Firmware roadmap: FLAC / OGG support?

@gnomon wrote:

  • SanDisk’s support for the RockBox project, although not exactly overwhelming, still eclipses that of almost other major manufacturer;

Not exactly overwhelming? Try virutally NON-EXISTENT! While the team at Rockbox cracked the code for the v1 units and many, many people are happily using this ‘alternative’ firmware, the ONLY help or support for the v2’s that SanDisk gave the Rockbox team was 2 free players! No code, no specs, no diagrams, no nothing!

And thanks to SanDisk for programming (or not programming) in _ NO RECOVERY MODE _ on the v2 units, it is likely that we may NEVER see Rockbox on these units (that includes the FUZE & CLIP as well)! That is (now and has been for several months) the ‘brick wall’ that the Rockbox developers have run into. They need a recovery mode to restore the player after they test code on it that doesn’t work.

You would think that with the success of Rockbox on the v1 units, and the repeated pleadings from many owners that SanDisk would at least “throw them a bone”. Nary a scrap! Frankly, I’m 'under-whelmed’ by this attitude. :cry:

That’s a great shame. I didn’t equate the Sansa Fuze with the v2 Sandisk players that are on the Rockbox site and currently not working. If I had known that there was little possibility of Rockbox running on the Sansa I wouldn’t have just bought one. I hope Sandisk you change your mind and help these guys out, they’re helping your marketshare.

The recovery mode of the v1 is a necessary function for the PortalPlayer / NVIDIA processor.  The new family (Fuze / Clip / v2) use a different processor, the AustriaMicrosystems device.  Recovery mode isn’t necessary with the new platform.

The v2 devices are far more stable (just look at the multitude of I2C rom failures), and aren’t vulnerable to accidental formatting of the reserved partition.

I wouldn’t say that SanDisk conspired to make porting Rockbox over more difficult.  They have opted for a superior chipset, with increased capabilities and sound quality.  Anyone who’s listened to a v1 knows that these products are in no means a “slacker”, in fact, they’re a wonderful machine.  Being able to customize them via Rockbox is a welcome option. 

The OGG Vorbis addition to the Clip hasn’t been entirely without glitches.  Filename issues have been found as a bug, and no doubt will be resolved.  Let the issues shake out a wee bit, and the improved code will be quite useful for the Fuze.  Running the same processor, it’s possible to try new things on different devices.  I’m sure the Fuze version will be an improvement, even if the differences are subtle.

There are several overlapping issues with the new Fuze firmware that take time to iron out.  Remember, compared against even the new v2 device, the initial code for the Fuze is superb, doing most tasks better.  It’s kind of an ironic twist that the wraparound scroll of the v2, and its rate, were left out.  The logic for the scroll wheels is different between the two.

I’m enjoying the Fuze as it is, and patiently await the next firmware.  Regardless of the quirks, it’s all about how well the wee machine drives those earbuds.  I’d better get 'em back on.

Bob  :stuck_out_tongue:

@tapeworm wrote:


@gnomon wrote:

  • SanDisk’s support for the RockBox project, although not exactly overwhelming, still eclipses that of almost other major manufacturer;

Not exactly overwhelming? Try virutally NON-EXISTENT! While the team at Rockbox cracked the code for the v1 units and many, many people are happily using this ‘alternative’ firmware, the ONLY help or support for the v2’s that SanDisk gave the Rockbox team was 2 free players! No code, no specs, no diagrams, no nothing!

And thanks to SanDisk for programming (or not programming) in _ NO RECOVERY MODE _ on the v2 units, it is likely that we may NEVER see Rockbox on these units (that includes the FUZE & CLIP as well)! That is (now and has been for several months) the ‘brick wall’ that the Rockbox developers have run into. They need a recovery mode to restore the player after they test code on it that doesn’t work.

There is a significant amount of error recovery code in the staged bootloader of v2 units; it must just be used cautiously. Rockbox developers are making significant progress on v2 units at this very moment. That’s not to say that developers aren’t still being slowed down by accidental brickings, but they do now have methods to avoid that outcome. Keep in mind, too, that at the lowest levels of the bootloader chain, SanDisk may have to bend to the specifics of the AustriaMicrosystems design.

@tapeworm wrote:

You would think that with the success of Rockbox on the v1 units, and the repeated pleadings from many owners that SanDisk would at least “throw them a bone”. Nary a scrap! Frankly, I’m 'under-whelmed’ by this attitude. :cry:

If you disapprove of SanDisk’s stance on Rockbox support, you may perhaps be more encouraged by the position and the actions of the chipset manufacturer.

The situation is not nearly as dire as you make it out to be: Rockbox developers may not be sitting at the head of the high table, but they’re getting more than scraps.

That said, I am as enthusiastic about Rockbox as I am about the official firmware, though for different reasons: the former will be an excellent resource after this line reaches its end of life, while the latter should be able to leverage hardware knowledge that the chipset provider may not be at liberty to release (power management code in particular).

It became true!

Well, finally we DO have FLAC and OGG support in firmware version 01.01.15. For me these are very good news. And let me say to Sandisk:

  • Great work!: Because they listened to the community (I guess…) and added what people asked for. Well done Sandisk!!!
  • Improve communication, please: Did they really listened the community? Did they read the forums? In fact we hadn’t *any* official word in this thread or any official announce about these so discussed features. I heard Sandisk usually do things this way: they don’t announce any new feature until the firmware is released, but why? Sandisk should be more communicative, just posting in the forums would be a great improvement in the relation with customers.

Anyway: with this new firmware my Fuze is twice as cool as last week :slight_smile:

I see there are some new bugs to be solved (for instance I see new firmware can’t read my FLAC tags), but sure this will be fixed soon.

* BIG *   THANKS,   SANDISK

Just got my Fuze. I performed firmware update to latest rev VO1.01.15 A.

My whole WMP 11 Library is WAV Format.

The Fuze Docs. states it supports WAV Audio Files. Well Not Exactly!

I Ripped all tracks/songs using WMP 11 WAV/Lossless Setting w/ default sample bit rate 1411.2.

I Synched a bunch of encoded WAV Tunes to the Player. All were recognized, but only some played. Others would just skip over Song and go to the next. I tried an erase and re-download of the same files and obtained the same result, No Joy!!!

I then re-encoded the same problematic WAV Songs to WMA and/or MP3 at various bit-rates/samples and ALL were recognized and played fine.

Some WAV Files play, others don’t. Go Figure!!!

Any Clues?

Thanks!

@h14268

I believe there are now ways to put ID tag info into WAV files, but…

There’s no sense in keeping WAV files on a digital audio player.  Those are “lossless” files, meaning the original CD can be recreated; FLAC files have those some features, are half the size, and are readily taggged internally with ID info.  The FUZE needs those tags to find the files and show you their titles, artists, genre, etc. so you can play them.

Ogg Vorbis -encoded files at quality q7~8 have been shown in numerous tests to be indistinguishable from lossless, even though they are “lossy”  – the original CD files cannot be recreated.

To the main topic of Sandisk providing FLAC/Ogg support:

I’ve had my Fuze for only four days and I bought it largely because of Ogg support.  I  believe the decoder software for *.ogg’s is exceptionally good, because I have a wide range of files at high and low bit-rates with sampling rates down to 22khz and very old codecs (pre-release, even) for Xiph; everything plays well – Rockbox is no better.

It has to be difficult for a company to concede control of how their product is used to independent, Open Source hackers.  After all, keeping DAPs closed and used merely as a conduit to the company music store is the business model for the most successful music players. Unsurprising, then, that competitors like Sandisk hoped to collect continuing revenue similarly.  Certainly, they’re not getting that revenue for Ogg and FLAC files on FUZE players.

I say that Sandisk and their coders should be given credit (and thanks!)  for doing something that’s simply nice for their customers, even though economic benefits to them are uncertain.

Thank-You :slight_smile:

SansaFix 

@fluxam wrote:

To the main topic of Sandisk providing FLAC/Ogg support:

<<snip>>

I say that Sandisk and their coders should be given credit (and thanks!)  for doing something that’s simply nice for their customers, even though economic benefits to them are uncertain.

Totally agree. It is good to see a manufacturer being responsive to the requests of its customers :slight_smile:

OTOH, they don’t have to pay licence fees to Fraunhoffer for Ogg/FLAC decoders…

“There’s no sense in keeping WAV files on a digital audio player.”

I would  agree to a point, however,  Sandsik published the specs for supporting this and the Player should perform to that published spec as advertised.

Does anyone know of/use a converter on the fly to convert these Wav’s to a supported format. I am not going to re-rip my whole Library.

Thanks!

@hl4268 wrote:

Does anyone know of/use a converter on the fly to convert these Wav’s to a supported format. I am not going to re-rip my whole Library.

Thanks!

MediaCoder

I am new here and to the Player.

Thanks Much for the Mediacoder suggestion. Look very nice!

Just need to figure out how to use it for my needs…

I want to keep my CD WAV Files archived on my Drive, then transcode and Synch those tunes I would like to download to the Sansa Fuze.

Are you guys using FLAC for Songs on the Sansa?

@hl4268:

I favor foobar2000 for transcoding and MP3tag for tag editing.

The point in archiving to FLAC (or Wavpack – increasingly popular) is that one puts tag info in the files just one time.

Any time one transcodes to another – presumably smaller, lossy – format for playing in a DAP, the tag info will be preserved. I use the same username in the FUZE subsection of the AnythingbutIpod forums and you’ll see some instructions I offered there.

Big, outboard hard drives are ever cheaper and that’s where to save the lossless files.

Most scientifically conducted blind listening tests have shown OggVorbis as the highest fidelity codec for bit rates 128kbps and above. Q5 Ogg Vorbis is higher fi than an $0.99 iTunes store m4a file.

@hl4268 wrote:

I am new here and to the Player.

 

Thanks Much for the Mediacoder suggestion. Look very nice!

 

Just need to figure out how to use it for my needs…

 

I want to keep my CD WAV Files archived on my Drive, then transcode and Synch those tunes I would like to download to the Sansa Fuze.

 

Are you guys using FLAC for Songs on the Sansa?

Winamp can take care of both the conversion and syncing tasks.  You can use it to convert your WAVs to FLAC and then sync the FLACs to the Fuze.  It can also convert the FLACs to mp3/Ogg on the fly when syncing (if you want to fit more files on the player).  This is what I do.  My library is in FLAC and I use Winamp to sync and automatically transcode to mp3 for portable use (might switch to Ogg now that it’s supported).

You are also going to need something to tag the FLAC files once you’ve converted your WAVs.  Tools like MP3Tag and Tag&Rename are able to automatically generate tags based on the file name (assuming you’ve used a consistent naming convention).

Like fluxam said, FLAC is a much better choice than WAV for archiving.  It’s lossless just like WAV, but about 65% of the size and it supports tags.

Once you’ve got everything converted to FLAC, you can get rid of your WAVs and just start ripping straight to FLAC.  This is also very simple with Winamp.  Or if you’re really interested in bit-perfect ripping, you should look into dbPowerAmp or EAC (my personal choice).

Thanks for all the info. Pardon my ignorance, but I have a couple of more questions:

  1. My Naming conventions used, are the ones directly off/from the Original Master Cd’s. Tags are built into almost of these (a few exceptions) as they do correctly display all CD info and Jacket/Album art. Is this what you mean by tags? if so, they already have the Tags encoded, so If I convert I will have to Re-tag using one of the apps that have been recommended here?

  2. If I convert all Archived WAV’s to FLAC Encoding, will this convesrsion still permit correct play on any Legacy type players, i.e. Car, Home CD Changers etc. etc?

Thanks to all for the help/info.

Much appreciated!

@hl4268 wrote:

Thanks for all the info. Pardon my ignorance, but I have a couple of more questions:

 

  1. My Naming conventions used, are the ones directly off/from the Original Master Cd’s. Tags are built into almost of these (a few exceptions) as they do correctly display all CD info and Jacket/Album art. Is this what you mean by tags? if so, they already have the Tags encoded, so If I convert I will have to Re-tag using one of the apps that have been recommended here?

 

  1. If I convert all Archived WAV’s to FLAC Encoding, will this convesrsion still permit correct play on any Legacy type players, i.e. Car, Home CD Changers etc. etc?

 

Thanks to all for the help/info.

 

Much appreciated!

 

 

  1. There is no industry standard way of tagging WAV files.  I’ve heard of some high end audio editors with proprietary tagging methods, but no standard media players support tagged wavs.

I’m guessing that when you ripped the CD to wavs using WMP, it looked up the CD info on the internet and saved it to it’s own internal database  Then, whenever you play one of those wavs, it looks up the file name in it’s internal database to find the song info for display.  It’s not reading the info from the wav files themselves.  You’ll have to use Window Explorer to see the the actual file names on your hard drive.

So you will need a tagging tool that can auto tag FLAC files from the file names.  For example, say your files are named something like:

SomeArtist - SomeAlbum - 01. SomeSong.wav

Then you can setup a template in the tagging tool to tell it how your file names are structured.  Something like:

<Artist> - <Album> - <Track>.<Title>

Using the template, it will be able to parse the different pieces of the file name and create the appropriate tags automatically.  Your naming convention is probably different, but you should get the idea.

2.  Legacy players wouldn’t know how to play WAV, FLAC or any other file types for that matter, they only know CD-DA.  I presume in this case you are burning an audio CD from your WAV files?  In which case, yes, you can do the same thing with FLAC files.  Winamp will burn audio CDs from FLAC files very easilly.

Thanks and Understand!

Yes, the files were Ripped using WMP 11 and sometimes Ripped and burned using Roxio Media Creator. The lookups were performed using Microsoft’s DB Service and Roxio uses Gracenote. Yes, I was then Burning selected files to create favorites/compilation CD’s. Now that I have the Sansa Fuze I will most likely  have a reduced need for that process in the future as I will use the Sansa.

Now I just need to see which apps will best work for me. I am relatively happy with WMp 11, but I will take a strong look at Winamp and the other encoder and tagging apps so that I can re-archive my files in a different space-saving, loss less format and to use with the Sansa.

Again, I am new to the Sansa Player so all this info helps put everything into perspective.

Thanks Much!

MediaMonkey works well too:smiley:

I have used FLAC on the Fuze, and it works fine, but it’s not really practical…the files are still big, albeit smaller than WAV. FLAC’s a better solution to archiving than WAV, IMHO, and MediaMonkey can transcode it to MP3, WMA, OGG Vorbis to use on your portable player. Unless you have exceptional headphones or a phenomenal home stereo, you won’t hear the difference between FLAC and these other transcodes, depending on the bitrates you use. :smiley: