Hi Dudes,

I assume most of you have been through a problem similar to this in the past - so I'd be interested to see your thoughts (can't really find a definitive answer no matter how much I search). I just managed to get my hands on a 20GB X5L & have the following requirements before rockboxing.

(1) Clearly, although 20 GB seems pretty large to most people, it will fill up pretty quickly if one uses a lossless file fomat.

(2) Any chosen file fomat must be gapless (fave music is segue driven alum rock - Pink Floyd, etc).

(3) Therefore, we need a lossy, gapless format. This clearly excludes mp3.

(4) The best lossy format (to my ears, anyway ) is OGG.

(5) OGG unfortunately provides the worst battery life, which is already impeded by the use of Rockbox in any case.

(6) So we come to the problem of needing a gapless lossy format which is preferable to OGG in terms of CPU usage, but doesn't lose out on the sound quality too much.

Anyone got any ideas/data?

Cheers!

PS -- Further to all this, would anyone advise not even trying the X5L with the original firmware so as not to be disappointed by the drop in sound quality by rockboxing (don't know whether this is a myth or not)?

mp3 can be gapless and is gapless on my rockboxd hp140, i also get a very similar battery life with rockbox using mp3, as for the sound being worse well i've never encountered that but there are many rockbox features that could screw up the sound if set wrong.

First (and only) problem I'm seeing here is if you didn't purchase X5L yet. You will have really hard time to find some now as it's production is discontinued.

The sound quality (original fw versus RB): If you are just playing files without any DSP processing, it should be the same. If you will need any DSP, Rockbox is incredibly better. It is difference between child toy and real audio stuff!

Rockbox plays LAME MP3 gapless of course, there are NO playback issues with Rockbox

I use vorbis almost exclusively on my X5L and have no problems with battery life. I made exact measuring once, I don't remember exact numbers now, but there was no big difference between OGG and MP3. I use OGG Q4 which is transparent to me and it is 128 kbps only. The difference was something like 15 % (?)

I suppose Rockbox will use better decoder for vorbis, so there will be lesser CPU consumption comparing to original fw.

AFAIK there is only 30 GB version of X5L (I may be wrong).

Wish you god luck!

EDIT: I reread your post more carefully and I see that you've got it already. So you are lucky man (or woman?)