You could put the files in the audiobooks or podcasts folder. I wonder what would happen if they are placed in the folder for FM recordings or voice recordings. The player expects to find WAV files there, however the bitrate and sample rate expected are different than what you use. You could try it though. The only other idea is to get a different brand of player that supports browsing by folders.
Ah, that’s easy! (Quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
All you need to do is place the .wav file in the Voice subfolder within the Record folder. The file can be named as you desire. Make a sample recording with your Fuze. It will be named as: 092708-165350 if I were to start a recording presently.
Plug in your Fuze, and open a Windows Exploder window. You will see the test file stored in Record > Voice. (These files are not tagged per se, as the MP3 files are.)
It is easy enough to put WAV files in the FM recording or voice recording folder, but if they are at a different bitrate than the player records to, will they play properly from there? Have you tried it? I don’t have any WAV files on my pc to test this.
PS. I extracted some WAV files from a CD. I had a feeling WAV files at a different bitrate than the player expects wouldn’t play from the FM recording or voice recording areas. They don’t play. It was worth a try though. I tried placing WAV files in the audiobook and podcast folders. They weren’t even accesible on the player. I guess the Fuze really doesn’t support WAV files in general. I was curious about this so I thought it was worth some experimentation. Most mp3 players don’t support wav files, but some higher end ones that browse by folders probably do.
Well Fuze does support and play WAV at 44100K i tried the audiobook and podcast folder, it plays WAV´s but you can´t do a playlist inside there.
Within the music folder you can playback but you can´t do a playlist or tag the wav files even it´s posssible with some tools out there like “stamp”, but fuze doesn´t support WAV Tagging.
So you have to make sure you tagged all your mp3 files so that the only unknown files are your WAV´s you wanna play!
Thats my workaround atm.
And btw you can´t playback WAV from the FM Folder cause Fuze want these files in a specific bitrate.( hmm i didn´t tried the voice folder yet, but i think it will be the same cause it´s also a recording with lowered bitrate)
I would apreciate a Xplorer MODE along with some extended playback modes like playin files ones
Message Edited by musician242 on 09-27-2008 07:24 PM
The best solution will hopefully come in the next firmware, when FLAC is added. In case you’re not aware, FLAC is a lossless audio compression codec. It typically compresses to about 65% the size of the original wave without losing any information. When decompressed, it’s identical to the original wav. Also, it allows full tagging support.
Supposedly, the new FW will be out in the next week or two.
I don’t see the point of FLAC. Converting files just to save 35% in space doesn’t seem very productive. As for sound quality, most people can’t tell the difference between a 256 kbps mp3 file and the WAV file when using a portable player. I guess he doesn’t object to the sound quality of higher bitrate mp3 files, but might want to transport WAV files from one pc to another, or else to listen to them on the player but avoid going through the step of converting the WAV files to mp3. While FLAC may be said to be able to produce a WAV file exactly identical to the one that produced it, those doing serious work don’t want to risk it just to save 35% in space. The time used to convert files and reconvert them to WAV is also a factor.
@jk98 wrote:
I don’t see the point of FLAC. Converting files just to save 35% in space doesn’t seem very productive. As for sound quality, most people can’t tell the difference between a 256 kbps mp3 file and the WAV file when using a portable player. I guess he doesn’t object to the sound quality of higher bitrate mp3 files, but might want to transport WAV files from one pc to another, or else to listen to them on the player but avoid going through the step of converting the WAV files to mp3. While FLAC may be said to be able to produce a WAV file exactly identical to the one that produced it, those doing serious work don’t want to risk it just to save 35% in space. The time used to convert files and reconvert them to WAV is also a factor.
There are many reasons to prefer FLAC over Wav and high bitrate MP3:
FLAC is smaller than Wav. May not be a big difference when you’re talking about an 8GB player, but when you’ve ripped 3000 CDs (as I have) it adds up to a lot of space (300-400GB).
You can’t tag wav files, making them impractical for use with pretty much any kind of music library software or portable player.
Assuming you got a bit-perfect rip (EAC/dbPoweramp), you can perfectly recreate the original CD from FLAC files. You can’t do that with any lossless format.
If you only have lossy files, you can’t transcode to another codec/bitrate without significant additional loss. From my FLAC files I can transcode to as many different formats as I like and change my mind as often as I like. With lossy files you’re pretty much stuck with whatever format you originally chose.
Storage always gets bigger and cheaper. In a few years when we have affordable 250GB flash players, many people who ripped all their CDs to a lossy format might regret that choice.
FLAC is computationally very simple to decode. It takes less CPU than most lossy formats and less disk access than a wav.
Not sure what you mean by “While FLAC may be said to be able to produce a WAV file exactly identical to the one that produced it, those doing serious work don’t want to risk it just to save 35% in space”. I would consider archiving 3000 CDs serious work. And what do you mean by “risk it”? Are you suggesting that FLAC isn’t lossless?
Sonar, SoundForge, Audacity and others all support FLAC import/export. Ableton Live actually allows you to directly work with FLAC without import/export. Same goes for Traktor. I would say some “serious” works gets done in those apps.
Now, whether FLAC is really ideal for a 8GB flash player is debatable. Even after FLAC support is added to the Fuze, I’ll still probably transcode to MP3 for space reasons. But you were asking about “the point” of FLAC, of which there are many. A given person may or may not care about those points, but that doesn’t make them any less valid.
