[Flac] flac files

[Mark Rudholm]

I think the confusion stems partly from the ambiguity of
the term "audio disc".

Strictly speaking, an "audio disc" would be a Red Book
CD-DA disc, which uses a specific format for coding audio.
These are the discs that you can buy at the music store
and that any music CD player can play.  These discs have
music in straight linear PCM only.

On the other hand, a "data disc" or, "CD-ROM" (Yellow Book)
contains a proper filesystem and can hold any data you put
on it.  The coding scheme is different from Red Book discs
(the practical difference being lower data capacity due to
more forward error correction).  A CD-R onto which you back
up your computer files would be an example of a "CD-ROM". Of
course, you can put files on these discs that contain sound.

The confusion starts because some devices (car stereos,
portable CD players, home theater DVD/CD players) can actually
read CD-ROM discs and can play the files on them that they
identify as formats they can decode.

So I think what you are looking for is a portable player
that can play CD-ROMs with FLAC files on them.  I would
avoid calling these "audio discs" as that's almost sure
to cause confusion.

Now that that's hopefully clear, my question would be
"why do you want to do this?"  Since CD-ROM discs aren't
very capacious and FLAC tends to yield only about a 2:1
compression ratio, it only halves the number of discs you'd
have to carry around.  Players with internal disk or flash
memory can hold data equivalent to up to 100 CD-ROMs and
are far smaller than any CD player.

Richard wrote:
> um, portable cd player, that you can burn a audio disk,
> cd-r to play music, was wondering if there where any native cd players,
> that can read and decode .flac files... 
> 
> Rich
> 
> On Sunday 12 November 2006 5:00 pm, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
>>> are there any portable cd players, that can read .flac files...?
>> Well, I don't know about cd players, but my iAudio plays flac files fine,
>> and rockbox apparently works well.
>> Do you mean data cds with flac files on them, as opposed to audio cds?
>>
>> Nicholas.