Which iPod is most stable in playing ape+cue?

[Schoenberg]

I am looking for an ape/flac/cue player.
My previous experience with Sansa Fuze last summer was very bad. The rockboxed sansa fuze can hardly play a big ape with cue smoothly.  It turned dead constantly.

I am looking for a player which can play best at big ape/cue files.  I prefer iPod especially. 
I currently own a sansa clip+.

[evilnick]

Ape as a codec is very expensive in terms of CPU power, so your experience with the Fuze would have been better with flac.

It's possibly not the clearest wiki page to prove this point, but have a look at how quickly ape is decoded on here http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison#Current_Results and bear in mind that 100% means it decodes it *barely* fast enough to play in realtime.

Results on one player (Sansa e200 v1 series) show that ape gets around 60 - 95+% whereas flac is around 600%, i.e. an order of magnitude "cheaper" to decode. While I'm not sure about the architecture on the iPods, this is at least an indication that flac is (currently) better suited to Rockbox than ape is, and as both are lossless codecs I would convert ape to flac.

And for some anecdotal evidence, I've used flac files on an iPod video and Rockbox has coped with them perfectly.

[Schoenberg]

Hi, thanks for your reply.  I understand that FLAC is a better/easier format but I just have too much APE files.  I have over 1000GB music files and 80% of them are in APE format.  Some MP3 players might perform better in APE than others do.

[AlexP]

As both ape and flac are lossless you can transcode between them without losing quality.  Ape will not play well on ipods either, at anything other than the first (and maybe second) compression level.  Only the gigabeat S will play them all.

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SoundCodecMonkeysAudio

I would transcode to flac.  Ape is just too cpu intensive.

[saratoga]

I have over 1000GB music files and 80% of them are in APE format.  Some MP3 players might perform better in APE than others do.

What compression level are they at?