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What are the best behaved audio file formats for RockBox?

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gonzalexx:
I did ask this question in another post... as part of it... it was a reply... but probably won't get seen that much... so now... officially... I'm asking:

What are the best behaved audio file formats for RockBox?

Thanks for all the work... and for not asking if I have read the manual... I have... but it would be nice to have a live answer from both devs and users.

Thanks for your time and effort!

cool_walking_:
I mostly use Ogg Vorbis, with a few MP3s for podcasts and such, and I don't think I've ever had problems specific to either one.  I've experienced playback bugs, but they didn't have anything to do with the file format.

I never took much notice, but the formats need differing amounts of processing (and thus battery) to decode:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/BatteryRuntime

Also this:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison
My understanding is that higher percentages are better because the faster the decoding is done, the sooner the CPU can be clocked back down to low speed.

gonzalexx:
Thank you cool....

Excellent insight!... so in codecs... it appears that FLAC wins.

and here comes a newby question... what do you guys mean by "realtime"... as opposed to what?

Thanks so much for your response... so many formats, so little time.
Take good care... and enjoy.

cool_walking_:
"Realtime" as in the actual time of the song. So if a 3 minute long song decodes in 3 minutes, that's 100%.  You actually want to be decoding at more than 100% (I've read 120% or 130%), so that you don't get any skips in playback.

Keep in mind that FLAC is a lossless codec, so it takes up much more HDD space than lossy formats like Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WMA, etc.

Llorean:
For playback, two things really cost battery. CPU and disk spinning. So lossless like FLAC may be faster but because they are bigger, you spend battery spinning the disk more. You want to find a happy point with small files that still decode pretty fast.

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