I did it!!!

Well, when I am stuck on an aircraft and a hotel for a week at a time I like to listen to music. I can even put a movie on when those long boring aircraft rides seem to never end or bozo next to me wants to discuss the economic impact of reduced federal assistance for some no-name, hillbilly community. I'll probably put books on it as well. It's much more than JUST music.

Have you gotten it some nice lingerie yet?

Ricardo wrote: »

With all due respect to my polkie friends, SQ comes to second place (maybe third) in many, many, many situations and places where you want to listen to music.

Not saying that an ipod can't sound very good using the right files and DAC...still have not played on this field.

I agree Ricardo for music/WiFi/Entertainment on the go it IS the unit to have. But those who use it as a dual purpose audio quality unit in a main listening rig are missing something.

They can sound very good, but are no replacement for a true dedicated 2ch system.

I myself have been thinking about getting one just for all the apps that are available as well as WiFi surfing and as an added bonus I can have portable music. Can you store FLAC files on there?

H9

Yeah, I'm not doing iTunes. Oh well it was a good idea while it lasted. I suppose I could load some high bit mp3's on it. I assume it allows mp3's or does everything have to go thru iTunes?

I have a SanDisk Sansa View and I've been liking it pretty good for a year now. Has a MicroSD expansion slot so I can cram lots of stuff on it from MP3's to movies and it has enough space to hold high quality feature length movies and still hold 4-12 gigs of music.

Best part is it's DRM free and loading media is a cinch! Just plug it in to the USB port and it uses standard directory structures to store files. A Windows system sees it as a removable hard drive.

It stores pictures, videos, several different audio files as well as a couple loss less formats, audiobooks and has a microphone for recording voice notes or an entire meeting or class lecture or whatever. It also has an FM tuner with about 20 presets.

They come in 8, 16 and 32 GB sizes and with the MicroSD expansion slot it'll handle pretty much any size MicroSD card. My 8 GB turns into 16 GB with the addition of an 8 GB card. Being flash memory based, it's small and light as well.

Both of my teenagers want one badly. I have to admit they look pretty cool. You can download an application to control a Squeezebox remotely - I'd like to check that out.

Even the 64 gig is small for lossless if you have a collection over around 200 CDs.

Personally, I think high bit rate mp3 or AAC is good enough for portable/car applications where the equipment and listening environment is not conducive to critical listening anyway. For my Zune, I use mp3's encoded with lame at the highest variable bitrate quality (VBR 0, averages around 240 kbps). On my car's factory stereo, the Zune playing these mp3's sounds fine (way better than FM) and the convenience of taking your music collection with you is fun. I would also say that playing through my $40 Senn PX100 headphones sounds pretty good too. In these scenarios, I can't hear obvious compression artifacts with the VBR 0 mp3's.

For those that own or plan to own a portable player like an iPod, Zune, Sansa, etc., but don't want to use it for their main rig, but are interested in the idea of a home music server like a Squeezebox, Olive, etc., I suggest ripping your music to flac with Exact Audio Copy (best quality for use with home music server), then use Foobar or some other program to transcode the flac files to mp3 for the portable player. Yeah, you will have the same library in flac and mp3, but storage is cheap.

If your collection is around 500 CDs or less, I can think of one scenario where you could just rip to Apple lossless for a music server, with no need to transcode to a lossy format for the portable player. This would be the case if you owned the iPod Classic 160 gig. It would hold around 500 CDs in Apple lossless, which could then be used with the Wadia/DAC directly, or the lossless files could be used with a Squeezebox.

On a different topic - Zunes require special software too. It's not too bad or clunky, but I would prefer no software interface - just a drag and drop removable hard drive scenario, the way Sansas operate.