Losing Confidence in Products

**LtData** · July 20, 2006, 11:31 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

From what I can tell (aka just using the player and reading what Spoon says), it seems that dMC calls a MS dll to encode to WMA, hence him mentioning a "COM nightmare". That basically means the calls to encode to WMA are a mess. Also, the documentation for this is probably sorely lacking, in typical Microsoft style.

Also, Tomb is correct, though not quite for that reason. The main reason the battery drains faster is that the buffer on the player only holds one song, so it has to spin the HDD up more often to refill the buffer.

FLAC does not natively work with WMP, as you have discovered. FLAC should work just fine with Winamp, though I have never tried personally. FLAC support for players, unfortunately, is few and far between.

Also, in dMC Apple Lossless has no quality settings or anything else, you just encode to it.

**Deano** · July 20, 2006, 04:17 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Originally posted by Tomb

Isn't 320 k/bits overkill for a portable player?

The higher the bitrate will contribute to a faster battery useage whilst I read on Hydrogen Audio recently that because the player's decoder has more bits to read on the higher encoded files this could contribute to a faster demise of a portable players drive. Unless you are listening in silence and on pretty good head phones I would go for V2 or even V4 if using lame.

Personally I use aotuv at Q3.95 on my i-river.

Unfortunately, not everyone realises that they should be doing all the ABX testing on themselves to see if they can really hear the differences on their portable player. I personally use LAME @ -V 2 --vbr-new, but that is purely due to "paranoia" reasoning, not necessarily because I need it that high bitrate. Some people just generally are paranoid and don't really understand how good lossy encoders are these days.

**Deano** · July 20, 2006, 04:22 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Originally posted by LtData

From what I can tell (aka just using the player and reading what Spoon says), it seems that dMC calls a MS dll to encode to WMA, hence him mentioning a "COM nightmare". That basically means the calls to encode to WMA are a mess. Also, the documentation for this is probably sorely lacking, in typical Microsoft style.

Well, I have found a lot of Microsoft Documentation to be very good on MSDN. That doesn't mean Windows Media components are good though I guess, but I wouldn't say Microsoft's documentation is bad...

Originally posted by LtData

Also, Tomb is correct, though not quite for that reason. The main reason the battery drains faster is that the buffer on the player only holds one song, so it has to spin the HDD up more often to refill the buffer.

Guess it depends on your buffer size. My 5G iPod has a 64mb buffer, so I am thinking I would get considerably more than one song @ 320kbps in that buffer.

Originally posted by LtData

FLAC does not natively work with WMP, as you have discovered. FLAC should work just fine with Winamp, though I have never tried personally. FLAC support for players, unfortunately, is few and far between.

I thought I had covered that in my reply earlier. But yeah... WMP is easy enough to get support in. You can get the illiminable DirectShow filters and Tag support via a plugin. Not that difficult. Just people are too lazy to look.

**Agrajag** · July 20, 2006, 04:56 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

They'd have to be lazy. I found references to both of those in one search yesterday.

I'm trying out APE at the moment based on Spoon's support for it (will also be looking at FLAC Deano).

For the record, I realize the iPod isn't a high fidelity device but I also work for a high fidelity earphone company. I can't justify walking around with an iPod with low bitrate MP3's on it. I'm looking forward to being able to store lots of lossless files on a future player and getting decent battery life and fidelity.

Part of the reason the files are on the iPod that way are to get them off for playing on other devices while I'm on the road.

**Tomb** · July 20, 2006, 07:16 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Originally posted by Agrajag

For the record, I realize the iPod isn't a high fidelity device but I also work for a high fidelity earphone company.I can't justify walking around with an iPod with low bitrate MP3's on it. I'm looking forward to being able to store lots of lossless files on a future player and getting decent battery life and fidelity.

Lame at V2 is hardly low quality! At this setting lame is transparent for most users, no doubt regardless of headphone make

I agree with Deano that anything higher is simply paranoia and he is right as regards to abx testing. Try it - I think you will be surprised.

**LtData** · July 20, 2006, 09:01 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Originally posted by Deano

Guess it depends on your buffer size. My 5G iPod has a 64mb buffer, so I am thinking I would get considerably more than one song @ 320kbps in that buffer.

OK, so I was exaggerating, but my point is still valid. How many mp4/m4a songs at, say, 160kbps can you fit in that buffer? About 10-12. How many lossless songs can you probably fit on there? Probably 2. The HDD still has to spin more often to refill the buffer if the buffer only has the song currently playing and the next song, instead of 9-11 subsequent songs.

**Agrajag** · July 20, 2006, 11:57 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

For what it's worth, battery life doesn't seem that much different for me over when I was using 192kbps songs (I did for a while simply due to a mistake in the transfers). If there is a difference it's pretty small. Lossless I can see having a big impact. You're talking decoding of every song into a larger space and lots of hard disk activity.

**Agrajag** · July 21, 2006, 12:39 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Guys, while testing APE files, I've run into an annoyance. I converted all my WMA9 files to APE and put these copies into their own folder to see how things go.

First thing I noticed is that Windows Explorer doesn't seem to like them. It gets very slow essentially identifying the file type and applying a generic icon to it (round yellow icon with a play symbol in it.)

Any ideas? Why is it even bothering to look at anything but the extension here?

Simply scrolling down that folder is a chore.

**Spoons** · July 21, 2006, 08:51 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

the APE symbol should be a monkeys head.

**Agrajag** · July 21, 2006, 10:40 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Well, it's not that. I suspect it got the icon from the codec install as it's also the same for FLAC and I saw that same icon while inside settings in the software somewhere.

On the plus side I just ripped about 40 songs from CD via Audio Input last night and every one copied flawlessly.

I did encounter an old issue again.

I'd decided to call everything from Paul McCartney "Paul McCartney" instead of that plus "Wings" plus other variations. When I got done I noticed I had all the tags right but one file started with the artist as "Wings". I deleted it from MMC and changed the file name in Explorer. When I re-added it, MMC apparently got confused somehow and it played some random song. Every time I clicked on it I got a different song. I then quit MMC and came back in to find I now had two entries for that song. I deleted the first one (I just picked one) and that seemed to fix it.

Also,

I've noticed some issues with Track Title tags.

Rush's 2112 album has a LONG track title as it includes all 7 songs in the one track ( i) Overture ii) ...... )

That one wouldn't sync up because the APE listing wouldn't accept the full track title. It got cut off about 15 characters short of what WMA took and what was on the iPod so it kept appearing. I just edited both down but still not desired.

Then I noticed two Paul McCartney songs (both with square brackets in the title) got cut off mid-way through the bracketed text but this time on the iPod. Editing the name on the iPod fixed this but why did I have to do this?

I also wonder now what happened to one song from "The Police" that has a title that's literally a full sentence. I didn't get any notification of sync issues with the iPod and the full name is on the track on the iPod. That makes me wonder if the Rush issue was some other problem.

**Agrajag** · July 23, 2006, 04:33 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Bump....

Still waiting to know if anyone knows why Explorer takes so long to display the folder with .APE files in it.

Also see above for a few issues with tagging. Spoon, you commented that moving to this format would leave these sorts of issues behind. Just want to be sure it's not something I'm doing wrong.

**Spoon** · July 23, 2006, 08:23 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

>APE listing wouldn't accept the full track title

APE tags can but dAP has a maximum length of 100 characters per field.

**Agrajag** · July 24, 2006, 11:50 AM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Not sure I understand that answer. dAP (The audio player) wasn't involved in this process so how is a limit it might have involved?

I used Audio CD Input to rip the song and it went into MMC. That's it. Plus, I was able to go into MMC after I noticed the problem and correct it.

The key here is, why did I have to correct this at all?

**Spoon** · July 24, 2006, 07:56 PM

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

dAP is MMC.

Losing Confidence in Products

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment