[Flac] Efficiency

[Christopher Brown]

Hi Mark,

MR> Speaking of audio devices that support FLAC, your TS-101 doesn't
MR> need to transcode, since starting with v2, the Squeezebox can
MR> decode FLAC internally.

Thanks for this clarification. This is related to one of the reasons for 
my switch. As I understand it, ape files are transcoded to flac 
on-the-fly (on the server), which is then sent to the squeezebox for 
decoding. This means first decode from ape, then encode to flac, only to 
be decoded again by the device. So, one of the reasons I had for 
switching to flac was to avoid this needless server-side overhead. But 
with respect to the laptop, I was hoping for a further benefit in 
increased decoding efficiency, which I suspected (hoped?) based on my 
highly scientific tests (listening for the laptop fan), and which was 
confirmed by the link that Gregory provided. flac was a win-win.

-- 
Chris