Battery life on FLAC 0 and FLAC 8 ...

[epaludo]

Which one has better battery life when played on a rockbox capable DAP, a file encoded using FLAC 0 or one using FLAC 8?

I know the FLAC 0 is less CPU consuming, but it's larger so needs more access to the hard drive.

Was wondering which one has better battery life ... ?

[saratoga]

8 will use less power.  FLAC runs the processor on the lowest speed on all software targets anyway, so you don't gain anything by going lower then 8.

[DefineByte]

Wouldn't the fact that FLAC 8 is smaller mean that you could fit more in the playback buffer and thus save a small amount of battery life?

[LambdaCalculus]

FLAC 8 is the highest compression level for the file format, am I correct?

[DefineByte]

That's correct.

[LambdaCalculus]

So I figure that what you said before should be true. I have a few albums on my iPod in FLAC format, and I used Level 8 compression. On a fully charged battery, I can play the lot of them (7 albums in all), and still have about 50-60% charge left afterwards.

[DefineByte]

It's certainly true but I'm having a hard time recalling why I typed it.  :x

[stuffedspacedog]

The higher the number, the higher the compression, therefore lower disk usage (good for battery life) but higher CPU usage (bad for battery life).

The only way to find out which drains more current is to test it, but from personal experience FLAC 8 is overkill for only small gains in file size reduction.

FLAC 5 should do just fine.  BTW have you done any ABX with lossy codecs?  I'm an audio engineer and perfectly happy with MPC Q7 99% of the time.

MPC runs very efficiently on Rockbox (whereas Vorbis doesn't), so you get both low disk usage and low CPU usage.

If you're running Rockbox on an iPod of some description, the latest patches improve the performance of the MPC decoder even further.

[LambdaCalculus]

The biggest draw for FLAC 8 with me was because it gives the smallest file sizes. I've tried some Musepack (MPC) files on my iPod, but for whatever reason, I've never been too big on Musepack. I'm a Vorbis man and I love the file format. I rip most of my CDs using Vorbis at Q5, and I'm very pleased by the results I get, especially compared to VBR MP3s.

But as they say, "To each his own".  

[DefineByte]

MPC runs very efficiently on Rockbox (whereas Vorbis doesn't), so you get both low disk usage and low CPU usage.

If you're running Rockbox on an iPod of some description, the latest patches improve the performance of the MPC decoder even further.

I'm using Vorbis at the moment. Is it really a noticeable difference?

[AlexP]

MPC runs very efficiently on Rockbox (whereas Vorbis doesn't), so you get both low disk usage and low CPU usage.

If you're running Rockbox on an iPod of some description, the latest patches improve the performance of the MPC decoder even further.

I'm using Vorbis at the moment. Is it really a noticeable difference?

It depends on the player.  For instance some formats are more efficient on Coldfire than on PortalPlayer and vice versa

[DefineByte]

I should have said; it's on an iPod Video.

[Dixie Flatline]

FLAC level 8 should, without qualification, use less power.  FLAC is designed so that all compression levels take the same amount of CPU power to decode.  FLAC level 8 takes much longer to encode than level 0, because it's searching a much larger set of possibilities to find the optimal compression algorithm for the input audio, but it will take no longer to decode than the level 0 sample.

[saratoga]

I should have said; it's on an iPod Video.

I think mpc will be faster on everything, but vorbis is pretty fast too on teh ipod.

[DefineByte]

If it's 'pretty good' I don't think I'll bother re-encoding all my music.