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Tuesday 25 March 2008

MP3 player with FLAC support [Am]






Shortly I shall be off on Hols and would like to take an mp3 player with me for lounging around with condusive tunes. However I have been ripping an awful lot of stuff to FLAC and I'm not sure that I really want to go through all the arse of converting it to MP3 and having stuff on my hard-disk in dual format. On the other hand, I haven't really looked into how onerous that conversion would be.

So the question is; if you were in my position with about 60 albums on FLAC, is there a decent mp3 player which isn't the size of a house-brick and has sufficient capacity (surely less of a problem now?) to play those natively without mucking about with hacks which are incompatible with the legal brain. Or would you go through the convert process and if so is there a program that will do this on a nice batch basis you would recommend?




8 comments:


  1. TAKE YOUR TR1MP!...

    A big list, with prices, of FLAC compatible portable MP3 players, can be found here:

    http://audiovisual.kelkoo.co.uk/cp_122701_filter_audiovideo_formats_flac.html

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  2. One thing you may not be aware of is 3rd party firmwares for the ipod, such as Rockbox:

    http://www.rockbox.org/



    Which will let you play flac, provided you have one of the suported models. If it was me, I'd get a nice nano, no moving parts so tough as fek for travelling, and transcode just what you'd be copying to the ipod.

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  3. Unfortunately my TR2X ain't exactly going to fit in my pocket while I call from a sunlounger for more refreshment.

    Rockbox looks useful but doesn't support the nano, which does seem like a good idea, so I guess we're left with transcoding.

    The net throws up Foobar2000 and Max which do converting (which I presume like transcoding only using a less interwebtastic word for it??). But of course, one doesn't blog for what can be found on google but more for the EED xp of it all. Calling Lurk! Calling the Kaveman!




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  4. Yer problem is you're kind of forcing using a HD player aren't you, which is a shame. Myself, in your shoes, I'd basically use some software to rip to mp3 on the fly while copy to a nice solid state player. It just doesn't take any time at all to encode MP3 these days. You don't fuck around like, 256/320kbps cbr, just a quick and dirty encode straight onto the player.

    You have to sit around waiting for shit to copy to it anyway, how much difference does it make how long it takes? Well, fuck, it's going to take awhile to do it with FLAC and of course you wont get much on there.

    I really don't have any idea what particular software is good but there's probably loads. I know the software for iriver players, media jukebox, does this shit for a start.


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  5. dbPoweramp has a pretty good batch converter. Anapod Explorer for the iPod will transcode as your copy over. Don't know if Anapod reads flac tho.

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  6. Foobar2000's probably the easiest.

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  7. Foobar gets my recommendation. Load it up in the player, right click and convert to mp3 with whatever settings you like, using any version of lame you care to point it at. Can't go wrong really. You can even set the output directory to your mounted MP3 player if Windows sees it as a storage drive and then you're copying them at the same time.


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  8. foobar me doo too. It comes with the modern Lame settings, I think I use the one that works out at about 120-130 kb/s - it's absolutely fine for a portable.

    If you are ripping stuff there is a fair bit of prebuilt scriptery for EAC that will rip to FLAC and do you a dirty mp3 at the same time.

    The evil empire alternative is, of course, using EAC to rip to Apple Lossless which will play on iPod and just having one file to rule them all. Your iPod battery won't thank you mind.


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