Rockbox

[Asus]

The other day I formated my 2GB iPod nano and threw rockbox on it. It's great when you have a compatible audio player and Rockbox opens up your options. :thumbs:

I never really used my Nano. Didn't support flac and neither does iTunes (I use Foobar2000 for flac playback via ASIO to the soundcard). Now I drag-drop songs on the iPod without iTunes. Picking your own menu and background for the player is nice. A much better option for me than putting $150-400 down on a player with an odd interface just to get flac support. Plus I'd never want the interface on the LCD screen for a audio player. Of course 2gb storage could be better...especially while using flac. ha

hmm maybe i'll grab my brothers 30gb ipod when he upgrades.

 

[Qonfused]

I love Rockbox. I've looked at it many times. While I've never "used" it, I do like the graphical change and added support (which the iPod and other players need dearly). I do wish they had a version for the ZVM.

 

[Sedako]

I couldn't imagine using just FLAC on a 2 gig nano. It must fill up after about 4 albums.

 

[Asus]

Yeah, I can't use it to hold my collection. Just to play a few playlists and I've only got 8 albums on there atm. Maybe 2 of which are in mp3 format. But I normally listen to music from my PC. So this player is not exactly necessary. If I found more time to listen to music outside of home then I would really get a bigger unit.

 

[Sedako]

Personally I can't hear a difference between 320 kbps and FLAC (at least on my system). Saves me some HD space.

 

[Sedako]

Yes, I know that Sea. I was simply adding commentary.

 

[Asus]

Any other nice ipod hacks out there?

There are some songs even with not so pricey equipment ($100 headphones) that you can hear a difference. Mainly with the virtual space that the instruments create. But the main reason I use FLAC is for conversion. If there was a time when I wanted to listen to 15 albums on my 2gb nano I could pretty easily put MP3 versions from the FLAC files on there. So I wouldn't need to dig up my audio cds to do it. (my PC has a lot of hard drive space)

Plus when I do video work I never convert the file if I can help it or hopefully just once if I really need to. I guess it is rubbing off on my audio habits.

 

[Sanada]

I originally encoded my music in MP3 but decided to switch to FLAC. HDD are so big and cheap these days that there's no reason to even worry about disk space anymore. For music players though it's not as pratical. My current playlist in FLAC is about 64 hours long which equates to about 25GB of files. My N800 has 2 x 1GB cards at the moment so I can only put about 20-30 songs on it at a time but FLAC uses only a variable bitrate so a long song can still be small and a short song large.

 

[Asus]

When iTunes sorts files it writes the track number and then the song name.
Artist Folder>Album Folder>01 Songname etc
See, it makes sense to organise alphabetically.

 

[Asus]

Yeah, too bad you can't change that in the settings on your portable player.

 

[Sanada]

It does make sense, but not if you have to manually edit the title tags for every single song.

Why don't you just use tagging software? There's many programs out there that will rename all your files based on the tags in the file. I use EasyTAG to do mine.

Eh, I have like 40 GB of music, and that's using mp3. Although its rate of expansion is slow (I no longer pirate music as of a couple of years ago), if I were to rip all 100+ of my CDs in FLAC, I wouldn't be able to store it all without making room elsewhere. I don't think it's really possible to have a huge amount of music in uncompressed formats unless you want to have a dedicated music drive.

It would be a lot but you can get 500GB drives very cheaply now. For you though there probably wouldn't be much point encoding all your songs again in FLAC as it'd take forever to transfer all the songs from the CD's. I wasn't going to orginally but I decided to anyway as I hadn't ripped that many CD's at the time.

FLAC isn't an uncompressed format as you said, it just compresses files in a way that they don't differ from them uncompressed which is known as "lossless". MP3/WMA/OGG are known as "lossy" since data is losed in the compression process.