Spec me an MP3/WMA/FLAC/APE/OGG Player

manveruppd · 15 Jul 2010 at 11:34

I'm having trouble finding a player that supports all the above formats (FLAC, APE, OGG as well as the usual suspects). I've looked on several e-tailers, and it seems most players will only support one or two of the more unusual formats, not all 3. Don't fancy having to transcode hours and hours of music, so I need OCUK's assistance. Supporting ALL of the formats above is my only requirement.

Would prefer it to be OS readable like a USB flash drive rather than have to transfer my music through some kind of bundled software.

A microphone would be a nice bonus. So would an FM tuner.

Don't care about video playback, in fact I'd rather it didn't, as I'd prefer a smallish device that I can carry around while exercising.

Capacity: as big as possible for the money.

Max budget £50ish.

marc2003 · 15 Jul 2010 at 11:56

an 8gb sansa clip+ meets all those criteria. but you'd have to flash it with rockbox to get APE playback. i honestly don't think you'll find anything that supports it natively.

alex24 · 15 Jul 2010 at 11:57

marc2003 said:
an 8gb sansa clip+ meets all those criteria. but you'd have to flash it with rockbox to get APE playback. i honestly don't think you'll find anything that supports it natively.

This would also be my recommendation having looked at similar recently. Can't say I use APE though.

manveruppd · 15 Jul 2010 at 14:27

marc2003 said:
i honestly don't think you'll find anything that supports it natively.

I saw a "Foehn & Hirsch" player on a competitor's website (never heard of the brand before, I assume it's that competitor's "own brand" hardware) which supports FLAC and APE... but not OGG...

Oh well, I'm willing to go to the trouble of flashing a Sandisk myself if it'll give me everything I want. Seems like a good device for the money.

Cutshaw · 15 Jul 2010 at 19:26

I had shortlisted 3 for myself. I wanted expandable memory and hopefully a line out for my amp. Rockbox being a huge bonus.

Cowon J3. An amazing touchscreen and great UI, some really cool features, great battery life. Expandable memory. It costs an arm and a leg, no line out, no Rockbox.

S:flo2. Great sound, power and a line out crafted by the ancient gods of xendar and expandable memory. Dodgy UI, pooptastic battery. Costs a fair bit, but much cheaper than the top end Cowons, if you are willing to wait on the shipping from the far east. No rockbox.

Sansa Fuze. Brilliant battery life, rockbox for the v1 and active team working on v2 model(seemingly the biggest effort made to get rockbox on to a player), line out via a dock and expandable memory. Cheapest of the three.

I went with the Fuze. If you can't wait on Rockbox(no stable release yet) for the Fuze then definitely go for a clip+.

EDIT: I didn't notice the £50 budget, but the Fuze isn't a huge stretch, just under £62.

manveruppd · 17 Jul 2010 at 14:54

Hmmm... what does the Fuze offer that the Clip+ doesn't? Better battery life? Audio quality? The only thing I really need is the ability to play all of the obscure formats I've got lying around my hard disk, and it looks like the rockbox firmware will do that for me.

Oh, one thing I forgot to ask, I assume all of these have normal 3.5mm headphone jacks, right? None of those small 2.5mm ones or any other kind of weird proprietary connector?

Cutshaw · 17 Jul 2010 at 18:28

manveruppd said:
Hmmm... what does the Fuze offer that the Clip+ doesn't?

Video and line out to use with an amp. Rockbox doesn't support the line out yet, but it's being worked on. If you aren't amping it, don't care about video or a bigger screen. Just get the clip+, yo.

oh and they are all 3.5mm inputs.

manveruppd · 17 Jul 2010 at 18:59

Nah, not particularly bothered about video, and I wouldn't use the line-out because the amp is currently being hogged by my desktop PC

I'll think about it though, it's conceivable that I might want those features in the future. £20 isn't a lot extra to spend, so I'll give it a think, decide if it's worth it.

manveruppd · 3 Aug 2010 at 12:50

I went for the Sansa Clip+ in the end, nice little piece of kit but copying files to and from is a nightmare! If I set USB sync to STP, then it doesn't recognise it as a USB drive. It still opens an Explorer window and lets me copy files onto it, but won't show up under My Computer. If I set it to DTP, then it sees it as a USB drive, but the files and folders I had previously copied onto it don't show up! And to top it all off, when I'm browsing its file structure through the device itself, some of the folders I had copied onto it show up under different names (usually "New folder_randoms_string_of_numbers") - but if I plug it back onto the computer I see them under their normal names through Explorer!

What gives?

marc2003 · 3 Aug 2010 at 12:54

put it into MTP mode and delete everything you put on it. now switch to MSC mode and leave it on that permanently. and then transfer your music again.

manveruppd · 3 Aug 2010 at 13:08

Yeah, that was my plan - in fact I posted on here while I was backing up all the music I put on it (so that I wouldn't have to go through the bother of sifting through my collection again - got about 30GB of music on my hard disk so choosing 7.5GB to put on it took the better part of an afternoon!

) It's also why I couldn't go into settings to check what those two initials for the two different USB modes actually were, and instead made up 2 random strings of initials!

BTW, I plan to also be using this with my gf's Mac - I assume Macs can also read the device's file system in absolutely the same way, and it'll work fine if I leave it in MSC mode when hooking it up to the Mac as well?

(Incidentally, what do MSC and MTP stand for?)

marc2003 · 3 Aug 2010 at 17:09

MTP stands for media transfer protocol and is required if you want to listen to DRM protected WMA files. it supposedly makes it easier to manage with various media players. personally i hate it. because you don't get a drive letter, you can't directly edit files on it with normal windows applications. i think getting it to work on mac/linux is a PITA as well...

MSC is just so it appears as a usb flash drive which universally works with every OS. you definitely want this as you're using a mac and windows.

manveruppd · 6 Aug 2010 at 14:42

Thanks for that dude, everything transfers just fine in MSC mode! There's a couple of weird snags, but I can live with them!

Only one thing annoys me: you can't seem to create playlists on the device, apart from the "GoList", which I assume is basically a "now playing" list. Seems like the only way to create several different playlists is by syncing through Windows Media Player, according to the manual at least.

Now, using WMP is out of the question, because I transcoded a lot of tracks into lower bitrates when transferring them onto the player, so I can't just create a playlist on my computer and then sync it up to the Clip+ - the tracks on the Clip+ aren't the same as the ones on my computer!

The other thing I thought to do is: with the player connected via MSC, to enqueue the tracks I want to add into the playlist into Winamp, then save the playlist onto the player. I'm sure that'll work, but it seems very convoluted, and I'd like a way to be able to do this on the fly, and through the player, instead.

manveruppd · 6 Aug 2010 at 17:19

Just a little note, the Winamp idea worked like a charm, still haven't figured out if there's a way to create playlists using the actual player though, rather than just creating them on my PC and copying them over...

marc2003 · 6 Aug 2010 at 17:27

if you rockbox it, that allows on the fly playlist creation.

here's the manual just to give an idea what it's capable of...

http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-buildch4.html#x7-660004.4.2

manveruppd · 6 Aug 2010 at 18:13

Oh man... that's excellent! Definitely gonna do this!

Might wait for a stable release though, they still list it as an unstable port for the Clip+. I'll have to put up with doing things through Winamp for now.
Anyway, the main reason I wanted Rockbox is to play APE files, and I've since discovered there's no way I can fit enough music on there without transcoding things to 96kbps OGG anyway, so that's not an issue anymore!

Participant · 17 Aug 2010 at 12:08

manveruppd said:
Just a little note, the Winamp idea worked like a charm, still haven't figured out if there's a way to create playlists using the actual player though, rather than just creating them on my PC and copying them over...

Sorry to drag this one back up, but I'm looking at getting a Sansa Clip+ and I read in one review that pressing and holding the central button, adds the current track to the default playlist. Not sure if this is any good to you!