I just bought myself a shiny new portable audio player (I was about to write MP3 player but realised I didn’t buy it to play MP3s primarily so that would have been somewhat redundant). I went for a Cowon iAudio 7 (Silver, 16GB). There were a few reasons for this:
- Up to 60 hours of battery life (claimed)
- 16GB flash memory
- Reasonable price (less than £120 inc. postage at time of purchase)
- Generally good reports of sound quality
- Ability to play many audio formats (particularly FLAC).
Why are those things a big deal? Well, battery life is because I see this as a very sensible alternative to buying a CD changer for my new car (probably cheaper and I can take it to my next car). Sound quality is important because anyone that knows me also knows I’m an audiophile. Finally, the killer feature is the ability to play many formats, in particular FLAC. Being an audiophile, I’m moving towards ripping CDs as FLAC instead of MP3.
However, I’d read there was one gotcha – a lack of support for gapless playback. The solution? Well, rather obviously, rip mix CDs as one file (I don’t care about skipping tracks in the car). Hang on, surely there’s a way to combine FLAC files automatically, I thought (since I’m not going to want to rip/store only one file on my HDD). The answer is the rather useful shntool. A very simple command line tool (available for Linux and Windows – I like it already 
) that will stick together a bunch of audio files and spit out a WAV (or, with a bit of work and very simple scripting, another compressed audio file).
I’ve used it on Windows only so far and simply stuck it in a directory that I added to the PATH environment variable. I did the same for the FLAC tools. The really neat part of this is that shntool can read a list of files to stitch from a text file. So, if you rip with something like CDex and create a playlist, you can then feed shntool the playlist to stick the files in order. Brilliant! Then run the WAV through the FLAC encoder again and you have one big file. If you’re feeling adventurous, shntool supports supplying a choice of encoder and parameters to do the whole thing in one go. So far I’ve been lazy, so all I do is something like this:
shntool join -F playlist.m3u
flac -o mixname.flac -8 joined.wav
