I leave it at -8 at let it run all night. The time difference between like -5 and -8 is minuscule with today's computers, probably because the developers of FLAC optimized the algorithms over the years. When FLAC like first came out, I remember it would take over an hour to encode my album with -8 while something like -3 would take like 10 minutes.

Its still advantageous to compress audio. You can store more on the hard drive and playback will eat up less bandwidth in exchange for processing power. I am glad no one today complains about how decoding -8 compressed flac files eats up their CPU utilization.

edit: Looking at time differences is problematic because there is human or psychological component. When something takes twice as long as something else, the absolute time matters. 5 or 10 seconds is no big deal, but one or two hours can be annoying. I guess if you are encoding a million FLAC files at once, I can see how -8 can be problematic to some people.

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I still see the odd question and/or complaint about playback and compression level.

I use a Squeezebox, it supports flac natively, so you're right, the smaller the file, the easier it is on my network.

But to be honest I've never had any network problems with the Squeezebox anyways, no matter what I'm streaming. It has a fairly big buffer.

Any of you guys have a music server and stream you flac to other computers on your network? I'm wanting to do this, and need to know how much power I need. I have heard that it requires very little power, and others say it takes a ton. Do you guys think that my p2 w/mmx @350mhz running gentoo text based server would stream Flac very well? And would it be the server processing the file or would it be the receiving computer? All my flac is in -8, so, Idk if that would make a difference but, what do you guys think? Sorry to take over the thread...

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that's what i use

level 8 is far too slow.... haven't bothered to try other levels because the gain in speed and size is minimal....

Take a look at program called AutoFLAC. It automates the conversion process and produces Cue sheets for what you rip. However, for true gapless playback, you want to rip to a single file. I just posted on it here.

Curious to hear whether you think find that the Total Bithead greatly improves the sound from your Rockboxed iPod. I have one too that does wonders for playing FLAC files from my laptop. Using a Turbodock, I get an improvement with my iPod but it's very minor as in usually not worth it. Mind you I'm playing V2 new-vbr MP3s in Rockbox on my iPod, not FLAC.

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I don't have my Bithead yet, I got an Airhead in a shipping mistake, so I've only been using that so far.

With the E2c's and the Airhead fed from the headphone jack, I feel that I get a cleaner signal overall. I run the iPod in what I feel is the sweet-spot, at -10db volume into the Airhead on high-gain mode. The E2c's sound almost the same at low levels as they would direct out of the iPod, but if I crank things up, it's no contest, the Airhead is far cleaner, particularly with tracks with insane peaks (Fear Factory - Shock is one that comes to mind.) Synthesized electronica is where I hear the most distortion directly out of the iPod when driving the Shure E2c's hard.

With the DT880's I just got, the Airhead is a requirement and it drives them plenty loud enough for my needs and the signal quality is fantastic. The iPod just doesn't have the headroom to feed them on its own, nor does my laptop soundcard or my home system onboard soundcard.

I'm looking forward to getting the Bithead here so I can see if the DAC makes a big difference. One thing for sure, it will be nice that the source will be consistent between my laptop at work and any of my home systems.

As for my ogg/flac/mp3 fiddling, I've decided to stay with mp3 using 'lame -V2 --vbr-new' for size vs compat vs quality.

I did a bunch of flipping back and forth with the same track encoded different ways and though ogg didn't sound bad, it wasn't better enough to deal with some of my players still not supporting it.

I had issues with the ogg/flac's that I encoded in that Rockbox doesn't seem to want to play them... I used 'flac --ogg -8' as I recall, haven't figured out why that didn't work.

Oggs seemed to be smaller for sure and sound equally as good, possibly smoother, as similar bitrate mp3's. I just have some car players etc that don't support them. Easier for me to keep my repository in a consistent format for now.

Just another quick note here, I'm really only using my setup for stationary listening. With the E2c's, I think if I were still wandering around NYC all day, I'd not notice the Airhead as much, with the gains being lost in the ambient noises. Also Rockbox, though fantastic in featureset, has horrible battery life on my iPod 5g, I'm getting no more than 3hrs out of it with Rockbox. If I were still commuting and using the iPod constantly as my sanity bubble, I couldn't run Rockbox as the battery life is too short. This will be improved if they find a developer that can do the assembly level optimizations for the ARM codecs as they have already done with the iRiver H* series.

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I actually had a nice session last night with my Turbodocked Bithead and my D77s. I find the cleaner signal I'm getting through Rockbox (precut set to -10db - the lineout through the Turbodock is much quieter - it means that I have the volume on the Bithead turned right up) makes the advantages of the Bithead amp greater. Like you, i wouldn't go portable with it. Especially with my Vibes letting the outside world in, the improvement won't be so noticable and won't justify the bulk.

You'll love the Bithead DAC/amp combination. That's where the unit shines.

Battery life is poor with Rockbox no doubt. But I'm so in love with the improvements from the EQ precut, hardware low shelf filter and crossfeed that there's no going back. If you program a playlist and just play that, you'll get a lot more life. Rockbox is a glutton when you constantly switch songs. (It seems to cache about four songs ahead everytime you switch...)

Guys...sorry for this noob question. I have all my music in .wav format. If I want to convert them to FLAC what software I should use? Is that software freely available in internet?

Thanks

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There are a lot of programs you can use. The free one would be Foobar2000, which also happens to be a great program for playing your music. It's kinda a swiss army knife, does a lot of stuff well.

But for transcoding I think the best one is db PowerAmp Music Converter.

it's not free, but it is more powerful that foobar when it comes to transcoding.

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The FLAC binary support Wave (PCM) files as input.
Available for free here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html

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Have you read the docs at flac.sourceforge.net? They're actually pretty good, and you can always wander over to Hydrogenaudio.org. Between those two places you should be able to get more info on flac than you ever wanted.