*.ape file playback on sansa e200 intermittant and freezing player

[hatchetman82]

Hi.

a few days ago I've transferred a few *.ape files over to my sansa e200, running a recent rockbox build.
I've noticed that when any of the ape files was selected for play the player would freeze for ~5 seconds, play ~2 seconds of audio, then freeze for ~5 more (probably while decoding the next 2 seconds) and so on.

during the ~5 second pauses the player is completely unresponsive - couldnt even change the volume.

I'd like to know if this means that the e200 simply isnt powerful enough to play back ape file, or should i re-encode them with a less aggressive compression setting.

does this appear with other lossless audio codecs ? (flac, for instance)

Thanks in advance for any clues.

[karashata]

FLAC playback works perfectly on all supported targets, so it's not related to it being a lossless codec.  I believe the PP (PortalPlayer, ie. iPod, Sansa, H10) targets are the worst for APE playback because they have the least powerful processors, and decoding APE files requires a decently powerful processor.  There may be more information here.

[AlexP]

Yes, APE is stupidly complex to decode, and really not suitable for low power devices like MP3 players.  This is due to the design of the codec, and there is very little we can do about it, most of our targets just aren't powerful enough.  Both FLAC and wavpack work wonderfully under Rockbox, so I would suggest one of those instead.