[velvetsteele]

I am new to DAP or the portable world but want a player with great sound and room for lossless. A 60G Imodded Ipod or 60G X5 seem like the only options for now. I know they both have their pro's and con's and that there is no perfect solution, but right now I am leaning more towards the Imod due to the improved SQ and ease of interface/polish vs. the freedom of use (software) on the X5.

I have been trying foobar and like its sound on my home based rig but I am going overseas for the next year and cant take that with me anyway. If I use the X5, I will encode all my CD's with Flac compression level 8, and that is great for both home use and travel with the X5. However, If I use the Imod 4G, I will encode with ALAC Lossless, but that would mean using Itunes instead of Foobar (unfortunately) for lossless playback at home. Its a tradeoff either way. I really like the tight integration of Itunes and the Imod, and I know I can just transcode my music for home use with player of choice, but I'm not sure about going from Apple Lossless to FLAC or if that is even possible?? There is also the inconvenience of having duplicate files on my PC (waste of space).

No, on reflection, it looks like you are "in for a penny or a pound" and in either case need to commit to one path or the other -along with the the inherent weaknesses.
Any thoughts??

 

[CousCous]

You can use FLAC with the Ipod via rockbox firmware.

 

[lexnasa]

Foobar supports ALAC playback, just do a search for the foo_alac plugin. Foobar also supports ALAC encoding using itunesencode. And of course you can synchronise all your files with your iPod using foo_pod.

Either that or encode all your music into FLAC and play it back gaplessly on your iPod using Rockbox.

Many many beautiful options!

 

[velvetsteele]

Rockbox is a great future option once the battery life issues are worked out.

Thats great that Foobar has ALAC functionality. How does it compare to Itunes for all around music file management and wouldn't it mean a loss of some important Itunes features (such as autosync, etc..)? I mean, if you are not tied to ITunes with the Ipod, why don't more pod users move over to Foo-tunes -I mean Foobar...lol.

 

[lexnasa]

I don't use it anymore coz I'm all rockboxed up... I think it does autosync... all the information you should need is here:
http://www.tinkafoo.com/log/foo_pod.html

I have an iModded Ipod Photo 60gb and I can't recommend it highly enough.