Paul_B;238724 Wrote: > I have all my music CD's ripped to NAS storage as FLAC and this all > works beautifully with Squeezecenter and my SB3. > > However, some times I would like to listen to the same music on a > portable device. Currently I have an original 2GB Nano but I am > thinking of getting a new device. > > 1. Should I get a new iPod? If so which one, Touch, Classic? > > 2. Should I get a non-iPod device (Zune Gen 2, Archos, Zen, Cowon, > etc); I assume I will still need to transcode from FLAC to Mp3? > > 3. Which Music Manager is "best" for ease of use, MediaMonkey, Sveta > from dbPowerAmp. etc? > >
Paul: I've been in the same situation as you for me and family. For me, I bought a FLAC capable player, a COWON iAudio XL5. It's a bit dated now, but awesome. You might want to take the same tact, as no conversions of your media library files are necessary and, as such, you retain the high level of lossless sound. The only caveat is that FLAC files are large, so you'll need a player with a large capacity to carry a large amount of music. For my family, they all have iPods. To accomodate them, for a while, I bought several licenses of Red Chair Software's Anapod Explorer, the software that others in this thread have mentioned. It will transcode your FLAC files to MP3 format (user selectable to a quality/bit rate). That may work for you, but note that Red Chair Software is out-of-business and does not support the software any longer -- they just collect the license fees you pay to download it. The software also has problems in dealing with Album Art, and conflicts with ITunes, so you'll need to learn the quirks necessary to get it to work with these two things. I've totally dropped Anapod for something I feel works much, much better for family and iPods, or any non-flac compatible device (see below). If your Slimserver is on Linux, which mine is, I would strongly suggest you look into MP3FS (http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/). This utility lets you mount a psuedo "MP3 drive" of your FLAC files, which you can then set up as a SAMBA (SMB) Shared Drive, for Windows and Mac computers. In this scenario, iPod users see a drive full of 100% compatible MP3 files, fully drag and droppable into iTunes or to the device's directory. I find this is the perfect solution for my wife and son for their music needs . They pick the music files they want, and MP3FS transparently transcodes them to MP3 files for their use, on-the-fly. As for music managers, if you go with an Apple Device, you can't beat iTunes, in my opinion. I've tried some of the others, dbPowerAmp, Media Monkey, but have settled with simple drag and drop with the windows file system explorer and using both a Samba (SMB) Share mapped to the straight FLAC files and a second Samba Share mapped to the MP3FS system for MP3 versions of the FLAC Files. Best of luck, *Bradley -- Bradley ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bradley's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=46 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39762 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
