Originally Posted by t42
Originally Posted by Steve Eyles
Battery life was my main concern, smaller files make for more life.

IIRC flac is more computationally efficient to decode than mp3, so there is actually a small power saving there. In hard drive based players this is dwarfed by having to spin up the hard drive more often to fill the (fixed-length*) buffers, however in flash-based players I'm not so sure...

I agree, it's the hard drive spinning up and reading that takes the battery life.