Hi-Fi away from home

One solution would be an Android tablet. Unlike Apple devices they nearly all have provision for SD cards to expand the memory so you could carry multiple TB in a matchbox. 

I use a Lenovo Yoga 3 which has close to 20 hours battery life and does everything I want at less than half the price of a comparable Apple device.

I use my mobile Samsung with SD card then download HiRes FLAC or Tidal and Deezer for use in the car and headphones or portable Bluetooth speaker. 

So I end up with a seamless listening experience from Nova to car to headphones.

I haven’t founf a single solution that works consistently in all areas, home, car and portable, so I treat them all separately.

For the car, unless things have moved on recently, the only devices that work with the BMW USB input are Apple, but what I use instead is a USB stick full of WAVs. Metadata is limited to track, album and artist, but to me that is all that’s required to choose an album and play it. I use WAVs as I find compressed music pretty poor, even in the car, and FLAC is not supported.

Portable use for me means headphones, and for this I use a Sony player. It also works well over Bluetooth into a little portable speaker I occasionally use when camping, etc. If you use FLAC, it’s worth trying it with maximum compression applied, as this is still lossless, and reduces file size. 

Paul, your iPod should be fine playing gapless - does it only affect MP3s? What about ALAC?

On another thread somebody mentioned a company (ipodrepairs) who can upgrade the old iPod video 5g to take much larger capacity SSD drives, so 1tb and apple iPod functionality are possible. And with the 5g iPod at least you get the best sounding Pod of all.

I’m tempted to do this as I use my iPod for the car but as the battery and drive on my 80gb are still so healthy I may have to get hold of a dead pod and have it rebuilt.

All, thanks for the suggestions so far

Re. the tablet and SD cards, this would require breaking up my music into blocks, which is not what I want.  Most tablets only support 128GB SD plus the 32GB internal, which gets be back to 160GB. There are one or two that support 256 GB SD and that seems as big as SD goes at this time, maybe in a year or two 1TB will be available and supported by the tablets?

I am not hard over on FLAC out of the home, any decent compression would be OK, I use dBpoweramp Batch Converter to copy my entire library to mp3 at the moment as it gave me the necessary data size compression.

Richard, the main problem with mp3, and possibly all other lossy compressions is that (as I understand it) the track is divided into a number of minor frames of fixed size for the compression to take place.  This means that the final frame of the track is larger than the music to fill it and therefor the mp3 process adds silence to pad the frame out.  This has two effects, one is a brief period of silence, OK if it was the end of the movement or a very quiet point but not if at a point where the playing is full on, hence my term of "anticlick".  The second is a time delay between beats.  So it is a bit like the stylus hitting a bit of grit on a record to cause the click but so hard that the record slips on the platter!

As the dead patches are each of different length mid movement but always in the same spot, it can be quite annoying.

I have considered trying to glue all the tracks that make up a single movement back together and then compressing, that might work.  It would probably be quicker however to wait a year or two for technology to catch up.

I'll try ALAC and see (listen) to what that does.

Thanks again all, Paul.

Paul, I've never noticed any glitching on gapless playback - then again on my iPod I've always used ALAC.  The advantage of ALAC is of course that it's of a much higher quality than MP3 or AAC, but if you had your iPod "enhanced" with say either an msata SSD or one of those cards that replaces the old hard drive with a board holding up to four micro SD slots, then storage is no longer too much of an issue.  It would be smart to upgrade the battery at the same time.  With the lower power consumption of solid state memory and much higher battery capacities out there, the potential for a great sounding, high capacity iPod with a long battery life is very much a possibility.

Hi Richard,

I have had a look at "ipodrepairs" and I think you have hit the nail on the head!

I'll have a trial of ALAC to see if it would fit within 512GB, if so I will give them a ring Monday.

Thanks, Paul.

Depending how much are you ready to spend...

micro sd cards are getting bigger, you can buy one of 400gb, you can buy many with 128gb and use them all

you can buy a top dat wich got 256gb internal memory such as Sony WM1Z or AK SP1000, this are very good players ( you can even connect an hard tribe to sp1000)

or you can buy a simpler dap ( digital audio player ) with 2 micro Sd slot such as Fiio x5 mkiii

A decent dap loaded with flacs and a good İem is very good music everywhere 

Let go the iPod....rest in peace

I used iPodrepairs for a damaged screen and their service was excellent and very prompt.  Very likely to look to increase capacity on my Classic with 120GB at present.

Bryce Curdy posted:

I used iPodrepairs for a damaged screen and their service was excellent and very prompt.  Very likely to look to increase capacity on my Classic with 120GB at present.

You may find you are out of luck ... the "Classic" (excepting the final 160GB "slim") models are limited to 128GB.  You can get around this by using the RockBox OS rather than Apple's original iPod OS - but then you loose the ability to control the iPod with car radio controls.

The earlier 5th Gen "iPod with Video" models are the best to upgrade with an SSD - ideally the ones which started with 60GB or 80GB as the smaller ones are limited to ~20k tracks vs 50k tracks in the larger ones.

(I've not done any "hacking" on my iPod but this is information I've found out in the past).

At present max capacity of micro SD card is 400GB, so not quite enough and you'd need to split onto 2 cards - however mabe in another year or two they'll exceed your 500GB and fit the bill. Then one option for high quality playback could be Chord Poly + Mojo: bigger, heavier and less battery life than iPod, but rather a different league in terms of sound quality (received wisdom - I haven't heard personally). 

You could always remote stream from your QNAP to wherever you are.

Only if you have internet access whenever you want to listen - and then subject to the limitations of online streaming, though at least not competing for server bandwidth with all other users.

Eloise posted:

Bryce Curdy posted:

I used iPodrepairs for a damaged screen and their service was excellent and very prompt.  Very likely to look to increase capacity on my Classic with 120GB at present.

You may find you are out of luck ... the "Classic" (excepting the final 160GB "slim") models are limited to 128GB.  You can get around this by using the RockBox OS rather than Apple's original iPod OS - but then you loose the ability to control the iPod with car radio controls.

The earlier 5th Gen "iPod with Video" models are the best to upgrade with an SSD - ideally the ones which started with 60GB or 80GB as the smaller ones are limited to ~20k tracks vs 50k tracks in the larger ones.

(I've not done any "hacking" on my iPod but this is information I've found out in the past).

Not sure that's entirely correct, perhaps now out of date.  Their website does state that for 160, 256 and 512GB updates you also need to buy a 7th Gen logic board (except if upgrading from 7th Gen 160GB).  No reference to RockBox OS or loss of car functionality (which would be a deal breaker for me) on the website.  Might phone them tomorrow and enquire.

Bryce Curdy posted:

Not sure that's entirely correct, perhaps now out of date.  Their website does state that for 160, 256 and 512GB updates you also need to buy a 7th Gen logic board (except if upgrading from 7th Gen 160GB).  No reference to RockBox OS or loss of car functionality (which would be a deal breaker for me) on the website.  Might phone them tomorrow and enquire.

So to be pedantic, my information wasn’t incorrect (the 6G “Classic” don’t support >128GB... but they do offer a solution in a new logic board (essentially making it into a 7th Gen).

Hi Guys,

This seems to have triggered some interest,

I started by converting a batch of FLAC files (some red book, some Hi-Res) into ALAC the compression seems very similar (~+1.5%) and they sound fine to me.

I contacted ipodrepairs this morning, they were very helpful and said they do about 3 a day.  My ipod is 7th Gen, so have gone for 512GB upgrade and a new battery, total cost of £269 including return, the unit is now in the post!

It will now take me about 24 hours to make a full ALAC copy of my music, by which time it should be on the way back.

I'll post again when I have it up and running.

Paul.

Paul Ca posted:

I contacted ipodrepairs this morning, they were very helpful and said they do about 3 a day.  My ipod is 7th Gen, so have gone for 512GB upgrade and a new battery, total cost of £269 including return, the unit is now in the post!

That’s a pretty good price considering the cost of 512GB SDXC (or a 512GB mSATA).  I doubt you could buy the required parts for much less.

The IPod Classic 512GB is now up and running - sounds perfect, no "anticlicks"

I had my IPod back from ipodrepairs within 48 hours of posting it, all done very efficiently.

There was one issue that needed attention and it concerned the Hi-Res music, converted to ALAC, the IPod would only output it at about 44.1kHz.  I half expected that this might happen using the internal ADC and the headphones but was surprised that it also happened over the USB.

To see if there was an IPod setting that I could make to address this, I contacted ipodrepairs for assistance and I was told: A) there is no such selection on the IPod and B) no one had ever asked that question before!

Still no problem, I used dBpoweramp Batch Converter to change all my Hi-Res to 16bit 44.1kHz. (ALAC) for the IPod, everything now working perfectly and I have more growth capacity than with Hi-Res.

An added benefit of having a duplicate copy of all my music but at CD quality is that I can put this on a separate NAS (or a separate instance of minimserve on my QNAP).  This will then be used as the main source for my Mu-so and Mu-so Qb that I always run together in "multiroom".  That way I will get around the problem of trying to remember what is/isn't Hi-Res.

Hope the above helps and my thanks to Richard for pointing me in the right direction.

Paul.

Thanks for the update Paul.  Sounds like it has all worked out well for you - great news!