Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

That's the holy grail for quite a lot of us on here and over on head-fi. Seems getting n8x0 to play nice with a usb-dac is beyond even the most persistent attempts to tame the beast so far though.

I'd pay good money for a solution like that if it ever pops up. Would love to go n800/flac->usb dac->good cans.

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

Yeah me too. It's funny to get on a train when others are carrying an ipod Nano, I've got a freaking CD player strapped to a Total Bithead playing into my ER4s. :D

The n800 / n810 seems to be the best candidate out there to get this to work. n810 may be needed for more CPU speed. But maybe with a USB DAC some of the processing gets offloaded...

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

If you have OS2008 on your N800, then your tablet is already matching any N810 in terms of processing power. Frequency scaling up to 400 MHz came with that OS release.

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

This thread got me started experimenting a bit... I converted a bunch of stuff into OGG at 500kbps, and actually, I think that for me that may be the best choice for music on the n800. Flac-playing isn't very convenient as I've stated earlier in the thread, seems the ogg implementation through either Canola or YouAmp is much more usable. The sound quality is excellent, to the point that it actually feels slightly -better- than flac for some reason, and the handling quick and easy.

Since ogg is lossy, and flac isn't I can't explain why they'd sound better, but there may be some issue with flac simply not being well implemented?

Now if only that usb-dac connection became reality...!

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

my experience on a 600MHz via x86 CPU is that flac takes much less CPU power to decode (at least a factor of 2) than ogg vorbis. That was using gstreamer codecs.

there may be variations between x86 and arm, but i can't imagine the n800 having any trouble playing flac if it can play vorbis in software. if the decoding can be pushed to the DSP then it would be even better.

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

I can but agree. That's why I first went to flac.

But when I switch between ogg and flac, still I'd say there's something I like more about the ogg at the moment. It may all be placebo of course, since the overall handling and userexperience of using oggs works better.

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

And no, please, disregard my last few posts. Flac, is much nicer. A few more listening tests, and I'm back to Flac, warts in the implementation and all. My new shiny ogg-files all produce a hiss in the background which isn't there when playing the flac-files. Strange, but true.

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

Is vorbis (that's the name of audio codec which is typically used in ogg container format) decoder compiled in low quality mode? That could explain audible artifacts: http://www.humboldt.co.uk/2006/02/vorbis-on-dm642.html

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

I'm now experimenting with somewhat lower ogg bitrates, and the results are encouraging. So I don't think it's a problem across all ogg/vorbis settings, but rather certain levels of compression perhaps.

Back to my trials!

Re: Can the n800 play FLAC audio format?
 

And what about adding flac support into platform ? it's just a gstreamer codec element isnt it ?

same for lossless codecs in table:

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php...mparison_Table