Is it time to give up on FLAC?

[jrschmidt]

I've been wanting to get a networked MP3 player for some time now. I was waiting to find a player that accepted FLAC natively not one that would transcode FLAC to some other MP3 format before "sending" it out. Although, not needing a server would be preferable, I would not mind running a Revere application on my PC to support this.

My thoughts now are to simply rip everything into a non compressed format since disk space is sooo cheap. Find a player that will play this (most of them) and transcode for anything that I want to download to my portable devices.

Any thoughts on both my latest idea as well as what players that I should consider based on my new plans would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John

[doody]

john - what's wrong with slimserver? my understanding is that it'll convert FLAC to WAV and everything plays that. why do you require native support? sure, it's more bandwidth, but not even 2X the bandwidth.

doody.

[SiliGoose]

Yea, Slimserver gives you the option of converting FLAC to MP3 or WAV. I use the FLAC to WAV option over an 802.11b network and it works (and sounds) fantastic.

[work permit]

You can rip to WAV, but WAV doesn't natively support tags. You can play games with cuesheets, but its a pain.

[highgrovemanor]

I actually wished I picked FLAC over APE when I did all my ripping, as I believe there is more FLAC support than APE. I've grown to accept transcoding to WAV as probably being the best approach, but haven't really found good transcoding software (outside the slimserver) that'll work in a device-independent way.

I do think a uPnP server that transcodes APE and/or FLAC will eventually present itself.......but when, I dunno.

If you already know, please speak up!

[sean_w_smith]

All,

Xbox Media Center running on a Xbox will play FLACs natively no problem over the network, CD/DVD or interal HD. Its engine is based on mplayer from linux with a Xbox specific skinnable GUI put on top. Very cool.... you can find info on this at

xboxmediacenter.de (Its in English)

Sean