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I was wondering if there were any portable ogg/vorbis players the other day too. Unfortunalty I found nothing useful except this article which mentions that the HipZip player mentions a company which is responsible for Ogg Vorbis.. And, something about this Dadio OS

The player itself is of good quality; it sounds great both on headphones and plugged into my car stereo. It includes an equalizer and a backlit display. Unfortunately, the OS itself is a bit spartan; there's no way to save the playlist through a power cycle, and the random play function resets itself on every powerup. I suspect these issues may be resolved with a newer version of Dadio, and for now I just randomize the playlist before loading it onto the player, as tracks are sorted in load order.

There are several interesting features of this player. The first is that it takes Iomega's 40MB Clik! (now Pocket Zip) disks, which run about $10 each retail. It acts as an ordinary USB mass storage device, which means you can copy any files to/from it without restriction, and also use it to exchange ordinary data files. (Unfortunately, as always with Win98, you can't just plug in the player and copy files; you have to install the drivers first, despite its being a perfectly generic USB disk drive. Completely plug-and-play in Linux, though.)

The 40MB size of the Clik! disks is a little annoying, but the ability to carry 5 or 6 of the disks around in the media wallet without significant expense makes up for that, and I'm able to store much more music (with the hassle of changing disks) than I was with my Rio 500 expanded to 128MB. Additionally (and this is the reason I bought the player), it will support Ogg Vorbis as soon as the format reaches 1.0. (There is a beta firmware that supports it now, but it won't play files encoded with >beta4.) Ogg Vorbis will let me easily degrade bitrates without re-encoding, and at 96kb/s .ogg I will be able to store quite a bit on 1 disk.

One interesting problem: When hooked to the line-in of my car CD player, there is an audible hiss if I have it simultaneously plugged into the charger. As soon as I disconnect it from the charger, it disappears. I don't know if I wired the stereo strangely or what, because it's not there with headphones. Weird.

To me, fair use rights aren't a big concern. If you can see it or hear it, you can get an adequate sample for fair use with a cheap camera or audio recorder. You don't need perfect digital video samples to make your point for a review.

iObjects Dadio operating system for digital music players supports OGG Vorbis files, so at least some hardware players out there could in theory play them. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's HipZip is the only players actually using this operating system at the moment. That being said though, I'm pretty certain that the processor used in the RioVolt will support the same operating system, though the rest of the hardware likely does not. That means that should SonicBlue decide to do so, the RioVolt could potentially be upgraded to support OGG as well.

As far as actual processing power goes, most of the portable digital music players out there should be capable of playing OGGs, the format shouldn't take much more or less processing power then MP3, and would be very comperable to any of the other "new" compressed audio formats (WMA, AAC, etc.). The problem now is two-fold. First, a lot of the old portable audio players used ASICs which can't be reprogrammed. Fortunately almost all of the new ones I've seen come out these days have moved to either a straight DSP or an ARM processor, both of which are reprogramable. Other then that, it's just a matter of someone actually adding the code to these players. Not exactly something that could be done in a weekend, but given that the OGG format is OpenSource in straight C code, porting it shouldn't be TOO hard.

For me personally though, I really can't tell the difference most of the time. A good quality encoder for either mp3 or ogg should produce fine sound when used in the 160kbps range. I prefer the OGG format for political reasons, but that's somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion :>

Now what would be COOL would be a car player that played more than just mp3's...like one that would play .ogg and .wma files, too.

Wouldn't that be spiffy?

Interactive Objects has an embedded OS for playing many digital audio files...
one that can be included OR upgraded to is Ogg... As mentioned earlier, the HipZip can play .ogg's due to the fact of using this reference hardware.

The FAQ on the Vorbis site refers to this

What hardware manufacturers are dedicated to making Vorbis players?

Interactive Objects, for one. They're the ones who designed the OS for the Hip Zip, among other things.

My Iomega HipZip plays .oggs, but I'm not allowed to give out that firmware version yet. For those of you who have the HipZip, had you wondered why the xiph.org twirlfish logo was in the 'about player' menu? :-)

Monty

This press release recently got trumpeted on the Vorbis mailing list. Scroll down to "New Encoding and Decoding Format Available" for the part relevant to Vorbis.