ipod no flac

[bladderhead]

I have the latest version of rockbox and a ipod nano 1gen.  When I play a flac, all I get is a few clicks from the headphones for about a second, then the track ends.  Is this ipod supposed to play flac?  Do any ipods do flac?

Thx in advance

[evilnick]

iPods most certainly do play .flac files. I'm assuming that your iPod nano is upgraded to the latest Rockbox build and can play other codecs without issues?

Can you try playing http://www.archive.org/download/fishbone1999-05-14.flac16/fishbone1999-05-14d2t06.flac and report back to see if that's working?

[bladderhead]

It won't do anything at all now.  I think it is dead.  It was probably in the process of dying, and that is why it wouldn't do flac.

Well, it was second-hand from ebay.

[gbl08ma]

By "won't do anything", what do you mean? Does it turn on?
If it doesn't turn on, try charging it for a few days (yes, days). I've seen lots of cases with iPods on this forum where the iPod has "died" and didn't turn on even the charging screen of the low-lever firmware, that got fixed after some days of continuous charge.
This happens mostly when the battery power went too low. Perhaps the battery of your second-hand iPod is dead?...

[LambdaCalculus]

Do the FLAC files you tried playing work on another music player? If they're improperly encoded, they will behave funky.

[bladderhead]

The computer plays the flac files  and generates music and no error messages.

The ipod won't turn on.  I am now going to charge it for a long time.

[Chronon]

You might try forcing a hardware reset first (hold Menu + Select).  It's possible that it is on but crashed.

[bladderhead]

Chronon was right.  I woke it up.  But it still does not do flac.  It says its battery is flat so I am charging it.

This is an edit.  It is now charged, and I now know the problem was the file.  I got a different flac, which it plays, no problem.  Apparently the ipod only likes some flac files.  I use Linux and Sox, which have no problem with any flac.  This ipod prefers Beethoven to Miles.

[saratoga]

Chronon was right.  I woke it up.  But it still does not do flac.  It says its battery is flat so I am charging it.

This is an edit.  It is now charged, and I now know the problem was the file.  I got a different flac, which it plays, no problem.  Apparently the ipod only likes some flac files.  I use Linux and Sox, which have no problem with any flac.  This ipod prefers Beethoven to Miles.

Post the broken flac so that someone can see why it doesn't play.

[bladderhead]

I have been trying for ages send a post with the offending flac attached, but I can't seem to do it.  Is there something wrong with this site?

[torne]

The maximum attachment size for the forums is 128KB, and flac is not an allowed filetype.
Post it on the internet somewhere and link to it.

[bladderhead]

I uploaded it to a share place.  Maybe this works.

http://www.4shared.com/file/CVGVTndv/C2_-_John_McLaughlin.html

[saratoga]

I uploaded it to a share place.  Maybe this works.

http://www.4shared.com/file/CVGVTndv/C2_-_John_McLaughlin.html

Thanks.  Looking at it, thats a pretty screwy file.  Whoever encoded it upsampled it to 192k/24 bit which we don't support and probably won't since its not really possible to get lossless files at that sample rate.  Fortunately, since FLAC is lossless you can pretty easily fix the file by resampling it to something sane (e.g. 48k and 16 bit is sensible for recordings of that era).  As a bonus it'll be almost 8 times smaller. 

[saratoga]

Whoever encoded it upsampled it to 192k/24 bit which we don't support and probably won't since its not really possible to get lossless files at that sample rate. 

Actually looking at the file, I think its not that hard to make it work, so I'll add support for it in r28609.  That said, decoding such large sample rates is extremely power intensive compared to normal flac files, so I strongly recommend using sane settings when encoding your files.  You'll get better quality in rockbox, fit way more files on the disk, and add hours to your battery life.   

[bladderhead]

Solved.  I used sox to convert it to 24bits and 96khz and the ipod likes it.

Thanks very much.  You are all very clever.