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rockbox plays gapless without problems. cbr is either a waste of space (at high bitrates) or a waste of quality (at low bitrates).
http://www.rockbox.org/ straight from it's format results in degraded audio. OK. maybe *degraded* is a huge word here, since not many human ears will notice the difference. But there it is: lossless format is compressed anyway: a regular lossless audio CD is some 1/3 smaller than the the original wav/aiff CD. Thus, when playing a CD straight from it's lossless compressed file form, the audio is decompressed on the fly. Which results is audio losses. These are quite neglectable, listening wise, nonetheless mesurable. And probably with various results depending on the software/player/gear. But, outside of this yes, lossless reveals it's full losslessiness (!) only when uncompressed in aiff/wav CD format.
Btw, other brands of walkpods or software may be able to play gapless VBR, however, this has always caused problems on iPods, afaik. Maybe recent models circumvent this. Necros, which gen model do you own? as a lossy format choice, sounds better as mp3 at similar bitrate yes. Moreover, it's a free codec. On the other hand, like flac, vorbis, is not as widely compatible as mp3. Another thing, doing my tests I remember having run into problems with Ogg Vorbis CBR, maybe corrected now.
Anyway, we're talking about some megs in a lossy audio world here, No big deal, if this can prevent any uncomfy listening moments... If Shambler wants to listen to music in his car, the quality of the recording is hardly likely to be an issue is it? Try engine noise, wind noise, tyre noise; his six kids in the back arguing about life, the universe and the merits of stealth versus all guns blazing in sixteen year old computer games.
As you know i'm the same in terms of music fanatism, having 930CDs in my collection I got tired of looking for certain CD in those vast shelves just to listen to it. So i took http://legroom.net/software/autoflac and decoded ALL 900 CDs to flacs. This is lossless format, everything plays perfectly. I'm now converting my vinyls to flac too, so i play them less and save their lifes.
Just read that autoflac page for instructions, but basically all you need is Exact Audio Copy program and this autoflac script, it'll do everything for you. ps. books - kindle, games - steam, no other options. to play all those 300Gbs of flacs I use excellent player http://www.foobar2000.org/. it's light, easy to costomise and has no flaws at all.
ps. to convert all those 900CDs to flacs took 3 months of lazy copying and not every evening. but even with a bunch of shrieking vores playing ball on the backseat you'll instantly notice the difference between a CD and a pod-player (in hi and low-ends mostly, but overall clarity too) whatever the car audio system quality...
On the software side, whish we had Foobar2000 for Mac! Great app! The current sleek one for OS X is Vox. Not as sharpely refined as Foobar though... What Text_Fish says isn't true, you can buy from wherever you want with the Kindle, not only Amazon.
The screen isn't too small, it's quite perfect, and the device is really light and easy to carry around, I read it standing up in the subway, or even when waiting in line at stores or such. Now that I have it I just want to get rid of my 200+ paper book collection. Books are really easy to find, I haven't had any trouble finding anything I wanted to read (from amazon and other sources), and it's nice to not have to buy hardcover books for new stuff you'd want to read as soon as possible. The other e-readers around are probably good as well though, but I haven't tried any of them. I wouldn't suggest a tablet if all you want to do is read, it's more expensive, heavier, and the screens aren't as nice as e-ink. Yes, fully recommend one as well.
I haven't bought a single book from Amazon on it, and more than half the books I have are public domain - ie. free, downloaded from websites legally. Don't bother with the fire, you want the eInk version, though if you want to read pdf then go for the touch version. The keyboard is fiddly and goes unused. The free Wi-Fi sounds good, but I've never turned it on since it makes the battery drain quicker and have no use for it. Finally, use Calibre for it - which is like iTunes but not a completely shitty waste of time. Which brings me to portable music - fuck iPods. The machine itself is quite nice but the software is the worst I've seen since Windows Vista. Why not just spend the money on a slightly nicer phone? I'll throw my recommendation out there for Foobar2000 as well. Been using it for years! Fantastic no-fluff music player.
Johnxmas: you are falling victim to confirmation bias. lossless means lossless. think of flac like zip or rar. what you compress loses no quality.
show me some research, test results, measurements. ----- willem, sorry to hear that. and the screens aren't as nice as e-ink.
That's the big appeal for me. It's like reading from paper, very easy on the eyes. I confirm I clearly hear a difference. I know it's a puzzling subject and I'm in no way interested to feed another bias/myth/controversial dialog about it. The internet is already full of people claiming they can hear something, meanwhile others just come with the plain facts, a straight tech approach and the undisputable proof on paper that lossless is lossless. Tests and measurements have been run with the same results: zero difference. At least nothing conclusive. Yet, some people, me included, can hear it.
Maybe I should have been less upfront affirmative in my previous posts and report those facts in the first place as results of my own experimentation. "Yet, some people, me included, can hear it."
No, you believe you can hear it. You want to hear it, so you do. If it makes you happier, then keep doing what you're doing. It's no skin off anyone else's back but it would be good to stop telling people that it makes a difference when it doesn't. Lossless is called lossless for a reason. Not to argue. My several blind tests were conclusive. I leave all the rest to your fine and open minded ability to tell what you know about me and other people in my case. Shambler, you're welcome.
There's really no argument. Hell, I even said that if you hear a difference, that's great. Do whatever sounds good to you.
I'm no electronics guy, but in theory, at least on portable devices, there could be interferences? Very unlikely that you could hear them though (if they even exist). I'd say it's bullshit.
- Fuck all the i- shit - Foobar2k for windows is awesome. It's missing one thing though: the notation of an album. You cannot write a script that checks if you have all tracks of an album (at least i never figured out how to do it), because all foobar knows are individual tracks. (Which have album/total tracks tags of course, but this is not the issue here). - sansa clip+ is indeed nice -- but my phone jack broke, which is a known problem. :( - managing a large library is really really hard, despite discogs tagging (foobar plugin!), etc. - If you dl rips, ensure that none of the mp3s are broken. Depending on your source, a lot of stuff that's going around is either completely broken or has broken mp3 headers (foobar check integrity/fix headers) - Don't get stuff below 192 (and i tend to avoid those). - on a mobile device quality doesn't really mattress. - use flac for lossless. Has anyone tried ape? very exotic though? - use the tool vondur recommended for ripping. It only knows about files -- which naturally can have all sorts of tags -- but all operations work on files. So if you filter on something, say, album == 'Apostrophe', it goes over all individual tracks (in isolation) and shows those that have the album tag set to that string.
Now try selecting all albums that are missing a song -- there's no check that can be run on a single track alone to achieve that. E.g. if track 12 is missing, you cannot deduce this from track 1-11, even if they have total tracks == 12 set. Speaking of music, what do you guys use to download music?
I use soulseek, and rarely pirate bay if there's a discog. But downloading one song and album at a time takes a lot of time on soulseek, and pirate bay pretty fkn useless unless it's a fairly mainstream artist. In terms of programs... TagScanner is fantastic for fixing tags. I never automatically tag anything, I do it manually with TagScanner. And then I use AutomaticPlaylistCreator to create my playlists: http://www.necik.net/?obsah=obsah.htm&telo=download.htm I only just recently found this - until which time I had been manually playlisting each and every folder. It would take me hours. Now I can do 1000 folder with just a few clicks. What kind of weird player do you use? For tagging I use http://easytag.sourceforge.net/
As for music, uhm, enjoy this shuffled list of sites I follow through feeds: http://www.earthmantra.com/ http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?collection=ambient_collective http://www.fresh-poulp.net/ http://sonicsquirrel.net/ http://www.ektoplazm.com/ http://archive.org/details/amorfus http://www.mixotic.net/ http://www.musopen.org/ http://www.sublimeporte.net http://nl.electrobel.org/ http://altusmusic.ca/ http://dubmissionrecords.blogspot.com/ http://melodica-netlabel.com/index.htm http://www.dogmazic.net/music http://www.clear-cut-records.com/ http://www.fature.net/ http://www.seriesmedia.org/ http://blog.pazarahm.com/feed/ http://gems.tumblr.com/ http://archive.org/details/netlabels http://www.ideology.de/ http://www.ambientium.com/ http://be.electrobel.org/ http://totallyfreemusic.blogspot.de http://www.ambienteer.com/ http://deepspace-blog.blogspot.com/ http://dubmood.wordpress.com/ http://www.upitup.com/ http://thekalle.blogspot.com/ http://www.justiceforaudio.org/feed/ http://www.jamendo.com/ http://philwilkerson.wordpress.com/ http://www.magnatune.com/ http://petecogle.com/blog/ http://www.broque.de/ http://www.planetterrorrecords.com/ http://www.kahvi.org/ http://line.alter-x.net/ http://www.digital-diamonds.com/ http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?collection=x-dump http://netlabelism.com http://freefloatingmusic.com/ http://netlabels.org/ http://materializm.webs.com/ http://blocsonic.com/ http://www.entity.be/entity/ http://www.mon0.de/ http://space.alter-x.net/
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