Breepee2

And how responsive is it? Mwa, 1GB is pretty standard these days, though 1 process eating 1,25GB is indeed a little more than usual Anyone here whose got it to work in Linux (and VMWare)?

You don't seem to care much about quality loss. Then you could choose to transcode your mp3's to a lower bitrate, and if I recall correctly, the PSP also plays AAC, so you can look for a program that encodes AAC (iTunes, but Nero is better).

It seems they/he only judge the device.

Well, 256 k isn't low bitrate, and I must say I didn't (and don't) look into that, I don't care much for low-bitrates.

By the way, I don't know what you mean with 'other MP3 codecs' than Fraunhofers, but Lame is the best MP3 encoder. No question about it and no exceptions. Have you looked into that one? Isn't it funny, that the best audio codecs are made under Open Source licenses by dedicated audiophiles (Lame, Vorbis, Musepack) and not by companies (Fraunhofer, Sony, Apple). OK, Nero with it's HE-AAC is an exception

Try a search here: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ I know there once was a big community comparison with high bitrates and a lot off codecs including Atrac and MP3. Can't find it right now, but I know it's there. And of course you can always ABX for yourself.

Ignorance is bliss.

Interesting read. I'm with the Japan hardware engineers

A real line-out (or a full-size HiFi deck) and (surprise surprise!) support for a compressed lossless format (FLAC, ATRAC Lossless, whatever). Non-crippled MP3-playback and more userfriendly software would be nice too.

Glass is actually siliciumdioxide, so in essence that's no element either. Wouldn't know the answer to be honest. Why do you need it by the way? Just curiosity (I like that )? If it's an actual material you need, an alloy would suffice I think?

I wouldn't count on Sony changing anything. Apple will remain apples and programming will be different.

Thanks for the confirmation! A faster mac will of course speed things up, but faster than realtime will probably never happen (so I suggest every mac user to record via the unit an title though the software if available).

Let's just hope first that there's gonna be a 3rd gen, and worry about the iPodders later

THe question isn't really if we'll go bluray, but the question is if we're going to get there via HD-DVD. I prefer the direct route.

The fun thing with these codecs is that it really doesn't matter which one you choose. They store precisely the same bitstream. In a whiff you can convert to any other lossless codec, sound quality will not degrade. You can choose which codecs characteristics you like most and go from there. I liked FLAC most (in everyday usage is works better I think and I don't really care about a few MB's).

Record via the unit's line-in (optical perhaps) in realtime.

Show me the tests. I never ever had an .ape bigger than it's .flac counterpart. I've tested about a 100 single files, and my whole, at the time 80GB, archive as a total (in WMA Lossless too, FLAC was the biggest, altough the difference was no more than ~150MB. Flac at -5 and monkey at high compression). Also all tests I read on the web also come to the conclusion monkey is among the best compressors, flac among the worst. When looking at how the codec compress, that all makes sense. Maybe you need to run some more tests, with some other music. Yep, it was mine too Couldn't stand having to wait ~1 sec in monkey

Hmm, that's a strange attitude. Foobar is the only program that supports kernel streaming (eg. bypassing that stupid kmixer in 2K/XP which mangles bits so that even a digital out ends up with other bits than the source). FLAC is by the way one of the least best compressing lossless codec around, Monkey is king here. The reason most people use FLAC is I think it's open source nature and its consequential broad acceptance (amplified by it's low decoding requirements which makes it well suited for (portable) hardware, in contrary to Monkey).

One of the main advantages of FLAC over wav is not only the saved discs space, but also the native support for tags. I couldn't live without tags to maintain a transparent music backup database.

Source: CDRInfo UMD appears to be here to stay. I'm curious where Sony will be taking this. Strangely, the article specifically states the UMD-medium as Read-Only, so writers will probably don't come on the market for some time...

Well, I'm more interested in pumping up sound quality (and ending up with a system that can totally replace CD) than ultra low bandwidth music. FLAC + rewritable UMD = Good Thing Roughly 6 CD's in CD quality on a very small disc (UMD). That's what I want.

I hope you don't store it in wav? I also store my archive in FLAC, would be a wonderful world if I could play it back from MD too

Let's just say I'm happy to be in Europe (though is the least worst rather than the best).

We could start a petition (altough nothing is sure yet), but I think it's next to impossible to change the new path the new direction wants to go (with the shareholders and all). Seems just a dead end, and I don't like it, and will probably cry and whine for some time. There's no alternative out there. DataPlay was the only remote possibility of competition and they're long gone.

Would be a very cool idea (the discs are 1.8GB and a littlebit smaller than MD), but of course pretty useless without a (re)writable format. Not impossible, but I agree with MDfreak that Sony probably did this on purpose.