Just purchased a Sansa e270 MP3 player and installed Rockbox before even loading any music on it. I'm a tech dork and poor audiophile so that makes me a late adopter. That said...this is my first "MP3" player (if you don't count the 512MB they were gradious enough to give me in my XM Inno). I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 900-1100 CD's and a ton of MP3's on my laptop and external drive. I also have a few dozen live sets in FLAC that I've pulled off the Live Music Archive.

SO...here's my question...

Due to the fact I'm new at this and familiar with codecs but don't have a ton of first-hand experience...in your opinions what is the best and safest (relatively future-proof) codec to use to begin transferring a good chunk of my music into for use on my RB e270? I hate bad audio so the majority of my MP3's are at least 192kbps but the majority are 320kbps. I'm leaning towards a lossless codec but I'd appreciate more info on the pros and cons.

Any help, ideas or simply a link to a guide would be greatly appreciated!

I've got a Rockboxed e260 myself, and ever since I picked it up I've been playing around with various formats. Your 270 only has 6gigs of space, so while flac is an option with Rockbox it's not a very good one if having a wide selection of music sitting in the player is important. Your current MP3s will play fine, although will probably eat up your battery life (which is already severely cut short just from running Rockbox rather than the default software on e200 series players).

I played with MPC for a while recently, as it's generally the fastest-decoded lossy format in Rockbox, thus uses the least CPU cycles to play and so should give the best battery performance at a given bitrate, and that performance lead only grows with bitrate. Just glance through this page to see what I'm talking about:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main...manceComparison

The second set of playback performance numbers listed there, the ones for the ipod 5g 60GB unit, I believe would be the closest to the performance we'd get with our Sansa players as the e200 series units run off a newer version of the PortalPlayer chipset found in the 5g iPods.

MPC isn't exactly the most widely supported format out there, but it would probably be your best bet in terms of juggling battery life with sound quality at high bitrates on your particular piece of hardware when running Rockbox.

Personally, as I've got the slightly more cramped e260 with only 4gig to work with I've settled on using OGG at bitrates around ~70-80kbps. Sound quality is good enough for me when sitting on a noisy bus, while letting me cram a few more albums on the player AND keep the battery going that little bit longer between charges.

I second the OGG at less than 100kbps, it sounds very decent to my ears on my samsung yp-u2 (supports Vorbis out of the box). I can't tell the difference at all on the headphones I use with it, and even with slightly better (bigger) headphones I can often tell the difference between the Vorbis and the original, but can't tell which is which.

On my old 20gig iPod (the harddrive's starting to die, but smacking it against the palm of my hand seems to get it going again) I use Nero AAC at slightly higher bitrates, for listening with good headphones. This means I don't need rockbox, which gives me more battery life and apple's interface, which I prefer.

musepack FTW

my ginormous bootleg collection in *mpc rejoices!

since you have 1000+ cds, i'd go for nero he-aac at 64 kbps to fit the most into that 6gb sansa.

Not a good option with Rockbox though. While HE-AAC decoding is enabled in Rockbox, it is far from realtime on Sansas (or Ipods).

in that case, here's another vote for vorbis at 80kbps.

I don't want to attempt to fit all of my music on this small of a player. I simply want to choose the right codec for good sound quality (I will rarely use headphones, it will mainly be played on my nice car and HIFI systems) and hopefully a codec that won't be outdated when I eventually purchase a PMP with much more space.

I also was unaware of the Sansa's poor processing power, so I would prefer a codec that it can actually play without too much lag.

Thanks for all the responses though!

Good sound quality = Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV)
Good sound quality plus battery life = Musepack

You can't go wrong with either of those as your lossy codec of choice. Both are in development so they are not getting discontinued anytime soon and both tend to listen to HA Forums for problems, etc. Nero is another one if you want to go the AAC route.

You will have to determine quality bitrate and that may help you determine which codec to go with. Try encoding some samples into aoTuV ogg and Musepack at varying levels and compare. You might have to go higher bitrate for quality because you want to play it on hifi equipment but that is dependent on your hearing and any problem samples the lossy codec might run across.

Enjoy your music!

I know I sent you here for advice so it's a little like inbreeding for me to post in this thread, but I would strongly suggest that since you have so many CDs that you do the ripping losslessly, then you can play around all you want transcoding to various formats without having to re-rip the whole boat. Be aware that you are looking at roughly 500GB to house all that in lossless though, and about another 50 for the lossy transcodes.

Google returned a well-written guide: http://wiki.craz1.homelinux.com/index.php/...D_Ripping_Guide

Note that you will need windows for EAC although I have heard that you can rip losslessly under virtualization. I'm kind of skeptical of that but hardly an expert.

since you're looking at upgrading to a higher capacity player in the future that may or may not be supported by rockbox, your first option is to rip to lossless if you have the hd space in your pc. you can then transcode to whatever codec is supported in your next player.

the other option is to abx and pick a lame -V setting that's transparent to you.