AAC vs LAME Mp3 Battery drain on Sony E series Options

[zvnteq777]

Hi, I have a Sony E353 walkman mp3 player (also plays ogg, aac, flac, etc) anyway, I was thinking of converting my library to AAC 156kbps VBR but I was wondering if that or LAME q3 would drain the battery more, at identical bitrates, let's say 128 CBR for both AAC and LAME Mp3 (I'm using version 3.98.4) which would be a bigger drain on the battery?

Thanks so much for your help

[slks]

It seems to just depend on how efficient the particular decoding software used on a particular player functions. I don't think that tests done on one hardware and software combination (like the aforementioned Nokia test) will be the result for other players. Or that small differences in CPU load will even make a significant impact on battery life.

There's no database I know of, where you can see how particular formats on particular players perform. No companies have done tests like this on their players. So, the only way to get that information would be to hope someone with your same player has done the tests (and hope their claimed results are accurate), or to do the tests yourself.

I'm skeptical that which format your music is in has any impact on battery life beyond a few percentage points. All my computer experience tells me otherwise. The best way to get battery life is to buy hardware that's rated for longer battery life in the first place. It's a spec that I think people ignore way too much. Like all the laptops I see that only last for 90 minutes. Might as well have bought a desktop...

[saratoga]

Are these occurrences more or less even across the board?

No. You can't generalize results from one device to any other since theres such enormous variation in decoder quality. See Brand's link above my post.

There's no database I know of, where you can see how particular formats on particular players perform. No companies have done tests like this on their players. So, the only way to get that information would be to hope someone with your same player has done the tests (and hope their claimed results are accurate), or to do the tests yourself.

I think the only thing like that is the rockbox wiki, but of course thats only tests people have done on Rockbox supported players, and certainly only for a subset of codecs that people cared enough to test battery life for.

I'm skeptical that which format your music is in has any impact on battery life beyond a few percentage points. All my computer experience tells me otherwise.

Computers operate quite differently then small ARM systems, where power consumption can increase many times between idle and load. For ARM9 based systems, battery life can vary by 200-300% between different flac decoders. The difference is probably smaller on higher end processors though, since the idle power becomes much more significant as systems become more complex (as in PCs).