[comedian]

When I'm out and about I try to use 320kbps but I'll listen to FLAC at home.

My reasoning being that I carry around an 8gb Sansa Clip+ 320kbps allows me to load a heck of a lot of music on to an external 16gb sd card as well as the internal memory.

I rip all my cd's in FLAC and convert to 320kbps using Media Monkey's conversion tool so I don't have to duplicate my music collection.

 

[chinesekiwi]

Quote:

Originally Posted by comedian /img/forum/go_quote.gif My reasoning being that I carry around an 8gb Sansa Clip+ 320kbps allows me to load a heck of a lot of music on to an external 16gb sd card as well as the internal memory.

tbh, I'd use Vorbis @ -q6.55 or VBR -v0 mp3 on a Clip+.
You'll save space thus you would fit more songs in.
Vorbis = much better codec than mp3!
You'll save battery life as well as it's processing less bitrate and only processing the bitrate that's needed to represent that sample of audio data and not 'wasted' data.
Vorbis at ~210k is in fact better than 320k mp3.

320k mp3 has nothing going for it with the advent of VBR -V0 mp3.
iPods = ~192k AAC.

Both from lossless sources of course. Both Vorbis and AAC are of course natively VBR.

 

[MadMan007]

Some players don't deal with lesser-used codecs like ogg as well as mp3 even if ogg is technically superior. I had a Clip when they first came out with the ogg firmware and I could hear funny things some times when compraing ~128 ogg (q4 I think?) to the 'equivalent' 160kbps or 192kbps VBR mp3, the latter sounded more transparent and it wasn't just because of 'what I'm used to' because I didn't listen to mp3 much at all. There was also a well-known issue with some Cowon players and ogg, this was a few years ago though.

Anyhow for myself I rip CDs to FLAC for home use so that's what I voted. I maintain a copy of everything in 256kbps mp3 for portable use, which I do use much less, and decided to do mp3 just because it's universal - I'm not*so* concerned with absolute top notch SQ for portable as long as it's nearly transparent. I'll never buy compressed music, why buy a known inferior product that's not even cheaper, so until we get lossless digital distribution that isn't DRM-encrusted I'm sticking with CDs. It's a pita when you first convert a large library but a few at a time doesn't take long.