[phishoutofwater]

I'm looking for a player with gapless playback and the ability to play back lossless forms. I listen to a lot of live music, and compression really takes a toll on the sound quality. Currently I'm using apples lossless codec, but I am tired of having to connect all the tracks in order to achieve gapless playback. so i'm looking for a nice gapless lossless player! Any suggestions?

 

[breez]

Rio Karma or iRiver H120/H140. Both support FLAC and iRiver has Wavpack too (with the alternative Rockbox firmware). Rockbox isn't finished yet, but the development took leaps of progress in the last two months and it is already very usable (some things not implemented yet, like recording & FM radio). Bad thing is that both products seem to be discontinued.

 

[PsychoZX]

Agreed karma or the iriver H120/H140. Although the irivers don't have gapless without rockbox.

 

[austonia]

i would strongly recommend against using RoxBox for the iRiver H100 series at this time considering this is homebrew firmware that is incomplete and unsupported. it might be a good option down the line sometime.

for gapless playback, your best option is the Rio Karma for MP3/WMA/OGG/FLAC formats or any Sony NW-HD model for ATRAC/ATRAC3. these are proven systems.

 

[PsychoZX]

If only the karma or sony player had a digital out. It seems kind of redundant to use lossless on a DAP unless you are using a DAC.

 

[Gradoboy]

The problem is the portable players are not really made for lossless codecs because they are much larger in file size and consume so much more battery.

I think in the future we will see more players that play lossless codecs, but for right know its slim pickings.

Gradoboy

 

[mAsh]

Any Sony HDD player, if music is encoded right out of a CD to atrac, then it is gapless. Hence at any atrac compression quality, you have perfectly gapless music. If you have mp3s, it's not possible, but the gap is really small.

 

[Bolt San]

The Karma gets better battery life with FLACs than with OGGs, lossless doesn't cause that much of a battery hit.

 

[Thisp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PsychoZX If only the karma or sony player had a digital out. It seems kind of redundant to use lossless on a DAP unless you are using a DAC.

The DACs on the players are perfectly fine. So long as it's well designed, it's pretty indistinguishable from other DACs - it's a mature technology. They always measure the same and in ABX blind tests, sound the same.

However, a line out on the player would be nice..

 

[mrcheese321]

Do any of the other Rio's have gapless?

All of my songs are MP3s and I really want a gapless/near-gapless player.

c

 

[davidd]

I think the Karma is Rio's only player that does, as well as being the only player that does it with mp3 and ogg

iRiver's H100's w/ Rockbox installed does them gaplessely too, but it's not totally finished yet, though I been using the daily builds for awhile and havn't experianced any problems

 

[FenderP]

Both the Karma and the Sony Vaio Pocket are great when doing gapless - I owned the Karma and the SVP is my current player.

The iAudio M3 is near gapless (as I'm sure the X series is), with about 1/10 of a second gap, but it became annoying.

 

[Edvard_Grieg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrcheese321 Do any of the other Rio's have gapless? All of my songs are MP3s and I really want a gapless/near-gapless player. c

As said above, the Karma is gapless for all the formats it supports (wma is as gapless as MS supports-- the decoder is a 'black box' from MS), MP3, OGG, FLAC etc

 

[firefox360]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edvard_Grieg As said above, the Karma is gapless for all the formats it supports (wma is as gapless as MS supports-- the decoder is a 'black box' from MS), MP3, OGG, FLAC etc

I'm guessing that M$ really wants to protect it's proprietary formats...

 

[phishoutofwater]

is there a lossless atrac format? had a sony minidisc player a few years ago and there weren't any lossless atrac...just lossy and more lossy. just curious if they have changed that yet. i have a sony vaio laptop...and i love sony. i just hated that sonic stage software. a lot of my minidiscs had skips and stuff from sonicstage. that pocket vaio looks pretty hot. i am really thinking about jumping on one. but then of course the 5g ipods will come out with gapless (most of my stuff is in lossless aac). it would be so hot to have the whole Live Phish series on a dap (lossless and gapless!)