[fwinston]

I have a Modwright Tranporter on order and thought I'd get a head start by ripping my CD collection to hard drive before its arrival.  For music browsing/selection for play I'd like to use a device with a graphical interface such as an iTouch. 

Question is, which music file format to use?  Does using an iTouch for browing a music library and selecting the music to be played require the files to be in a format such as AIFF or WAV?  Will it work with files in FLAC format and still show me CD cover art?

Any advice on which controller and what music file formats I should consider using is appreciated.

Thanks.

[CharleyW]

Not sure about the iTouch angle, but, format-wise, the answer is definetly FLAC.

You might want to ask this question on the forums at http://www.slimdevices.com .

[ted_b]

The Itouch app, called iPeng ($10 on iTunes app store) is format-agnostic (i.e it doesn't care).  But FLAC is a good choice, especially if you want to save some disc space, and it stores metatdata (album art, tags, etc) better than some other formats...although in Squeezebox Server land, the server does a nice job of storing that info anyway.   If you use WAV or AIFF the workload is a little greater cuz you need to point a jpeg (album art) to SqueezeBox Server via either a naming convention like folder.jpeg or cover.jpeg (per album folder). 

Net/net, use FLAC unless you find a problem with it.  It saves HD space, stores metatdata well, sounds great, and Squeeze products read it natively.

[firedog]

I've done testing with FLAC vs. wav, and I haven't found an experienced listener that can consistently pick out which one is playing - in other words, they sound the same.

FLAC also has the tagging advantage, which is huge when you use a computer/browser based interface. You want to be able to set up tags in a manner that makes sense to you, and makes finding items in your collection easy.

As far as the iTouch, it doesn't matter unless you are using iTunes, which doesn't natively support FLAC. If you are using a browser interface for a player or iTouch app that supports FLAC, then you won't have a problem. For example, lots of Squeezebox users load iPeng onto an iTouch and use the iTouch as the remote for SqueezeCenter, which is compatible with their FLAC collection.

You can do the same with your Transporter - see the Squeeze forums at http://forums.slimdevices.com/index.php - there's lot's of info about iPeng and other programs there.