Have any products gone to market which can play FLAC alongside MP3? Has Iriver made something yet? or any other company?

Rio Karma does.

The Karma does so, and it is great. I think the iAudio m3 does aswell, but I can't say how good that is as I haven't used it personally.

Why not consult the source?

Is there anything else in the pipeline?

the ones I can talk about:

- possibly the rumored rio chroma (I have no info from Rio on this)
- FLAC is playing on ipod-linux
- lots of interest in the neuros but libFLAC has to work around lack of 64bit ints in their development environment

Josh

edit:
- almost forgot, the rockbox port seems close (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....7390&hl=rockbox)

The Cowon iAudio M3 is a 20GB player that supports FLAC and MP3. (edit: and Vorbis)

When initially released it could only play -1, -2, or -3 FLAC files IIRC, but I don't know if newer firmware can solve that.

edit: The Cowon iAudio M5 will support FLAC too, when it gets released.

So there are ones that you you can;t talk about? I really hope that the Chroma isn't just vapor ware....

Woah... Linux formatted ipod that can play FLAC??!!

I have a 2nd Gen Ipod. Would this be possible for me?

not sure, according to the official site, 3gen ipod @ 64mhz can play flac -8. there might be more info on that if you dig:

http://www.ipodlinux.org/MPD

Josh

FLAC would probably suck up the battery on 3G iPods because it has a small 32MB cache AFAIK; 8 hours alone isn't accurate so consider much less than that. By the way, is it compatible with any other iPod models?

I have a rio karma, and like it pretty good. FLAC isn't the most portable device friendly with its size though.

Will FLAC 8 be too bigger drain on a portable device then?

Its pointless me waiting to upgrade my 2nd Gen Ipod. If a new FLAC 8 capable player will only last for 30mins play time.

no. the karma, ipod, and m3 can all play FLAC for several hours.

Josh

My GSM phone can play Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, MP3 and WMA since yesterday ..... and soon i am going to get a 512 MB flash card for it .....

Christian

What phone do you have? If its a Windows mobile device then what player are you using?

Thanks!!

tell apple your waiting for them to implement FLAC before you buy an ipod, the more requests the better the chane they'll do it!

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html

M3L (L for long) playback time is 28 hours for VBR 160 kbps MP3 (-alt preset medium) and 25 hours for 128 kbps Vorbis (-q4) for me. [test options: vol.32, continuous playback, no light, no efects]. It could be about 15 h for flac, I guess (not tested !!!). That's not so bad

It's a T-Mobile SDA and i am using betaplayer http://corecodec.org/projects/betaplayer in smartphone version .... there is a strange bug for matroska playback right now in 0.5 stable, but all others work fine, including MPC ....

Christian
matroska project admin

that Rio Karma looks sweet. It would play Flac -8 right? All my files are encoded in -8.

Wondering how much £££ i'd get for selling the 2nd Gen Ipod 20GB.

Looks like I could pickup the Karma for £165.

Josh,

So the Neuros FLAC support is not looking good? Is it not going to happen or just take a while?

thanks,
JC

The Karmas are selling out fast. Buy one before it is too late.

Ordered the rio karma, for its codec (FLAC, ogg) support and sound quality. A lot of things pointed to very good output, eq as well. All in all couldnt find a fault with it reading around. Doesnt look the most eyecatching device, but then i want functionality over style.

thanks for help