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I'm a huge Linux and Open Source fan, but my iPod Touch is the best portable music player I've ever owned. I'd say 50-75% of my coworkers use iPhones as their m
by derwiki 17y ago
I'm a huge Linux and Open Source fan, but my iPod Touch is the best portable music player I've ever owned. I'd say 50-75% of my coworkers use iPhones as their music players too. And we're not all college kids or fanboys.
- jrockway 17y agoI guess you guys don't have any music in open formats. My collection is mostly FLAC.
- derefr 17y agoWhy would you put FLACs on a portable device without transcoding them first? Do you have TBs of room on your player? (My collection is currently 300GB of average-quality MP3s, and growing...)
- groaner 17y agoIf you are fussy about audio quality, a 500kbps FLAC isn't that much bigger than a 320kbps MP3.
- RevRal 17y agoTranscoding takes time and more space. I like my classical music, jazz, and noise music to be of the highest quality possible. The sound quality of most MP3s is distracting.
- dustingetz 17y agoi can't tell with my middle of the road earbuds.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoCrappy earbuds are more likely to expose flaws in lossy encodes than high-end gear. The psychoacoustic model assumes that certain sounds will mask other sounds so you can leave them out or replace them with something that doesn't sound quite right. If like most cheap headphones you don't have a flat response then the masking sound can be too low to work as intended. Having said that, with modern encoders it's mostly not an issue, even if you're using 90kps Vorbis created specifically for portable use. What is an issue is that you'll probably want to use the same file for portable and home listening, or you'll have got the file from someone who wanted to be on the safe side, since some songs are trickier to encode than others, so you'll end up with a 256kbps AAC file from iTunes, or 320kbps MP3. At that point the jump to FLAC compression sizes isn't particularly great and the management becomes a bigger hassle plus it allows you to transcode to various other formats and sizes as required, saving even greater space for listening in noisy environments like cars, trains, buses etc.
- derefr 17y agoDo you carry a headphone amp with you? Otherwise, the quality of your MP3s is the least of your problems.
- jrockway 17y agoThe analog output is probably fine for high-impedance headphones, like DT-880s or the ER-4S.
- jrockway 17y agoWhy wouldn't I? Disks, even flash-based ones, are cheap when you're talking about storing music.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoFLACs use less battery than lossy codecs (at least on flash based devices, since the extra reads don't cause a disk to spin up). It's a tradeoff of course, but if you've got the space (and this is only going to increase) and don't need instant access to a giant music collection then it's worth considering, particularly if it lets you skip a transcode step.
- gcb 17y agoyes. Because i'd totally trade space (cheap, because my phone supports microSD) for battery live