Luckily for me I usually listen to my library straight through or on shuffle so gapless isn't really and issue for me. If I was an album listener then I would likely take that into consideration and stay with flac for all my tracks.
I just did a bit of searching. "FLAC is amazingly efficient. Its probably the fastest compressed format in remotely widespread use. All formats seem to compress about the same, so if you want to use lossless on batteries, you should probably look at flac first." https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,82125.0.html It seems like another argument for not bothering with pointless 'space saving' lossy compression in 2019 when storage costs so little.
Oh wow, I thought for sure playing a higher res file would use way more battery. Almost like a 3.5mm vs 2.5mm battery drop. Good to hear otherwise.
While possibly still true, your link is from 2010 and lists the performance for RockBox's fixed point math decoder. Things might have changed considerably since and M0's hardware/software is very different.
Yes, good point. But in general I think MP3 tracks require more CPU or hardware accelerator time than do FLAC tracks to decode. It should be possible to try an MP3 track on auto repeat with an M0 and see how long the battery lasts, and then do the same thing with a FLAC track. I use AIFF in my main HiFi system as it needs about 2% of my Raspberry Pi's CPU time according to top, compared with about 7-8% for ALAC. I've no idea if that is audible, but it makes me happier. I keep my collection in both AIFF and ALAC formats and use ALAC on devices like my phone or the M0 where I want to optimize space.
Cost so little is relative based on what you can afford to spend and where you live, costs are not universally cheap depending where you live. Especially if you already have microsd cards and don't want to buy more. That is my point of view, compressing with ogg my tracks are 1/3 the size of flac and still sound great to me. There wouldn't be so many compressed formats including the fairly recent Opus if there wasn't a need for it. It also really depends on the size of your library and also keep in mind the larger the microsd card the longer it takes to scan. If you add tracks frequently and have to rescan your library each time it can be slow. It takes about 4 minutes to rescan the library on my M0 each time I add tracks with a 128 GB card. How long does it take for say a 400 GB card? Really pointless to keep up the discussion as peoples needs and views will always vary. Clearly ours are different so I see no point going back and forth as there is no one solution that everyone will agree on.
"Digital storage is cheap” - says those who either have a) very few things to store or more like b) a lot of spare money. (Digital storage isn't cheap when you have nearly 2TB of tracks, and that's a *fraction* of my CD/vinyl collection tbh). I mean have you seen the prices of genuine 512Gb micro SD cards? Ouch.
You may be right concerning battery use. There was a time when reading the SD card took a significant amount of battery power, and reading a FLAC requires a lot more reads than a compressed file. But, I have no current data for power required to access SD cards with current hardware so couldn't say whether the SD access balances out the CPU usage for the M0.
I think your assuming the everyone wants to put their entire music collection on an SD card, and then they either needs to spend a fortune on a large card or they need to compress the music with lossy compression such as MP3 to fit them all. But I personally don't feel I need to take my entire collection with me - it is 1.2 Tb as ALAC and just over 2 TB as AIFF. I have a 400gb SD card in my phone with my entire Jazz collection on it with over 1000 albums. I have another 400gb SD card in my M0 with about a third of my music collection taken at random. I use iTunes with a smart playlist that includes everything whose genre contains 'Jazz' or 'Bossa Nova', and another smart playlist which gives you random selection of tracks which take up a given amount of space which I set to 380gb. I use an android and MacOS program called 'iSyncr' which can sync these playlists onto the SD card in a mobile phone, which I can then either leave in the phone or put it in the M0. I don't usually bother selecting individual albums on my phone or M0, and just run them jukebox style with shuffle play. When I was using a 64gb card then maybe after while some tracks got repeated, but I think once the SD card is 128gb or more then that is pretty much good enough for me. The two 400gb SD cards were about 180 euros altogether which I think is really good value, when you consider what I've spent on an album collection of about 3000 albums at maybe 10 euros each.
Sounds similar to my approach. I have different devices for different genres, Jazz on Phone A, Classical on DAP, Rock and Blues on Phone B, random selection of "fave tracks" on M0, etc. I have 4x 400gb cards now, spread across 4 devices including the Shanling M0. Recently however ive been dabbling with cloud storage and cloud players which is going quite well. I currently have 7tb of music, approx (if I consider single albums, "best" formats only). Am now uploading it to an unlimited dropbox account for streaming via Cloud Player and using the offline download using this player extensively for more critical listening with UAPP. Thats going quite well at the moment and it will mean I can eventually, effectively, have my entire collection with me wherever I am. Am currently at around 7500 albums and the player's supporting it well. The M0 has made my old Note 8 into a contender once again with its LDAC support
Ok, I have a complaint. My M0 used to shut down with the most awesomely profound message: "Life is short, play more." Since my last firmware upgrade, it now says "Love the music, not equipment". Wha...? But I do love my M0. Is Shanling suggesting I should love my music, even if it comes out of a FiiO M3?!? (I love you FiiO, but the M3's SQ isn't up there with the M0. Sorry!) Frankie, what's up with this lame new shutdown message?
While using the @XVortex firmware, do you notice that when the Track Titles scroll, that several pixels of the descenders (letter tails below the baseline) don't scroll, leaving thin white horizontal stripes on the screen?
