Question about audio support

[Nightrain86]

Hey guys, just wondering what's the closest to lossless that this player can have? I'm thinking of picking one up and while the fact it doesn't support FLAC doesn't really bother me i was wondering what's the closest to lossless that it can play?

I heard it can play WAV and i always thought that was a lossless format but I've been told it's not.

Thanks.

[CrowdAds]

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Nightrain86

Hey guys, just wondering what's the closest to lossless that this player can have? I'm thinking of picking one up and while the fact it doesn't support FLAC doesn't really bother me i was wondering what's the closest to lossless that it can play?

I heard it can play WAV and i always thought that was a lossless format but I've been told it's not.

Thanks.

WAV is lossless.....but the files are freaking huge!

[Nightrain86]

Ah ok then, cheers for clearing that up for me and thanks for the reply

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Nightrain86

Ah ok then, cheers for clearing that up for me and thanks for the reply

My pleasure. The WAV, in Sony-speak, they call it PCM or something of the sort.....but it's WAV.

[Amar89]

Waveform (.WAV) files are uncompressed losseless audio, hence they are massively huge and a ridiculous option for containing a portable music collection, as you'd only be able to fit about 20 albums into an 8Gb player.
The other thing to note about using .WAVs on an Mp3 Player is they are not compatible with ID3 tags (so no album art, author, album, track info and metadata) and they do not support fast seeking, so they can be jerky when fast-forwarding/rewinding.

Whereas FLAC is compressed lossless audio, so it takes up less space (about 20Mb for a 4 minute track, most FLACs have 40% compression). FLAC does not throwaway bits of data or very high/low freq. noise to save space like .mp3s it simply uses lossless compression algorithms like .ZIP or .RAR files.

Just don't bother with .WAVs, convert FLACs/WAVs/Lossless to 320Kbp/s Mp3s with dBpoweramp (LAME or Fraunhofer codec) and you won't be able to tell the difference anyhow.