Bitrate and Battery Life - MP3 devices (1 Viewer)

[Holadem]

Rather than file size, it is battery life that concerns me the most when it comes to encoding MP3s for my 30GB Creative Zen Xtra.

Has anyone quantified the difference in power requirements between the various bitrates?

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H

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i would think higher bitrates consume more battery life because the hard disk would need to spin up more often because file sizes are larger. apart from that, i dont think the bitrate itself has anything to do with battery life, but i could easily be wrong.

CJ

 

[Holadem]

Interesting, Christ, I hadn't thought about that. In that case, the size of the buffer becomes a factor as well.

Of course I could conduct a test myself: Encode a album twice with different bitrates, pick one, set the thing to repeat, play it all day and monitor for battery drain, rinse, repeat with the other bitrate, all things being equal of course (incuding things like battery life, which this engineer cannot ignore as it affects battery life). But who the hell wants to go thru all that?

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H