Slashdot Mirror

You're only right if the mini Ipod is marketed as "the low-cost alternative".

But I thinkt that it will be marked based on size. "Look, it's incredibly small! Isn't it cute? You need to get one!".

If Apple does it this way, they can ask $200 without any problems, even more considering that their next competitor asks $239 for just 1.5 gigs.

Beats me. Maybe it's because people think the mini iPod will be cheaper than $220.

1) Ogg/Vorbis is supported by (obscure mp3 player). Why should I get that (*drool*) new, affordable iPod?

2) Ogg/Vorbis can work in a DRM-based business model! Here is how: Step 1: Get five candles and a live goat.

There are several good players on the market now. Please see Vorbis Hardware. My personal favorite being the Rio Karma which sports phone out, RCA out (much better than 1/8" out for hokup to external amps, ethernet with DHCP client for automaticaly grabbing an address for networking, 5 band parametric EQ (by far the most advanced eq in a portable player). Pretty nice product. 20 gigs are out now with 40 gigs coming shortly.

The Rio Nitrus seems like it's very similar to whatever this iPod Jr. is going to be.

Here are some specs on the Nitrus:
Dimensions: 3" X 2.4" X 0.6"
Weight: 2.0oz
Battery: 16-hour continuous playback on internal Li Ion battery

I myself own a Rio Karma and have been loving it ever since Christmas day. There are worthy alternatives to the iPod and the iPod Jr. as well it seems.

The Rio Nitrus seems like it's very similar to whatever this iPod Jr. is going to be.

Here are some specs on the Nitrus:
Dimensions: 3" X 2.4" X 0.6"
Weight: 2.0oz
Battery: 16-hour continuous playback on internal Li Ion battery

I myself own a Rio Karma and have been loving it ever since Christmas day. There are worthy alternatives to the iPod and the iPod Jr. as well it seems.

Well the Rio Nitrus is close. Its 1.2GB for around 200$. I do think the 100$ price tag is going to be way off, but it should still be close to what Rio offers.

This is just silly. The only DAPs similar to these 'mini-iPods' are the Rio Nitrus @ US$219.99 SRP and the RCA Lyra RD2760 @ US$249.99 SRP.

So what we are to believe is that Apple is going to put out a 'mini-iPod' that has 3 times the capacity for less than half the price? Make sense: after all, Apple is known for putting out products that are all of sleek, stylish, well-made and cheap.

Wait, no, they aren't; we forgot the Apple Tax(tm)!

I can believe that possibly Apple is reading a 'mini-iPod', but if it's less than US$300 I'll be damned surprised.

Why not just get a Rio Nitrus? 1.5gb Cornice drive, plays many more formats than an iPod, costs around $150 street, and more importantly is available now :)

Oh, and it isn't stripey. Which is a bonus in my book.

As we are seeing, a new niche in the mp3 player market is being created. Creative just released a compact 4GB micro-drive MuVo2 MP3 player, here , and we have already seen a "pocket-sized" 1.5 GB player released by Rio, here. Apple is just bringing out the competition now. They will be tough to compete with.

It's about an inch taller and depending on the model, the same thickness or thinner then a deck of cards. IIRC, the Archos is about the size of a paperback novel

There are hard disk based mp3 players that are smaller than the iPod. Heck, they even have 1" MP3 players now. Check out the Rio Nitrus. It's got a 1" hd. It's as small as many flash players. By the way, there are newer Archos like the video one I mentioned above that are only slightly larger than an iPod.

I'd be tempted to buy one if they only supported Macs (their support page only lists Windows downloads). Unfortunately, the Rio Karma doesn't natively support Mac either. All I need is an Ogg-supporting player that works on a Mac :).

Replay has disabled Commercial skip in the current and future versions of their products.

Just got my Karma yesterday.

I'd been putting of buying one of these until one appeared that

- Played Ogg Vorbis
- Had non-trivial storage capacity in a form-factor what fits my pockets.
- Had non-trivial autonomy.
- Management App that ran on Linux, or USB storage device simulation.

I must say I'm delighted so far. The cradle is plugged in to my stereo and is banging out Mussorgski (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) with excellent dynamics and clarity.

I left it on and playing when going to sleep, yesterday evening. When I woke up 6 hours later the battery indicated "half", which is about right for the predicted 15-hour playtime. Of course I don't know if the battery indicator is has been weighed for linearity.

I've played downloaded (from emusic.com) mp3's and self-ripped Oggs, so far, and they sound just great. I have them cross-faded, and ise nice classic VU-Meters for display.

After unpacking, connecting to the network (the Cradle has a 100BT connector - the device does DHCP or manual IP setting.) copying the jarball for the "Lite" versions (which is what the Java apps are called) to my laptop, and running it, nothing much worked,at first.

The app allowed me to delete the pre-stored tracks, and to copy new ones from my HD, but the player would not see them. Also, character translation didn't work very well in the app.
So In checked out software and firmware versions on the support site, and the ones on the device and CD were hopelessly outdated already.
After updating both (I had to drive to work to find a Windoze Box.. the updater is an exe file and will not work with Wine) everything was suddenly okay, and I'm now a happy Karma User.

One downside so far: The included earphones hurt my ears and don't sound too great. Both cushions spontaneously fell off as I was removing the plugs from my ears, and were lost, already.

"My Karma is Great" :-)
For what I know from 2 days ownership, I can certainly recommend it. /hrf

Rio Karma 20 is the One ;-)

20 GB
Ogg Vorbis
Multi Platform JAVA Interface
USB 2.0 ...

I'm owner of the first iPod model. Had to replace the battery 1 1/2 year after ther purchase. The new iPod's get smaller, the battery capacity gets shorter and to be honest I like mechanical parts like the scroll wheel. Furthermore they made a stupid cradle, so I don't have a direct IEEE1394 connector anymore ...

To make it short I would not buy a new iPod model, I'd buy the Rio Karma. I actually did some research after my battery was gone, but replacing the battery was $80 - thats a lot cheaper - and I have not converted my songs to .ogg yet ...

The neuros uses a backpack hard drive though, which radically increases it's form factor.

Rio just released the Karma with Ogg support. Done by the same team that did the empeg, from what I understand. I haven't tested out a karma yet but I definitely love my empeg and if it's half as good it's much better than anything else.

-- Gary F.

On the other hand, Hauppauge has WinTV-PVR and a google showed several articles refering to those devices as PVRs. So the "jury is still out", but "I see the tide turning", [[insert more sayings here]]

Also, you are sorta right about not knowing that is available with DVRs, I have seen them used and played with a couple (including my father's house), but I do not yet own one. I will (most likely) purchase one over the next year. I am a little confused over your comment that "they sell themselves to a giant Asian firm" and that being better than the hated Hollywood, but the price factor of ReplayTV might push me to that system.

As far as Digital cable sucking, well you must not have any experience with the best feature, on-demand, because the channel quide will start (predictably) at "1" (which is On-Demand). However, I don't use the channel quide in "full format", somtimes I use it to see which "reqular" movies are starting or to check my "favorites", otherwise it's a bit of a pain flipping through over a hundred channels on screen of (maybe) 10 titles at a time. However, mostly I like the show title which shows up even when it's on commercial (a must have for channel surfing). From that I can check that channel's shows for the rest of the night (and find out the "info").

Feel free to browse my previous slashdot posts to learn more about my mindset. I think you will be surprised at what you find.

One thing I can say for sure is that if I were to leave Microsoft I can guarantee you my replacement at Microsoft would be worse to you from a consumer rights perspective.

If you want to support OGG, vote with your money and buy the players that do support it- If they sell well, other manufacturers are sure to take notice.

I already do. Which is why (getting back on topic) I did not buy an ipod. I have a neuros already and I'm just waiting for the 40GB version to come out before I buy the Rio Karma.

I think it is reasonable to support, say, four formats. For example the Rio Karma supports mp3, wma, ogg, and flac at about the same price point as the ipod.

Popularity is a good one, IMO.

I challenge you to find four portable file formats more popular than ogg.

Plus we need to settle on a stable file format one day or another, and MP3 seems pretty good for that purpose

I have never at any point suggested removing MP3 or WMA support. In fact my entire position is that a portable player should be expected to support more formats than the ipod does, not less.

Very nice; I did not know about the iriver one. I've been looking at one of these, rio karma" Do you actualy have a IHP-120? If you do what do you think?

• Neuros Digital Audio Computer
• Rio Karma 20 (Picture)
• PhatNoise's PhatBox, Kenwood's Music Keg (Powered by PhatNoise) These are in-car players that are installed into the trunk of your car and hooked up to your car stereo. Both players run ARM-Linux and support playback of FLAC files. Beta firmware to support Ogg Vorbis is available at http://phatbox.sixpak.org/phatbox/ogg.phtml.
• KISS Technology's DP-450 and DP-500 DVD Players
• MPST Digital Jukebox
• Freemax FW-960
• iRiver iHP-120, iHP-100, iGP-100, possibly others
• Umax/Yamada have a few standalone DVD players that support Vorbis.
• Neuston provides a standalone DVD player (model DVX-1201) that supports Vorbis.
• Samsung The MCD-CM600 is now available in Korea. It is a CD portable that can play Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. Page with photo of MCD-CM600. Closeup of MCD-CM600.

• Neuros Digital Audio Computer
• Rio Karma 20 (Picture)
• PhatNoise's PhatBox, Kenwood's Music Keg (Powered by PhatNoise) These are in-car players that are installed into the trunk of your car and hooked up to your car stereo. Both players run ARM-Linux and support playback of FLAC files. Beta firmware to support Ogg Vorbis is available at http://phatbox.sixpak.org/phatbox/ogg.phtml.
• KISS Technology's DP-450 and DP-500 DVD Players
• MPST Digital Jukebox
• Freemax FW-960
• iRiver iHP-120, iHP-100, iGP-100, possibly others
• Umax/Yamada have a few standalone DVD players that support Vorbis.
• Neuston provides a standalone DVD player (model DVX-1201) that supports Vorbis.
• Samsung The MCD-CM600 is now available in Korea. It is a CD portable that can play Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. Page with photo of MCD-CM600. Closeup of MCD-CM600.

The Rio Karma is on my Christmas list this year.

Check it out here.

It's tiny; 2.7" by 3" by 1". It's got USB 2.0 and *ethernet*. The unfortunate thing is, the ethernet connectivity requires proprietary software, it's not just an SMB server on ethernet, and it's not a mass storage device with USB. However, there is a Java version of the software, and it runs on just about any platform that can run Java.

Battery life is fifteen hours, about double the iPod's.

It comes with a DOCK so you don't have to plug in power, usb, whatever, every time you go home. It's got a rechargable battery, and you just put it in the dock to charge and connect to your LAN/PC. The dock has RCA out, ethernet, and USB.

MSRP is $399, but you should be able to get better deals online, and there's a $20 rebate right now.

Rio Audio makes a player that support Ogg. I can only find one, but I could swear they made more than that.

Rio Audio makes a player that support Ogg. I can only find one, but I could swear they made more than that.

So as a person who is a heavy music buyer, audio freak, and computer lover, you think I and others would be gun ho about these music services. Nope, I'm continuing to buy CDs. I recently decided to build my own stereo appliance, since there doesn't seem to be any affordable home players out there that support OGG and FLAC. At least there is now a portable that does.

As mentioned before on /., the Rio Karma is another hard drive based player with MP3, WMA, OGG, and FLAC support. I like the Karma because its smaller than the ipod, doesn't look like an ipod clone, and it has an ethernet port too. The karma will come in 20 and 40GB versions.

• I don't see how a post containing nothing but one biased opinion merits an "Interesting" moderation, especially as it's a one-line statement of opinion about the popularity of a codec.
• If nobody cares about Ogg Vorbis, why is Rio including Vorbis support in their new players, such as the Rio Karma?

This reminds me - just today I was looking at Rio portable players and when I checked out newer Nitrus model with "1.5GB" storage, it actually has an asterisk explaining that figure that says:

*1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes

I was thinking how can they get away with that outright lie! Imagine this type of advertizing:

New Item! - Buy Ten* CD-R Discs and get 5 more FREE! Low price of $5.00 for 15 CD-R discs!!!
*Ten cd-r discs = 9 cd-r discs

And then I see this /. story and a lawsuit. I wonder if multi-media storage manufacturers are next.

Had you considered the Rio Karma?

...don't you think?

Does this link: http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/i tem_main_Rio.asp?model=220&cat=53 display properly for anyone usng Mozilla? I am using 1.5A and the menus(which don't work) are displayed on top of the specs which run off the window.

And don't forget that according to this link, there is also going to be a 40GB for around $499!