USB Thumb drive and FLAC files

[freakydrew]

not sure is this the best forum for this post, but seems like it should be.

I have a Dell mini-9 and would like to take that on the road as my portable music player. I have winamp installed and most of my music has been reformatted to flac.

The mini 9 has no memory and I want to get a 16 gig flash drive (thumb drive) insead of an external hd for portability sake.

Any idea if flac works on flash drives? all the reviews and specs talk about mp3 and wav files. How many songs (approximately) would a 16 gig Patriot flash hold?

thanks.

 

[ericj]

yes, you can put files on usb sticks and they work just like files on a hard drive.

 

[geremy]

16 Gigs would hold somewhere around 45 albums in my experience, maybe a bit less. I am in the process of building my FLAC collection, I have about 130 Albums and it takes just about 44 GBs.

 

[MrKazador]

Lets just say a FLAC album is 350MB.

A 16gb flash drive is actually 14.90GB or 15257.6MB
15257/350 = 43.5 albums

Sizes vary from album to album so expect around 35-55.

 

[freakydrew]

perfect, thanks so much for the info. there are some good deals on Patriot flash drives now so I will go ahead and order one.

 

[jilgiljongiljing]

Try and use level 8 for creating the FLAC files. It makes em smaller. But it supposedly takes up a little more CPU power for playback as well (not sure about this) so I would suggest you try it out before re ripping everything to level 8 and have your mini 9 struggle. Also, most of the older/classic albums were only around 40-50 minutes long (take most of the MOFI releases for example), these will only be around 200 mb and you can fit quite a lot of albums on a 16gb drive.

Also, just curious, are you going to listen to this music off the headphone out of the mini 9? If thats the case then I see no point ripping to flac, stick to 190kbps Lame and itll sound just as good coming off a source like that. You can fit a lot more music in 16gb.

If you were to use a DAC of some sort, then go FLAC.

 

[freakydrew]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jilgiljongiljing /img/forum/go_quote.gif Try and use level 8 for creating the FLAC files. It makes em smaller. But it supposedly takes up a little more CPU power for playback as well (not sure about this) so I would suggest you try it out before re ripping everything to level 8 and have your mini 9 struggle. Also, most of the older/classic albums were only around 40-50 minutes long (take most of the MOFI releases for example), these will only be around 200 mb and you can fit quite a lot of albums on a 16gb drive. Also, just curious, are you going to listen to this music off the headphone out of the mini 9? If thats the case then I see no point ripping to flac, stick to 190kbps Lame and itll sound just as good coming off a source like that. You can fit a lot more music in 16gb. If you were to use a DAC of some sort, then go FLAC.

the mini is my second computer, Dell basically was giving them away if you bought an XPS, so all of the music is on my XPS hard drive, the mini plays that music at home over the wireless network. All of thos songs are either flac or being re-ripped to flac. So even though on the mini, without a DAC or such, FLAC is, as you say, useless, it is easier than having two different file formats for each song. This is only for when I am going away or something and want to bring music with me and saves me from burning a bunch of cd's. 300 songs on a flash drives offers more vaiety! I am thinking of getting a dac/amp portable something or other for the mini.
that being said I am impressed with how well it plays without any amplification to my AD700s!

 

[krmathis]

Yeah, I don't see any reason why you can't store FLAC files on an USB thumb drive and play back directly from it.