[vox-tech] portable mp3 player in linux

[David Hummel]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 11:50:35AM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> On Fri 03 Dec 04, 11:04 AM, David Hummel <dhml at comcast.net> said:
> >
> > better to hack together playlists instead.  Oh, another limitation
> > is a 52 character limit on file and directory names.
>  
> Do you feel limited by that?

Only because the firmware will ignore any file with names > 52 chars
when reading the tag database, and file/dir names > 52 chars get
truncated on the display (annoying).  Doesn't matter so much, because my
script shortens these files before they are transferred to the player
and indexed.

> Sounds like a built-in limitation of the filesystem.

Not the filesystem (it's FAT32), but the firmware.  File names can be up
to 255 chars on FAT32.

> I wonder if that could be increased with a firmware upgrade in the
> future...

I hope so ...

> I've heard that ogg sounds similar to an mp3 file at 64kbs higher in
> sampling, so that a 64kbs ogg sounds like a 128 kbs mp3.

I actually don't know, because I've never used anything below 128 kbps.
I can tell you that a 128 kbps Ogg does sound better than a 128 kbps MP3
(using lame in my case), and the Ogg file is ~4% smaller.  The bass is
more accurate and the highs more crisp.  You probably can't distinguish
this unless you have decent headphones.

> I've also read that that 192kbs ogg is indistinguishable from flac.  I
> started to collect flac, but haven't jumped on the ogg bandwagon yet.
> Perhaps it's time...

FLAC is awesome.  I would use it, except my collection is so large that
I would probably need a 400GB harddrive to carry around a significant
percentage of my collection.  This is why I restrict myself to 128 kbps
Ogg and MP3.

-David