I've always liked the gen1 sansa fuze(click wheel) The menus made sense and I could delete songs without looking at it(major + for me) I have one now, and I was going to buy another 1-2 to keep for parts. Broken ones are $15-$20 Used 8gb ones are $50 New 8gb ones are $120+ For a 5 year old MP3 player! Please explain...
No idea. I love my Sansa clip, though http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Sansa-Clip-Player-Indigo/dp/B00400TGEC
FLAC is "irregular" when it comes to products of a company with some fruit logo. There's tons of players supporting FLAC out of the box. Monkey's Audio is a different animal, i doubt it will ever gain any hardware support. Well except only thing - hardware becomes more powerful every day, so many bigger media players can just run mplayer and play almost everything. But that's not a hardware support so it affects battery life. Nobody cares about lossless formats other than FLAC and Apple lossless anyway.
FLAC *is* irregular. It's ment for archiving, not everyday listening. Is there any audible difference between MP3-320kbs and FLAC?
FLAC is only used by people who want to feel pompous and superior about audio formats, even though they most likely can't hear the difference between it or any decent quality "lossy" format.
I think the difference between low bit rate MP3 such as 128 and higher bitrate like 360 is prominent and audible, but FLAC vs MP3-360kbps is ridiculous
i archive all my cds as FLACs on my hdd. instead of converting them to 320 kbps and transferring them to my mp3 player, i just copy and paste the flacs and i am done. i agree flac might be overkill for portable systems but as i said, it is nice to be able to drag-and-drop my archived flacs without encoding.
Quite probably but if I have a bunch of FLAC files on my laptop I'm not going to also include an MP3 set for kicks. 128kbit MP3 is quite audible in terms of suck and most 320kbit MP3s can sound pretty decent. FLAC is more likely limited by your sound hardware being used and whatever speakers are available.
Ogg/Vorbis originally planned a feature called "peeling", meaning if you had a high-bitrate file you could just "peel off" some quality and end up with a lower quality file at any bitrate you wanted (NB: without reencoding!), eliminating the need to archive multiple files at multiple bitrates. That would've been ideal for the transfer-from-hd-to-portable-player scenario. Unfortunately, it was never actually implemented.
i can tell the difference from mp360kbs and flac on my creative speakers... not audiophile setup at all
I can definitely tell the difference between listening to an actual CD and listening to an AAC or mp3 on my computer. That's probably due in part to the fact that my CD player has a much better DAC than my computer, but I think there's a noticeable difference anyway. Even listening to a CD on a SCPH-1001 sounds better than a compressed file. It's not something I can really explain accurately.
