I have an older SanDisk Sansa model (e260), which plays FLAC after reflashing the firmware with Rockbox (www.rockbox.org). This is something that SanDisk actually supports, unlike many manufacturers. I have been happy with it, and I suspect the Sansa Clip is as good or better. Rockbox works on a lot of players, so even if a player you like doesn't support FLAC or Ogg out of the box, it may be possible to reflash the firmware with Rockbox.
If you plan to load your portable with FLAC you may want to consider a hard drive based player instead of a flash player. If you get an 8GB Sansa Clip and add an 8GB SDHC card (8GB being the current sweetspot for price/capacity of micro-SDHC cards), that's 16GB, or about 40-50 CDs. That may be fine for you, but you may find it limiting, and get tired of not having that CD you want to listen to just then. Or tired of swapping files on and off the device. Of course, carrying multiple SDHC cards and swapping them in and out is another possibility. That said, if you go for a hard drive player the battery usually runs down a lot faster with FLAC than with MP3. Whether it is more constant drive access or more CPU cycles to decode I don't know, but that's what I've generally seen reported. Personally I don't imagine I'd ever put FLACs on a portable player because I doubt I could tell the difference between lossless and high bitrate MP3 in a noisy environment like a plane, train, etc. If you want to have a chance of hearing the difference definitely get some good noise isolation earphones like the ER4. -- aubuti ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=73717 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
