Flac - > iPod - Best practices, Replaygain, gapless, codec? Options

[gerwen]

I've talked the wife into getting me an iPod Touch for Christmas. Currently i'm using a Rockbox'd Sansa E280. I've never owned an ipod.

Right now, i use EAC to rip and encode to flac, then Foobar to transcode (lame 3.98.2) to mp3. I've waffled around a bit on what bitrate to use, but i've settled on v5, as it is transparent (or close enough) for me.

I'm not a big fan of itunes, based on playing with it a little since deciding to go apple.


I'd be hard to live without replaygained, and gapless albums. Itunes Soundcheck is not a promising option for me, based on the fact it doesn't have an album gain scan.


I'm looking for opinions on the best workflow and tools used to go from my flac archives to gapless replaygained (album) files of a quality similar to or better than lame -v5, at similar file sizes.

I'm not afraid to transcode my entire collection to aac if it is a superior choice for the task.

How do you do it?

[Neasden]

Not that different!

Not sure what you mean.

So does that mean that the official FLAC encoder in C sounds superior to my COBOL port?

I don't mean C, C++ or Delphi... I meant language as being written complex / varying from another structure.

[Bodhi]

Not that different!

Not sure what you mean.

I mean that the difference between AAC and MP3 isn't that important than it used to be (if you consider last listening test I linked above).