Anyone recommend a portable FLAC player ?

[Deckard]

Now I'm burning all my CDs to FLAC files via Toast it is overwhelming the space on my iPhone so I thought, easy i'll buy a portable flac player with 64 gig at least..... Um a bit of a gap in the market I see - Headfi talk about the Cowon j3 and 9 but poor piss reviews all over the web and the only one I like the look is the iBasso DX 100 but a bit above my price range tbh Golden Ear the app I use to play FLAC files on my iphone interfaces well with Dropbox so I could buy a pro account for 200 gig ish and just download the stuff as needed to my iphone. Seems a shame there isn't a good low cost android one with expandable memory about......

[adam]

can you get a 64gig bluetooth ssd or similar?

[Dave_M]

I use the SanDisk Sansa Clip for Flac playback and love it. Mine is only 4gb but the new versions have MicroSD slots. £35 from amazon for the player. Assuming you could pop a 64gb card in it.

[VNVObit]

slightly off topic but have you tried xld for cd ripping? never thought to use toast

personally tend to use xld to rip to flac for home media server (squeezebox) and then feed the resulting files to xld to transcode to aac (true variable bit rate) for syncing with iPod/iPhone as can't really tell the difference when out and about

[Deckard]

I use the SanDisk Sansa Clip for Flac playback and love it. Mine is only 4gb but the new versions have MicroSD slots. £35 from amazon for the player. Assuming you could pop a 64gb card in it.

I saw several reviews saying it was very quiet which put me off as I'm a bit deaf in right ear but I note that the EU vogue cap can be removed .....

[Firefox]

I use the SanDisk Sansa Clip for Flac playback and love it. Mine is only 4gb but the new versions have MicroSD slots. £35 from amazon for the player. Assuming you could pop a 64gb card in it.

I've got three Clip+'s now, which I absolutely love! I ignored them for ages, but then noticed that hi-fi/anythingbutipod-esque websites were all giving them rave reviews for their excellent sound quality.

I've not tried them with a 64GB SDXC card - last I heard some work, some don't, depending on which version of the standard the card implements. 32GB SDHC cards work great, though, and with 8GB of internal flash that's 40GB of storage that you can clip to your shirt.

I use 'em like mix tapes with different stuff on each - they're smaller than a matchbox so it's no hassle to carry several around.

Top tip: reflashing with Rockbox firmware gives you triple the battery life when playing FLACs, thanks to Rockbox's amazingly efficient FLAC CODEC and Sandisk's amazingly shit one. (Apart from Rockbox's general wonderfulness, of course.)

I saw several reviews saying it was very quiet which put me off as I'm a bit deaf in right ear but I note that the EU vogue cap can be removed .....

Not been my experience with in-ear foam earbuds. I generally have mine on about 3 on the Spinal Tap scale.

[Deckard]

Well I'm tempted to get one especially I could just fill 3-4 with flac files and swap them out as needed - presume they're mac compatible as is rockbox and nice to see quite a community over at sandisk - how much can you get 32 gig cards for ? Installation of RB fairly painless ? Just read an interesting article about Flac compression levels and size which will now mean reflacing my CD's at level 8 rather than 5 to decrease the file size that might help a bit with the memory limits on my phone and the clip

[Ratsoap]

I have the Sansa clip as well. It's quiet simply because of that bullshit EU law about volume. If you reset it and set your country to USA, then it's plenty loud (My mum worked that out before I did, I'm ashamed to say ).

I lasted about 5 mins with Rockbox though, horrible, horrible interface.

[Loada]

I store everything in .FLAC on my server but I use MediaMonkey(Gold) to on-the-fly convert to decent VBR mp3 for my iPhone which it does nicely. It's not exactly what you're after but you can get a nice saving, even with 320kbps files and the sound quality is decent enough for a portable device and it uses the player you have already. It's an option anyway, thought I'd mention it.

[Deckard]

Thanks for that suggestion - another one to mull over . Seems odd that you can buy headphones for a small fortune but there are very few lossless players out there

[pogo]

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the classic iPod. At 160GB it's double the capacity you need. No FLAC support but as well as the standard lossy formats it does Apple Lossless and AIFF. Not as pretty as an iPhone but it has a certain retro appeal and only £199. Mac compatible of course: you can use iTunes and just tell it to encode everything as Apple Lossless or AIFF, then feed it CDs while you use your Mac for something else.

[mrsmr2]

Sansa Clip+ or Clip Zip. Stupidly cheap and one of the best players out there (regardless of price). I have a 32GB micro SD card in my Clip+ to go with the 8GB internal memory.

Volume is low if you select a European region. Select Rest of the World (I think) and you get full volume.

I have a Cowon D2 as well which has a completely different sound signature and that plays Flacs.

Both of these will play most formats out there. I have SE530 headphones and both players sounds fantastic.

I'd recommend any Cowon but you can't beat the Clip for price.

[Ollie]

Just read an interesting article about Flac compression levels and size which will now mean reflacing my CD's at level 8 rather than 5 to decrease the file size that might help a bit with the memory limits on my phone and the clip

Not really worth it imo; level 8 takes 3-4 times longer to encode, uses increased resources to decode so will slightly decrease your battery life, and you'll fit maybe one extra track per 200 if you're lucky.

[xav]

Another vote for the Clip+ here. I bought one a few months ago and put Rockbox on there. I agree with Ratsoap's comment about the Rockbox UI being terrible - the SanDisk one is much prettier. But once it's playing I don't interact with it much, so it's tolerable for me, and I prefer to have some of its extras (like the tiny, tiny sudoku for when I need to kill a few minutes) even if it means a less than perfect UI.

That said, you can dual boot into the SanDisk OS if you want to.

The small size and light weight makes it convenient to just stick in a spare pocket, meaning that I use it far more than I thought I would. One of my best purchases in terms of cost vs. usage.

[Firefox]

how much can you get 32 gig cards for ? Installation of RB fairly painless ?

I buy Sandisk cards from Amazon (not even Amazon Marketplace) so I don't have to hassle with fakes and random rebranded cards. It's currently £16 for a 32GB class 4 card.

Installing Rockbox is easy - there's a little GUI installer tool that does everything, and lets you install themes and apps as well. The original firmware isn't gone afterwards - you can get into it by holding down (I think) left on the d-pad when you boot the player.