Hi, I am a newbie and this is my first post here. So if I am out of line or in the wrong place with my query, please go gentle with me...
I see that there is a 'FLAC Player' App available on the iTunes Store. I also see that it is £6.99 to buy! Which seems a bit expensive for a media player type of app. As this forum is FLAC orientated, does anybody here know if this app is any good and worth getting?
I have a lot of downloaded FLAC files - as well as CDs ripped to FLAC for archive purposes - on my HDD. At the moment I am converting these to MP3 @256kbps to play on my new iPod Touch, but it does mean keeping two sets of files on my Hard Drive. Obviously sound quality is probably going to be no different between FLAC and MP3 through the iPod Touch's built-in speaker or the bog standard Apple iPod ear buds, but I do play my iPod through my car stereo and also through a Sony Hi-Fi with dock at home. So playing FLAC files directly seems to me to make sense and would save me keeping two sets of the same songs! So this app interests me, but do people think that it is worth getting, or is the improvement in quality of playing FLAC files on my iPod Touch through external speakers going to be negligible?
Thanks for any help you can give me.
If living in the Apple ecosystem it would be easier to transcode the Flac to ALAC. I used to have all my music in FLAC but with FLAC playing on none of my devices other than my computer i found it much easier just to use ALAC so i transcoded my whole FLAC library to ALAC.
Did you try to search "flac" on the AppStore?
I've tried this one before and it's a good one. Capriccio: http://capriccio.epmakes.com/ (http://capriccio.epmakes.com/)
I have a lot of downloaded FLAC files - as well as CDs ripped to FLAC for archive purposes - on my HDD. At the moment I am converting these to MP3 @256kbps to play on my new iPod Touch, but it does mean keeping two sets of files on my Hard Drive.
This is what I and many others do for portable players. There are scripts available (In Perl, VBScript and other languages) that makes it very easy to keep parallel libraries like this. The cost in disk space is trivial, as it takes (depending on the quality of your Mp3 encodings) less than 1/3 to 1/4 of the space consumed by the FLAC library.
Obviously sound quality is probably going to be no different between FLAC and MP3 through the iPod Touch's built-in speaker or the bog standard Apple iPod ear buds, but I do play my iPod through my car stereo and also through a Sony Hi-Fi with dock at home.
Many would argue little if any noticeable difference when played on a car stereo.
Two other advantages to using lossy files on a portable are: 1) Greater battery life. Larger files use more battery power to read files from storage. 2) Greater effective storage space. You can get 4 times as many files on a player if the average file size is 1/4 that of its lossless counterpart.
For any in-home audio application I just can't see using an iPod, as there are so many more convenient solutions that will play the full resolution FLAC files from a server across your network. Squeezebox, Sonos, some kind of audio PC, are just a few.
They all support ALAC as well and since iOS devices are by far the most popular one is better going with ALAC over FLAC.
Thanks for the replies. I will get the Capriccio app for .69p and see what that does...