[bloodandsoil]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RubenNYC /img/forum/go_quote.gif While the Cowons play Ogg, I don't believe any of them play Ogg gapless, which, to me, kinda defeats the purpose.

What does gapless mean?

Are Cowon and iriver the only 2 solid-state DAPs that natively support Ogg Vorbis?

 

[Nandro]

Gapless means that their is no space between songs, so if you have a live album it will play straight thru with no breaks in the songs which is really what gapless is for.

 

[bloodandsoil]

I can't seem to load the cowon website...anyone having a problem with this?

How are the iriver clix? Are they good?

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bloodandsoil /img/forum/go_quote.gif I can't seem to load the cowon website...anyone having a problem with this?

www.cowonglobal.com opens just fine here.

 

[RubenNYC]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nandro /img/forum/go_quote.gif Gapless means that their is no space between songs, so if you have a live album it will play straight thru with no breaks in the songs which is really what gapless is for.

Yep, but I wouldn't say it's just for live albums. Gapless really means faithful reproduction of the source CD with no added silence between tracks. There are tons of studio albums with tracks that transition seemlessly with no silence in between. (Here's a small sample.) Not to mention classical music and musical theatre CDs. And the vast majority of DAPs don't honor the gapless transition. Even Apple didn't didn't figure it out until last summer.

The reason I bring it up in an Ogg Vorbis thread is that, unlike .pp3, the Ogg Vorbis codec natively supports gapless playback. For a player to support Ogg Vorbis but not gapless playback makes no sense to me.

As of today, I believe the only options for gapless are the Karma, Vibez, Archos 604 (unconfirmed), iPod (G5 and G5.5), and anything that you can throw Rockbox on.

 

[Jaska]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif Not with the original firmware. But with the help of Rockbox it support Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and many more codecs. http://www.rockbox.org

Rockbox is nifty. I bought my first iPod about two or three days before the release of iTunes 7 and gapless support, so I had my fun with it for that short time.

I don't think I'd be alone in suggesting that Rockbox is NOT the way to go with a late-model iPod, since the battery life is such a disaster. I also like Ogg Vorbis, and in fact use it for all the music on my Rio Karma, but I find it much more sensible to encode MP3s with LAME using slightly higher bitrates than with Ogg Vorbis for use on the iPod.

Once music in encoded transparently, your ears don't care whether the codec is open source or not.