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Sadly, I don't have the space available to store everything in FLAC to reconvert at will, so I don't want to re-rip only to re-rip yet again, later on.


Well, Ogg Vorbis is lossy, as you know, so if something even better comes out, you'll still need to make this decision. My advice to you: rip to FLAC and then archive to DVD-R.

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just to confirm, Ogg requires v3alpha8


Yes, it does. The Ogg (and FLAC) codecs fell out of the audio path rework that got done for Karma, so you'll need v3a8.

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Are the issues reasonable to put up with, just for the Ogg support?


Depends. I've been using v3 alphas exclusively for over a year and, while I do get some issues with v3a8, I've been generally happy. It does occasionally reboot on me, but I can live with that. I don't, however, use the radio that much, so I can't comment on the level of functionality there.

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Does the alpha seriously break anything from 2.0final?


IMO, not seriously, no. And gapless playback is worth the cost, as far as I'm concerned.

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is the MP3 decoding done via software or hardware, and, if the latter, does using Ogg, rather than MP3, cause any significant impact on CPU/RAM usage?



All of the empeg's codecs are software. The Ogg Vorbis codec is heavier on CPU/RAM usage than the MP3 one, because we got a StrongARM-optimised MP3 decoder from ARM, and the Ogg Vorbis (and FLAC) decoders used in v3a8 haven't had as much optimisation work carried out on them.
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-- roger