While seeing a
flashy looking new
DAP roll out of China happens more times than we care to count, every so often a player hits the market with a feature that's actually quite remarkable. While the overall specs aren't revolutionary, the Gemei X-21 offers support for an audio format that few other players do, and is sure to catch the discerning ears of
audiophiles everywhere. The focal point on this otherwise average unit is its ability to play back APE audio files, more appropriately known as Monkey's Audio, which is a lossless format (similar to FLAC) that supposedly suffers no loss in quality from the original regardless of how many times it's uncompressed and re-encoded. Unfortunately, you won't stuff too many of those hefty APE jams onto the 512 MB of internal storage, since APE encoding reportedly only decreases file size by about 55 percent. Nevertheless, the "aluminum cased" DAP sports a fairly nice looking design, and the bold 2.0-inch screen apparently uses all 208 x 176 pixels to display photos, but gives no love to video clips. Aside from your basic track / volume controls, USB 2.0 connectivity, and obligatory white headphones, the unit supports the aforementioned APE, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA (no word on WMA-DRM). While it does toss in an FM tuner, the real downer here isn't the lack of pricing or availability, but rather the apparent omission of an expansion slot to load up tunes via memory card -- and honestly, you can't exactly go ape wild with just 512MB.
[Via
DAPreview]
posted August 17th 2006 1:07PM
That's really great and all, but FLAC playback is very simple from a technical standpoint and they offer a great (and free) developer program, so I'm sad to see this device not support both lossless formats. I'm still looking for an iPod-like device (aka large harddrive included in package) that can play mp3 (VBR and CBR)/flac/ape. I have no need for video or a fancy screen, but if anyone knows of any devices that can do the above, please reply or e-mail me!
Tony Rayo
oshiZwillThisOfferProtectionZdori@gmail.com (remove everything between the Z's including the Z's themselves, thanks).
personally i only encode my music in the super-elite incredibly rare open-source codec Bingo Toaster 0.1c ... anyone who markets a device that doesn't play Bingo Toaster files looses my business. and anyone that doesn't encode all their music in Bingo Toaster obviously isn't as cool as me.
Tony Rayo, Cowon comes closest with most of its models having flac support, but APE is very thin on the ground indeed. I don't much care for ape. FLAC is my preferred choice for lossless. Good to see progressive companies from China and Korea (Cowon) playing lossless files (it's sad that lossy crap is so popular).
Pah! My PMP only uses wax cylinders - Vinyl was a step too far if you ask me. I'm way cooler than any of you.