogg Vorbis, typically at a cost of slightly reduced battery life, but with the benefit of better quality/ size tradeoff. I bought one last week and e.g. the popular STMP3xxx series chipsets from Sigmatel have had Vorbis support in the default firmware for a year or two now.
Of course the two consumer electronics companies that also happen to have a huge stake in DRM, Apple and Sony, don't support Vorbis, but that's only to be expected, Microsoft's Vista presumably won't play Vorbis files either, even though it easily could do. These companies always have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, nothing changes there.
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 9, 2006 8:53 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] FWIW there's no significant difference in battery life when decoding MP3 versus Ogg Vorbis when running Rockbox (if anything the battery life is slightly extended when decoding Vorbis, probably because of the slightly better compression ratios Vorbis attains over MP3 and the correspondingly reduced disk spinup frequency).
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 9, 2006 14:53 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] "Routinely run into consumer devices that don't recognize and supportthem" is not the same as "no consumer devices recognize and support them. Sure some devices support them, now, but most of us still run into plenty of devices that don't -- if for no other reason than that we're not constantly upgrading everything. Neither my Alpine car stereo nor my RCA flash-player (both purchased in 2005), nor my Sony CD players (purchased in 2006) support Ogg files, but all support MP3; the Alpine (and I think the Sonys) also supports WMA, and the RCA supports MP3Pro.
Get your FLAC on with MP3FS (Linux.com) Posted Oct 10, 2006 4:46 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] I think the point is that if you care enough to discuss the feature, you could have easily acquired products that support it. Not that you in particular care about the feature, but it's sort of a weird tack to take writing such an article.
Missing the point for some Posted Oct 9, 2006 18:16 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Of course, if you listen to FLAC for the audio quality, this isn't exactly a solution. :-) I have at least one friend who cannot stand to listen to MP3s or OGGs and therefore encodes all his audio as FLAC.
Missing the point for some Posted Oct 10, 2006 5:48 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] On mobile devices your not going to be realy able to tell the difference. Something like a little mp3 player isn't going to have the clarity or definition to matter much and in addition the background noise is going to drown out any sublties anyways.
This sounds pretty nice setup. I hope they make one for vorbis also. I would expect that my CPU can burn through encoding mp3s or ogg vorbis faster then the transfer rate over USB2 to a mobile digital audio player anyways. So it's not like having this stuff being encoded on the fly is going to waste any of my time or whatnot.
Does the file system handle ID3 tags also? (I should read it)..
Also...
Just for the heck of it have your freind pick out a good 10-20second snippet out of his favorite audiophile song and you encode it using both high bitrate ogg file (say around 224 or something) and also encode it using Flac. Maybe throw in a few high bit rate mp3s and medium bit rate ogg files.
Make a playlist with them with switching back and forth and such and see how many guesses are accurate. Make sure that he can't see the screen or file names or anything.
It should be entertaining to find out the results. :)
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