[Nagasaki_Kid]

No one has mention any of the dozen chinese brand mp3 players that play flac and ape some which acctually sound good. I think there was a telcast player that sound good unfortunately not many head-fi dived in to that market and so they remain a mystery.

Also question above compression levels shouldn't affect sound quality for lossless, but I tried playing an ape file on my friends c240 sansa rockboxed and if the player can't handle the compression it starts to play a couple seconds then stops a couple seconds and freezes/slow down.

 

[smallcaps]

you could always convert your ape files if they are lossless to another lossless format such as flac or apple lossless. these two formats are more prolific it seems and i am able to play my alac files on my rockboxed ihp-h120. really depends on the amount and organization of your collection. i was able to batch convert my entire flac collection (not so large at 300gb) to alac using MAX on osx. very easy and straight forward. i believe there are also windows and linux solutions for easy encoding...

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by elitiste /img/forum/go_quote.gif Can I trouble you to elaborate a bit more on this? I assume you are referring to the different levels at which an APE file can be encoded. Do they affect the sound quality noticably when played from a portable device?

APE supports several levels of compression. You can make the file smaller, but you increase the cpu cycles required to decompress it.

Some DAPs are based on faster processors than others. The MX31L cpu found in the Gigabeat S and the Zune 30 is among the fastest ever put in a device that small. iirc it can be clocked to over 500mhz but rockbox clocks it at about half it's top speed.

The portalplayer chips that most ipods, the iriver h10, and the old sansas are based on are 80mhz or (iirc) 120mhz dual core. They are too slow to play ape files compressed with more than the basic level of compression.

The Coldfire cpus in the old irivers and possibly some other DAPs (zens?) is fairly zippy for it's age and can play more APE than the ipods can.

APE supports an "insane" level of compression that no known DAP can decode in real time.

The compression rate for lossless of course is all about file size, and doesn't affect the sound quality. (with, of course, the caviat that rockbox will try to play any supported file, and the sound will be choppy if the codec is running at less than real-time)

 

[elitiste]

Thanks a lot for the information! I didn't realize that there is so much to APE. In general, I would prefer to go with a DAP that can handle APE directly instead of having to convert it to another format. Conversion takes computing resources and may (of course, may not) cause a degradation in SQ, I'm afraid.

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by elitiste /img/forum/go_quote.gif Thanks a lot for the information! I didn't realize that there is so much to APE. In general, I would prefer to go with a DAP that can handle APE directly instead of having to convert it to another format.

Well, convenience is convenience. Right now the F series gigabeat is a good choice, as far as cpu speed + battery life goes. But it's all tradeoffs.

At any rate, you should know what compression level you used when encoding, right?


Quote:

Originally Posted by elitiste /img/forum/go_quote.gif Conversion takes computing resources and may (of course, may not) cause a degradation in SQ, I'm afraid.

Won't. No more than taking the contents of a zip file and putting them in a rar file will corrupt the files, and for the exact same reasons. They call it lossless because you get out exactly what you put in.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

Conversion takes computing resources

On my PC, decoding of an .ape with the lowest compression level possible takes three times more than encoding of it to .flac; the conversion takes about 45 seconds to decode .ape and about 15 seconds to encode to flac, so, this is about 1 minute total on my average 3.2GHz PC for an average 1 hour album.
Quote:

and may (of course, may not) cause a degradation in SQ

Actually, it would not. Lossless codecs preserve information as it was originally. You can think about it as of .zip archive, except for flac/ape being more optimized for sound compression than .zip is. You're not expecting .zip to cause degradation of music inside of it, do you?

 

[elitiste]

I'm giving this old thread a bump. Have people figured out a way to put these format on the iPod Classic (6th gen) now?

 

[gameboy115]

Cowon D2/ S9, AMP3( without external memory, I saw people report in other forum, flac and ape with no problem)

 

[0x000]

No, not yet. Apparently the 6G is made of entirely different hardware, and the firmware is encrypted, so it will be a while before rockbox can be implemented fully on it.

 

[Acreo Aeneas]

If you need 60+ GBs, I'd skip over the S9 unless you can live with ~30.5 GBs of usable space.

I'd also recommend the D2+. I don't suggest the legacy D2 (though they have the same hardware) as the D2 is no longer supported firmware-wise, while the D2+ still is rolling with new firmware. I also happen to own a old D2 and she still goes strong after 2-2.5 years of regular usage (even went on a international trip recently). Great battery life, great sound output (and power output), and pretty good video playback even with the smaller screen. With the newer firmware, both the D2 and D2+ can take 32 GB SDHC (Class 6) cards. So expansionability is virtually limitless.

Otherwise, if you are serious about the S9 and own some higher impedance 'phones, I'd suggest getting a portable amp with it (maybe a Fiio E5 or a E3). Otherwise, it'll drive lower impedance IEMs quite well (like my UE SF3 and Senn HD201).

 

[jelt2359]

Meizu M6

 

[lrsu.ranger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by REB /img/forum/go_quote.gif Not sure whether 32gb micro sd cards have been released yet.

It's suppose to be really soon I hear. No idea on price point though.

 

[elitiste]

It's just too bad that the storage capacity of the D2+ is a bit small. The 120GB offered by the iPod Classic is really tempting. But it's certainly worth looking into though given its popularity here. Thanks all!

 

[GreenLeo]

Anybody mentioned the to be released HiFiMan HM-801? It's supposed to be VG.