Since you are in the "Dark Ages"... 1) You do not have to convert (rip) your CDs to FLAC. We do that so the the music takes up less space on our hard drives. (about 40% less space) You could simply copy them in their native WAV file format and stream them to your Touch. They will simply take up more room on your hard drive.
2) FLAC is just one of several "lossless" compression formats. (codecs) Lossless means that no music is actually lost in the conversion. Others are Apple's ALAC, and Window's WMAL. 3)You could simply use iTunes and rip CDs to ALAC files for your Touch or use Windows Media Player and rip your CDs to WMAL files for your Touch. To use rip to FLAC, you need a different application (many free ones) like dbpoweramp to accomplish this. 4) There is no difference in sound quality between these lossless types. 5) FLAC is preferred by many because it is not proprietary. What if you end up with 3000 CDs converted to Apple's ALAC files and a few years from now, Apple decides that you have to pay them for that??? 6) As stated above, you could also just use Windows Media Player (or other software) and convert CDs to a "lossy" codec like MP3s. Lossy codecs take up even less space but actually loose some of the music data, so they may not sound as good. This lossy format has several different compression options like 64, 128, 256 or 320 kbs. If you Rip to the higher ones like 256 or 320, you may not notice a great deal of difference (or any) between those and a lossless codec like FLAC. This depends on your ears, the engineering of the music, and the resolving power of your stereo system. 7) You could do some experimenting... If you have a PC, simply use Windows Media Player and rip a couple of CDs to MP3s at 320kb/s and also to lossless WMAL. Then you can stream them to your Touch/stereo and see if you can tell a difference. Or if you have a MAC, just use iTunes and rip to MP3s and ALAC. Good luck... -- Blazer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Blazer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=39545 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84308 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
