portable that will play FLACs?

[maddog 2]

I'm thinking of getting a portable/ipod style player for when I'm cycling as my current MD is getting a bit long in the tooth and burning discs is a pain.

The thing is I've got my music collection fully burned on hard drive as FLACs (400ish albums) so a player which could utilise this would save me the hassle of re-ripping them as WMAs or something (unless there's a program/software that will convert them easily???). Obviously FLAcs are bigger than MP3s but I won't need all 400ish albums as I only cycle to the dancier/rockier stuff anyway.

I've just been doing some webbing and the Rio Karma plays FLACs but I can't find anywhere that's selling them new - are they discontinued? obviously there is always Ebay...

I don't really fancy an iPod cos every man and his dog has one but if they are the best solution then I'm not unbendable.

Budget is prolly £200 ish

any ideas?

 

[MattC]

this one will according to the flac site:

http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/x5/

Matt

 

[MattC]

and available in the UK at just about the price you were after
http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=624

Matt

 

[maddog 2]

mmm that looks nice

cheers Matt, I'll have a look at that.

 

[oedipus]

The thing is I've got my music collection fully burned on hard drive as FLACs (400ish albums) so a player which could utilise this would save me the hassle of re-ripping them or something

Whoa there!

First an interesting diversion...

My Squeezebox3 plays flac's - you could say it is FLAC compatible..

However, it implements a subset of flac (I won't get into the details), and my slimserver transcodes flacs from my highly compressed flacs to low compression flacs... [ie same data, but encoded with a simpler to implement algorithm; actually I stopped the server doing that and made it spit out wav instead which is a better trade of on low power hardware..]

Anyway, the point of the diversion is that portable players may play flacs, but you might need special encoding options and you won't simply be able to copy that files across. You might need to "transcode" them.

Then there's the 'tag" metadata (artist/title etc) -- that could be a whole other world of pain..

Check the manual for the player before buying.

Also in the "or something" category, I think there are perl scripts for re-encoding flac-to-mp3 -- and possible gui based tools too. Check the slim devices forum.

I'd expect flac to consume 5 times the space of mp3, which will also spin thehard drive (???) more frequently in your player and that could be a big deal for battery life...

 

[julian2002]

maddog - i use flac on my sbox and just transcode to wma using foobar - just create a monster play list and leave it beetling away overnight - job done.
however that cowon looks nice - if only it had a bigger screen.....
cheers


julian

 

[maddog 2]

I don't mind doing some 'trancoding' as long as it works etc. I assume foobar is free?

wma is probably better anyway as presumably flacs are still quite large for portables to handle.

If I go for the cowon then I guess I'll see if the software they provide can import flacs, if not then I'll transcode them into wma using foobar and then import them that way?

the main thing is not having to rip any more CDs! The squeezebox weekend was something else....

 

[maddog 2]

but then if I can transcode them all to wma then I'm not limited to the cowon....

I could go for any wma-enabled player....

 

[julian2002]

maddog,
foobar is free. google for it.
i use a 40gb archos gmini 500 that's a media player not just music. it also has a usb host so i can pull pics off my camera and push music onto the creative zen nano i use for playing music. that way i can take a significant portion of my collection on the road with me without worrying too much about battery life (the creative uses aaa batteries rather than a fixed rechargeable - i had a monolith with one of those and it was a pita when it died when i was out).
it's just hte solution i use - your circumstances may differ.
cheers


julian.

 

[markabuckley]

I'm running FLACs using an Iriver H-120 with the Rockbox 3rd party firmware - works a treat.

Does almost every codec apart from WMAs

Mark.

 

[dunkyboy]

The iAudio X5 is meant to be excellent. Word of warning about FLACs - they DO chew through battery life a LOT quicker than lossy formats, possibly by virtue of simply being bigger (and thus requiring the hard drive to work harder) or possibly because they make the processor work harder, not sure.

Dunc