[plug] Re: [OT] Portable Music Player, Voice Recorder

[Cameron Patrick]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> It amazes me that so many Mac and Windows tools don't play FLAC and
> vorbis, given the good quality, portable, free libraries available for
> them. It's less surprising for embedded devices, which have to worry a
> lot about ROM size, power consumption, CPU speed, etc and want to avoid
> including an FPU if they can.

In the case of FLAC, CPU speed should not be an issue; it's
integer-only and uses bugger-all CPU power even compared to MP3.  Ogg
_should_ require roughly the same as MP3, but implementations tend to
be less well optimised than MP3 decoders since it's less popular.
There's an FPU-less Ogg decoder called "Tremor" which was originally
designed to run on embedded CPUs like the Arm and similar ... I
believe it's what the Iriver and the like use.

Cameron (who has most of his CDs ripped to Flac these days)