Portable FLAC Players? Recomendations?

[Andy Jackins]

I have heard a bit about the Rio Karma. What are some other players that support FLAC and can be connected to standard stereo recievers and car audio players?
Thanks

[AAR.oner]

a number of players will play flac if you upgrade to the Rockbox firmware
http://www.rockbox.org/

[weedwacker]

I've been using an Iriver H340 with rockbox firmware. It works great except for the fact the rockbox firmware sucks the battery dry in about 9 hours when doing strictly flac playback. The other drawback is Iriver has pretty much discontinued all their portables except for the flash memory players.

[U2Lynne]

Does the Rio still play flac?

[direwolf-pgh]

im not sold on any of these myself (yet) - but the future looks real good for FLAC hardware players
http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html

[possessed]

personally, I just rip shows to 320 so I can fit more on my iPod. Unless you are using excellent speakers or headphones then it really is a waste of space IMO.

[paddington]

Originally Posted by possessed

personally, I just rip shows to 320 so I can fit more on my iPod. Unless you are using excellent speakers or headphones then it really is a waste of space IMO.

this is what I do.... If you go straight from CD (or FLAC decoded to WAVE) to 320k 44.1kHz MP3, that's really damn good for a portable player.


I have done some A/B comparissons between a few 320k MP3s and the WAV files they were encoded from (both sent to the iPod). In swapping back and forth I can barely tell the difference. If I wasn't specifically listening for it, I wouldn't care.


I'd still love to see FLAC support for the music I care more about, but for, say, "Bonnie Tyler's Greatest Hit", 320k MP3 is just fine

[SRVRules]

iAudio/Cowon X5 plays FLAC natively. I've had one for a while now and it's great. It is not gapless for live shows. But I think using Rockbox can fix that.

Plus the PC thinks its an external hard drive--drag and drop files. Does not have all the features the iPod has, but its perfect for me.

Check it out, you might like it

[possessed]

Originally Posted by jameskg

this is what I do.... If you go straight from CD (or FLAC decoded to WAVE) to 320k 44.1kHz MP3, that's really damn good for a portable player.


I have done some A/B comparissons between a few 320k MP3s and the WAV files they were encoded from (both sent to the iPod). In swapping back and forth I can barely tell the difference. If I wasn't specifically listening for it, I wouldn't care.


I'd still love to see FLAC support for the music I care more about, but for, say, "Bonnie Tyler's Greatest Hit", 320k MP3 is just fine

I've listened to many shows (and cd's) converted straight to "wav" and 320 lame mp3 over my Klipsch iGroove speakers and stock car stereo speakers. I couldn't tell the difference between them. Therefore I went with 320 to save space.

Interesting article on the whole bitrate thing. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/do_..._rates_pay_off

[paddington]

if you'll look at the freq response of an MP3 you encode at 320, 44.1 from CD, you'll notice that it is nearly full spectrum.

There are still a bazillion holes in the audio throughout the spectrum, but mr nyquist says 320k will net you the whole spectrum.

It moves the stairstepping aliasing from the roll-off way above the noticably-audible range, so you don't get that shitty "watery ching" sound you get from 'standard' MP3s encoded less than 256k.

It's no way to distribute audio, but for my portable player, it's the sweetspot in the tradeoff from space vs. quality.