Wow. 9 minutes. I'm glad I put that poll in, so that everyone else that reads this thread will have something to do.

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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.

Yeah, that would mean purchasing a DVD burner, though, and I've already blown my current toy budget on hockey gear. At the moment, I'm reasonably happy with the lossy compression -- my re-ripping *everything* is just because, since I have to rip a ton of stuff now, anyway, I figure I might as well redo everything else just to just get it all in the same format. I found that my time spent in the ripping/encoding is minimal compared to the tag editing, so once I get the tags done, I plan to keep a mini-cddb.

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Are the [v3alpha] 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.

Ah, cool. Occasional reboots, I can deal with. I'm not a frequent radio user, either (mostly it's just a click over to radio to show passengers that it's there, and tell them that I put the tuner together from a kit ). I'll see what info I can dig up about alpha/radio issues.

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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.

"Shuffle mode on, down, down, down" -- pretty much negates the need for any sort of gapless playback.

I really need to setup per-album playlists.

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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.

Interesting info to know.

Thanks!