Devices playing FLAC [LWN.net]

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 8, 2007 8:42 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
Parent article: Codecs cause Fedora pain

For portable devices, I'd suggest looking at Trekstor Vibez (12GB), iAudio 7 (16GB to-come) or
the larger iAudio X5 devices (60GB) for FLAC playing support.

Naturally one of the devices supported by Rockbox is ok too, though I'd rather support a
manufacturer that supports free codecs out-of-the-box (same thing why I don't endorse Nokia's
tablet devices in the area of multimedia).

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Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 8, 2007 11:22 UTC (Thu) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link]

You probably want to transcode flac files to something like ogg in any case for a portable
device. Because flac files are relatively big, they don't cache so well on the player, which
means it is accessing its storage more often, which reduces the battery life.

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 8, 2007 19:10 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

Why does caching matter?  I would've thought that music data is usually streamed once through
the processor and then not reused soon enough for caching to help.

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 8, 2007 22:23 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

For a hard disk device, think read-ahead caching. But even without that, you just have to hit the disk a lot more for each minute of flac music.

I rip all my music to flac, and then convert a subset to ogg for portable use.

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:58 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Indeed.

Also there's repeat modes (repeat-this-track and A/B repeating often use 
short enough spans to be entirely in RAM with Ogg) and users asking for 
short rewinds and so on.

All my CD music is stored in FLAC as its primary form (it lets me compact 
the huge CD pile down to a fairly small stack, which fits on a small hard 
drive these days), but is converted to Ogg for portable use. This turns a 
250Gb lump, far larger than any player, to a 25Gb lump which fits on even 
a small hard drive based player such as a 30Gb ipod.

I *really* don't want to have to play chop-and-change with my music 
collection, ever. The whole lot should be on the portable device.

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:09 UTC (Thu) by pljohnson3 (subscriber, #3749) [Link]

There is also the Meizu (Dane-elec) players.  I have used both the iAudio (broken headphone
output) and the Dane-elec for both ogg vorbis and flac.  

I like both.  Disappointed in the iAudio quality.

Agree with native support being required.

Phil

Devices playing FLAC

Posted Nov 9, 2007 9:38 UTC (Fri) by PaulDickson (subscriber, #478) [Link]

The CoWon D2 supports FLAC (Vorbis as well).