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• can play MP3 (and Ogg Vorbis)
• can not do 802.11
• can not store voicemail on your phone
• can not do Google Maps
• can play video
• can change to wide screen mode

Funny, I could've sworn that my old Palm Zire 71 with Aeroplayer decodes Ogg Vorbis just fine, and it's hardly a speed demon.

I believe you can backup the auido to a data disc of AACs or mp3s, however this does not remove the DRM from the files.

True, but this does.

So you still can't get the files to non-iPod audio devices

See above. I have an iPod now, but before that, I was playing iTMS downloads on a Palm Tungsten T (with AeroPlayer).

(The funny bit is that I don't think I've bought anything from iTMS since I bought my iPod. My most recent purchases were from these guys. 192-kbps AAC is nice.)

and if you hose your computer and reinstall and in the process appear to hose you iTunes account those DRM'd files on your backup cds might be worthless.

Wrong again. When you get your computer running again and iTunes installed, you authorize it and it starts playing your downloads. Even if you've used up all of your authorizations (you get five, IIRC), there's still a fix. You can free up all of your authorizations (including the one sitting on the hard drive that had a headcrash last week) and start over.

The movie player requires that files are in the magic folder with magic filenames ... You could install some programs on it, but as I mentioned above everyone required payment for their crappy utilities.

For video playback that's open source and plays just about anything, you might give TCPMP a try ...

There's no real solution for free mp3 playback, but Aeroplayer will play OGG files for free, and handles folders fine.

Personally I can't see why anyone would collect music in iTunes DRM, it has no real value, at least if you have a CD you can re-sell it and use it with whatever device you want.

It's easy enough to strip off the DRM. Hell, iTunes will burn a fully standards-compliant audio CD for you if you can't figure out Hymn. Either way, you can play your downloads on whatever device you want. I played my iTMS downloads on my Palm (transcoded to Ogg Vorbis at first, but now it'll play AAC) long before I bought an iPod.

Note: You can't convert DRMed files you purchased to mp3 in iTunes...

I have a directory of iTunes Music Store downloads on my server at home that says otherwise. Using just iTunes itself, you can burn .m4p files to CD, rip the CD, and encode to whatever format you want. iTunes combines ripping and encoding in one step, with the option to encode to AAC, MP3, or Apple Lossless. You can also rip to WAV if you want to use an external enecoder to do Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or whatever. With Hymn, you can get rid of the DRM to get .m4a files that can directly be transcoded to another format if necessary.

I used to transcode my downloads to Ogg Vorbis for playback on a Palm with AeroPlayer, but I probably won't be doing that as much now that I have an iPod. Getting rid of the DRM on iTMS downloads is still useful, though, as the unprotected files can be played and tagged by third-party apps (mplayer and xine don't like .m4p files).

My favorite portable audio player doesn't play mp3s by default. You have to pay. It plays oggs by default. For free.

Also, some people want to use other formats for the same reason some people want to use Linux--to get away from proprietary/patent-encumbered software.

Because not everyone wants FLAC or MP3

A lossless format like FLAC is perfect for long-term archivial storage. A lossy encoding is great for putting on a portable device. A modern CPU can encode a song in a few seconds, so it makes sense to store the lossless file and re-encode when you transfer it to a portable device.

I use Aeroplayer to listen to oggs on my Palm, and burn mp3-cds to listen to on the player in my car. For me, it makes a lot more sense to re-encode at burn/copy time than it does to store both .mp3 and .ogg files on my hard drive.

The best, most rigorous listening test in the world results in the conclusion that the results are within the margin of error.

So, it would be fair to say then, that it is arguable whether AAC is really better than Ogg?

The tie-breaker is the fact that AAC is available and supported, while OGG is not.

That's funny, Ogg seems to be available for every computer platform I care about. There are many portable music players that don't support it, but there are a few now that do. My PDA plays Ogg files just fine, too.

It's interesting that you seem to interpret "AAC meets my needs better" as "AAC is better". AAC doesn't meet my needs better than Ogg, so for me Ogg is better.

steveha

Yes, you can play ogg vorbis files on both Palm and PocketPC devices. PocketMVP will play .ogg files and MMPlayer has that feature slated soon, many other players exist aswell such as Pocket Tunes and AeroPlayer.

As for IM software, I'm not sure about PocketPC as I sold my ipaq for a Palm Tungsten T3, but on the Palm side of things there is Chatopus.

On my Windows XP boxes, QuickTime has been remarkably unstable through three major and countless minor releases. Crashes, weird artifacts that linger for the duration of playback, "corrupted" files that played fine under Win2K...

iTunes (which runs QuickTime underneath) streams Sean Hannity (in MP3) for me without a hitch on WinXP and Win2K. That's three hours a day with no glitches, unless there's a problem on the server side. (I know the problem is on their end because Winamp doesn't work any better if there's a problem with the MP3 stream.) They also do Windows Media and Real streams...I'll take WMA if I can't get MP3, but WMA takes much longer to begin playing than MP3.

I can't remember the last time I had RealPlayer installed on any of my computers. I simply haven't had a need for it. I almost broke down and was ready to install the Palm OS version on my Tungsten T when it became available, but then AeroPlayer made it to market first with both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis playback.

Sounds interesting. I have a Tungsten E with an SD/MMC card slot {126MHz OMAP processor IIRR}. Will that run such a player? Or will I have serious trouble with battery life?

The specs on that aren't too different than my Tungsten T...but more specifically, the Tungsten E is listed as a supported device. With a 256MB card, I usually get about 4 hours' worth of music at a time (give or take, depending on the bitrates). Playing all of that will run a fully-charged battery down to about 50%. I recently scored a deal on a 512MB card that should last all day, if I should ever need that much runtime.

Make sure you get a card reader if you don't already have one...it's the fastest way to load music. (I've not gotten music to load through a HotSync...I'm not even sure if that's supported.)

The reason why WMA would be more useful is because more people use WMA.

Hmmm ... funny, then, that the two popular mp3 players for Palm OS 5 (AeroPlayer and Pocket-tunes) both support Ogg files, but do not support WMA! Either there's licensing issues here, or nobody actually uses WMA (does anyone?? I've never known anyone who did, and a lot of my friends have large mp3 collections ...)

What is it with all of you Ogg Vorbis fanatics? Unfortunately, my iPod and my set-top player only like AAC or MP3. Does anyone make a portable Ogg player?

AeroPlayer actually supported Ogg Vorbis before it supported MP3.

"Why not just encode it at 384 and be done with it?", consider that PDAs have 64 megs of RAM

Memory cards are cheap...get yourself a 256- or 512-meg card and throw your music onto that. 256 megs in a Tungsten T with AeroPlayer and some 160-192 kbps MP3s will make the trip from Las Vegas to Phoenix without repeating. For the return trip, I copy a different set of MP3s over from my notebook.

I have been listening to ogg vorbis files for months now using my Palm Zire 71 and Aeroplayer. I got myself a 256 Meg SD card and I was off to the races.