APE files and Sansa 260

[gigaMojo]

   I've read through some posts about the APE format but I'm not sure what the story is.

   Been using Rockbox for many months happily on the Sansa 260.   But when I tried playing APE files they skip badly.

  Is the 260 simply not fast enough or is there some other issue with the APE driver?

[LambdaCalculus]

Except for the Gigabeats, APE files are simply too intensive to decode in realtime on most of the targets, especially PortalPlayer-based targets (of which the Sansa is one).

For your reading pleasure, I present this wiki page explaining the Monkey's Audio codec.

[AlexP]

Except for the Gigabeats, APE files are simply too intensive to decode in realtime on most of the targets, especially PortalPlayer-based targets (of which the Sansa is one).

Even for the gigabeat on higher compression.

     Is the 260 simply not fast enough or is there some other issue with the APE driver?

APE just really isn't designed for portable devices.  As it is lossless, transcode to another format such as FLAC or WAVPACK

[LambdaCalculus]

Even for the gigabeat on higher compression.

Indeed. Both the F and S can handle up to -c3000 ("high") compression well (according to the above wiki page), but anything above that will cause lag.

[gigaMojo]

 Thanks for the info. I have very few APE files so it's not a big deal.

[LambdaCalculus]

Why not convert those files to FLAC files instead? The performance with FLAC file playback is much better.