I think such a device would be interesting, and as others have said, the SBC is already part of the way there. It doesn't copy files from SBS to the SD card, nor can it play audio from the SD card. I don't imagine those would be that hard to implement in the firmware. For something I take away from home, I would want it to be more compact and more durable than the SBC.
However, I see the biggest round-peg-square-hole problem being putting FLAC (or other) lossless files on a portable player. Most places I would take a portable player (car, metro, airplane, running, etc.) are sufficiently noisy that lossy codecs like MP3 are perfectly fine, especially through earbuds or headphones that are far from audiophile quality. Putting the lossless SBS library on the portable device means having a lot fewer tracks to choose from, and lossless files generally run through batteries a lot faster than MP3s because the decoding is more CPU intensive, and in the case of hard disk players, the drive is spinning a lot more. So, imho, interesting yes, but still a whole lot of kinks to work out in the basic concept. Keeping a parallel MP3 version of my FLAC library and periodically changing the subset that's on my portable player or Blackberry via USB cable and/or SDHC card isn't the most elegant solution in the world, but it works. -- aubuti ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=70442 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
