Audiophile Converted to FLAC

[jimthedj65]

Hi All,

My first post and hope I am not breaking any forum rules. Rock Box was found whilst I was searching for a way to play FLAC on my 4th Generation iPOD through my B&W panorama. I installed the software within minutes through the auto install, the player rebooted and I was presented with my new player software. I uploaded about 12 gigs of FLAC and had a play with it. I changed my theme to BOXAMP with a font of 21 for my ageing eyes.

I have set the EQ to ROCK and everything else is pretty much the same. I sampled the sounds on my Sennheiser HD 212 pro headphones and it plays back beautifully, I then proceeded to test it on two Zeppelins, the new air edition and the normal edition, much to my lack of knowledge I couldn't get it to work with the Air but did get it to work with the normal Zeppelin, I connected it and it would go into USB mode briefly and then come back to the player, I played the Beatles, prince and some philharmonic stuff. I compared the Prince Alphabet Street on my 4th generation iPOD (colour) to the same on a iPhone 4g purchased track from itunes and according to my engineer friends, my 4g iPOD rockbox enabled FLAC player kicked ass.

3 of us agreed that the sound from the rockbox iPod was the deepest, the best reproduction and left the itunes track for dead.

So guys I cannot thank you enough for your software it has completed my setup and is allowing me to enjoy my music instead of farting about converting to apple lossless etc...

so as a result of saving me time I will be making a donation in the short term to keep this fantastic project alive...

Thank You

[MasterFen]

Another satisfied customer I suppose.

I haven't really dabbled around with FLAC though, 320kbps MP3s are fine for me but I'm glad you're happy with it!

[jimthedj65]

the main difference with FLAC over other compressed formats is the speaker won't rattle and delivers the sound much clearer. Its important for me as I don't want to lose my hearing, the speaker rattle at 60% volume and above is equivalent of killing your ears.. so the purer the better for me.

FLAC allows me to get detail at lower sound volume so its not all about loudness, more about the quality without rattle.

Very satisfied customer.

[Progweed]

No offense, but to me that sounds like an especially fine example of HiFi vodoo. There is simply no physically possible way for music encoded in a lossy format to "rattle" your speakers more than music with lossless compression. You are probably comparing a correctly encoded FLAC to a poorly encoded MP3 and wrongfully attribute unwanted effects like clipping to the inferiority of this audiocodec.

[saratoga]

the main difference with FLAC over other compressed formats is the speaker won't rattle and delivers the sound much clearer.

As someone whos worked a lot on the rockbox codecs, I can assure you that's nonsense.  I would not expect to hear any quality difference between FLAC files and most lossy formats unless something is odd or wrong with them. 

FLAC allows me to get detail at lower sound volume so its not all about loudness, more about the quality without rattle.

This is also not true.

[Phalangees]

I did blind tests to see if my own ears were able to detect any difference between 320kbs mp3s and FLACs, but I "failed." So I stick with 320 mp3s since it sounds the same (to me), and takes up less space.

If you here a difference in FLAC, then more power to you! You are blessed with some fantastic ears. 

[soap]

This thread is about Rockbox's lack of complete support for Apple's Accessory Protocol.  As misguided as the claims of subjective quality may be, this is not HA and we can't k-line people for it.

jimthedj65 - I would very much appreciate it if you would look at this wiki page:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodAccessories
and PM me (or post here) all information needed for me to update the table with your findings (assuming you don't want to register for the wiki).

[Falco98]

@Soap: should I submit information regarding my rockboxed ipod 5.5g plugged through the ipod dock wire in my wife's Scion XA 2006?  The track info displays and the controls work to some extent, which is more than I ever expected before trying it for the first time.  I have fished out some weird side-effects, such as (in the latest few versions) the ipod needs to be fully powered-on and playing before plugging it in, or else the car reports "ipod connection error"s, etc.