Let's kick an audio tech post off with something interesting for once, shall we?

Clawfinger has signed with Nuclear Blast, which means their freshly recorded and mixed album will be released - hopefully soon! I've heard bits of the album - at least from what I can remember after a night of gin 'n' tonic and imported beers at Zak's palace - and it sounded good. For the first time the band aren't using programmed drums, a fact that shook me up as I thought all their drums were recorded live, and they've got a refrain in falsetto choir, going "find the faggot in youuu". That should be enough to make you actually purchase the damn thing when it's released.

Now on to the goods: I'm thinking about retiring my iPod 3G 20GB audio player. There's nothing wrong with it, so why will I switch? First thing: I prefer audio formats that allow me to hear the big picture. I've been riding the MP3 wave for so long, that when I first heard about Ogg Vorbis, I thought it wasn't true. Whaddya mean smaller files but better, audible quality? To answer that question thoroughly, head on to the Ogg Vorbis FAQ and read your heart out. A lot of games use it, and it's now supported by a variety of hardware audio-players. I'd just like to say I did a little quality test of my own about a year ago, where I encoded two versions of Electronic's "For You" (off the album "Raise The Pressure"), one in the MP3 format (using the then latest LAME codec: joined stereo, VBR0 settings with 32Kbps minimum and 320Kbps maximum) and one in the Ogg Vorbis format (using the then latest Ogg Vorbis codec: joined stereo, 4.99 quality and VBR). I then loaded the two tracks in my fave audio-player, set it to random and pressed play on tape. Ten listens out of ten I could hear the difference, and Ogg Vorbis won every time when it came to audio quality. And yes, the Ogg Vorbis files turned out smaller than the MP3's.

See, MP3 is a compressed format. Ogg Vorbis is, too. So what's the difference? It all breaks down to the encoding. I believe the main reason that most people haven't demanded that the suppliers of audio hardware start supporting Ogg Vorbis (and the likes) are three: 1) MP3 is the "lingua franca", so why should there be other formats?, 2) most hardware audio-players don't support anything other than MP3, WMA and WAV and 3) people in general don't care; remember how long it took for most people to get that 128Kbps MP3 was crap and it was time to set (at least) 192Kbps as the minimum requirement?

There are other ways of making people work, though, as there are better audio formats than MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

FLAC has been around for a while now. It's a free, lossless audio codec which today is getting support from more and more suppliers of hardware audio-players. From the first page on the FLAC site:

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio

I love FLAC. Audio files sounding like they do on the actual source I've encoded them from? Perfect! So, what's the catch? There is but one, really, which is, I firmly believe, going to vanish over time as storage facilities turn cheaper by the month: the FLAC-encoded files are quite big. They're not as big as uncompressed WAV-files (which are raw audio input files, encoded correctly) as FLAC is a format which peels away the audio frequencies humans are unable to hear during the encoding process, thus rendering audio the way it's supposed to be heard.

Today my iPod 20GB MP3-player is filled with many albums, and I don't have any really nagging problems with it, other than its habit of turning itself off at times plus the very varied amounts of time it takes to drain a fully charged battery, so what's the catch, why switch to another player? Simply put: today, I cannot hear an album the way it's meant to be heard, while moving.

As I mostly listen to music while on foot, I need a gizmo that can play Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and MP3's. I've scoured the web for a solution, and have come up with a few choices, listed in no particular order:

1. Rio Karma 20GB 2. Cowon iAUDIO X5 20GB 3. Apple iPod 60GB

A picture that shows the above products in a size-comparison is available at the bottom of this page.

Rio Karma 20GB

It's very small, can play MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, provides very good audio quality and sports a docking unit with a network interface letting the user hand the Rio an IP-address, so that it can be used as a streaming audio server plus you're handed a java interface for handling the music. Everything on the player is dealt with using a scroll-wheel and you can created and edit playlists on the fly. A USB 2.0 interface means quick file-transfers, and built-in RCA plugs on the docking unit is very nice. Battery time is appx.

So what are the bad things about it? CNet writes of "hard drive problems" that several users have encountered after "several months of use". They also dislike its missing a remote control and carrying case, but that's not a problem of mine. Their complete review is found here. Another site that has reviewed the Karma states that it's made of "questionable build quality" and contains moving parts, which really isn't good - those are speculations, however, as the site didn't find anything broken with the machine. Their review is found here.

Cowon iAUDIO X5 20GB

It seems the device has a strong following, strong enough to make this fan-site work anyway. It seems they've asked Cowon to include FLAC-support, and so they did. They've also got a new audio-player in the works, called iAUDIO A2.

Apple iPod 60GB

The oldie, yet in new shape. History: I've owned two different iPods, the 2G 30GB and the 3G 20GB, the latter of which is my present player of choice. I've come to love the crisp quality of sound, but then again...isn't that crispness lost with the compression of the MP3 no matter how high the Kbps-rate is? You're damn right if you think yea. The new iPods all come with colour displays, more battery power and can display photos. It's got a lot of space available, which is nice if you compare prices with most other players. Apple (and other suppliers) provide a bunch of accessories, but as the gizmo cannot play much more than MP3's, WAV's and the Apple lossless format, I'm thinking of leaving the iPod.

Conclusion:

I think I'll go with the Rio Karma 20GB. It's got enough space, battery-power and formats to last me a while. Plus the freak in me thinks that ethernet connection is sweet. Anyway, we'll see; I haven't bought anything yet and I have definitely not made up my mind, especially since a new lens has come in my sights.

I've even got my eyes set on new head-phones, or maybe just great plugs. I'll see what happens. I know myself good enough to know I'd make my current Sony head-phones last a couple of more years.