[LingLing1337]

I have heard that FLAC is not very good for portable players for size and battery life reasons. If I convert to a more manageable format, will I lose any noticeable quality? And do you guys have any suggestions as to which lossless format to convert (planning on getting an O2, so throw anything out there

)

 

[skamp]

Lossless is lossless: you won't lose any quality at all. It's like unpacking a .zip file and repacking it with RAR.

FLAC is the most manageable of lossless codecs, actually. Monkey's Audio (APE) requires much more processing power for decoding, so that would be a bad choice for a portable player.

As for the battery, lossless would be bad mostly for hard drives, but I bet the O2 uses flash memory.

My recommendation: FLAC is fine, and if you want to save space, transcode your FLAC files to Ogg Vorbis (IIRC the O2 supports that too).

 

[Chri5peed]

Original question #12.

FLAC is a pretty simple lossless codec.

 

[insyte]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LingLing1337 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I have heard that FLAC is not very good for portable players for size and battery life reasons. If I convert to a more manageable format, will I lose any noticeable quality? And do you guys have any suggestions as to which lossless format to convert (planning on getting an O2, so throw anything out there )

Using a portable amp would also allow you to save your source's battery power because you can lower down the volume from your source

 

[Agnostic]

Flac is the less battery intensive to decode than ape. It's specifically designed to decode easily.

 

[LingLing1337]

OK, then that will save me a couple hours of encoding. And I plan on getting an amp some time. Thanks all.

 

[hew]

Quote:

Originally Posted by skamp /img/forum/go_quote.gif Lossless is lossless: you won't lose any quality at all. It's like unpacking a .zip file and repacking it with RAR.

I take serious issue with this statement. Not all lossless is lossless. Not to my ears anyway.

 

[TheMarchingMule]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hew /img/forum/go_quote.gif I take serious issue with this statement. Not all lossless is lossless. Not to my ears anyway.

Ugh, just when this topic was finished, you just had to....

 

[hew]

misinformation + spouted as gospel = bs

 

[skamp]

The only misinformation comes from you. A codec is either lossless, or it's not. There's no such thing as lossy lossless codecs, obviously. You can check for losslessness yourself very easily: encode a WAV file (with FLAC, for instance), then decode it back, compare the resulting WAV file to the original. They'll match bit for bit.

 

[hew]

Did the comparison and I never argue with what i hear.

 

[skamp]

When you zip a Word file, does its text get altered?

 

[skamp]

You can believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster for all I care.

 

[krmathis]

No audio data loss.
FLAC, Monkey's Audio, ... are all lossless...

 

[E.B.M.Head]

I would only switch from FLAC to Monkey Audio (APE) if you want to squeeze a bit more music on the player (Monkey usually compresses about 5% better than FLAC at Level 8), and don't care that much about battery life (battery life will be shorter because decoding needs more cpu power). Also remember that -c3000 is the maximum level that the A3 / O2 and Rockboxed devices support. If you already have -c4000 or -c5000 encoded files you then will have to transcode them to -c3000.
If you want maximum lossless compression but be soft on the battery, then better use WavPack. The compression rate with -hhx6 is nearly identical to APE at -c3000, but the battery lasts longer.
If you don't want to carry that much music with you, then better use FLAC or ALAC which are both intended for portable players.