Slashdot Mirror

Just to let everyone know, the Rio Karma's still alive and kickin', and so is the iRiver H series. Both play Ogg Vorbis files quite well (and as an owner of the former, I'm incredibly pleased with my purchase). IMHO, the Rio Karma's the closest so far towards a true ipod competitor (USB2/Ethernet, 20GB, easy menu system, easy syncing, MP3/OGG/WMA/FLAC), with the notable exception of USB2 not working on mac or linux yet (use the dock's ethernet connection to sync up).

As an aside, an engineer from Rio (name changed in the article) posted his unofficial postulations on why the iPod has yet to materialize with Ogg support to Gizmodo. Essentially, his answer is that the processor originally used in the iPods just aren't powerful enough for it. There's also a rebuttal from a xiph.org guy, so I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle. In any case, if the 4g ipods use the same processor as the mini (looking likely) then Ogg support just might be coming yet, though Apple still may not do it for the same political reasons as before (mp3 good enough, aac just the same or better, blah blah blah)

I'm not sure what this person was thinking, but I have an iRiver H120 which has SRS, WOW, and TruBass. This product line has been out for quite a while, too.

iRiver home

SRS, WOW and TruBass

Hmm, I could have sworn that my iriver hp-120 has had those all along. [from my link]:

"You will experience various sound effects with SRS, SRS WOW and TRUE BASS."

Oh, and ogg vorbis support.

SRS, WOW, TruBass? Never seen before? Maybe you should take your head out of your ipod's user manual and check out the iriver iHP, which has all these features, plus optical input/output and a built-in radio tuner.

And, it has a built in FM tuner, comes with LCD remote, optical and analog ins and outs, records direct to MP3 or WAV, has Ogg Vorbis support. You can record via analog in, optical in, or built in microphone.

There are a few quirks with some firmware, and navigation isn't as easy as with the iPod. Also, iRiver is super busy writing firmware for a few of their upcoming units, so a firmware update hasn't been released for these units for a little while. You should check out the hilarious disgruntled 14 year olds on the iRiver community forum.

Anyway, I made my choice, and I'm happy with it.

I only know of one or two dedicated hardware players capable of playing Ogg files.

Not trying to shoot down the rest of your post, but:

All of iRiver's iHP series hard-disk players, and many of their iFP series flash players support Vorbis. I have an iHP-120 and it works flawlessly and transparently with my Ogg Vorbis files. The Neuros line also supports Vorbis. The Rio Karma supports Ogg Vorbis as well. There are plenty of smaller manufacturers out there also creating Vorbis-capable players, but I won't bore you with that list. The three aformentioned makers are the big ones. Even with those 3 companies, that's quite a bit more than just one or two players.

Since you're using a purely audio CD player, the CD will work on it. Even fairly basic compact stereo systems have digital output.

So go buy one! Or go buy the iMP-250, 350, 550, etc. etc. which all support Ogg Vorbis (even the old iMP-250 aka Rio Volt 2) through firmware updates...

Sometimes I'm really glad that I have an audio CD player with digital output, and an iRiver H120 with digital input. Any CD that will play in my stereo can be ripped to WAV on the iRiver. Result!

I beg your pardon?

You have a point. There are devices however such as from iRiver which can play Ogg Vorbis and the winning encoder/codec in the Slashdot story AoTuV seems to be just an encoder fork which is bitstream compatible with Ogg Vorbis.

Check out the iRiver h140. It beats the iPod in almost every way. Really, I just got one and it's fantastic. A much better fit for the Slashdot crowd. It includes an fm radio, optical inputs and outputs, internal and external microphones, plays OGG, battery lasts for 16 hours. Comes with a case and remote control. It's worth a look.

Interestingly, the iriver iHP series claims that it's got a three to five year battery life with "normal"* use.

The use of a lithium-polymer battery is supposed to help here, since the electrolyte doesn't decay as rapidly. 10 hours of battery life (give or take) isn't too shabby either (and i do get this, i'm using it right now well into its 6th hour)

Now, i don't know about you, but i'd much prefer three years over 1, but the battery in the iriver doesn't appear to be easily replaced (by users), so i'm kinda up shit creek when it does eventually die.

ashridah

* note, this is according to iriver's FAQ. here. take with appropriately sized grain of salt, their definition of 'normal use' is fairly small.

Of course, you get what you pay for, and the li-poly batteries do actually cost a bit more (and so does the ihp range)

Um.. A beta of the firmware is currently available. I know one person using it with no problems. Ogg files eat more batteries, but aside from that, he loves it.

Sadly I'm stuck being Oggless with my iFP-190.. When the 700 or 800 series are released, I'll probably upgrade then.

while you're at it, might as well mention the excellent ogg firmware too. Cuts battery life down to ~9 hours on my machine, but that's not so bad considering that most mp3 players they tested didn't even get that much.

OT: I wonder where the testers managed to find 1400 mAh batteries, since the cheapest crap NiMH I could even find a year ago were all 2100. I sense incompetence.

Look you muppet it does support Ogg...

Unfortunately you have to make a firmware choice; MP3 and Ogg or MP3 and WMA. The flash rom is not big enough to support loads of codecs.

Twit.

The iRiver 300 series (390, 395) do indeed have Ogg Vorbis firmware, although you must choose between MP3/OGG and MP3/WMA/ASF. I have a hunch that the Slashdot crowd would prefer the former, though. The firmware is in beta still (and has been since December -_-) and doesn't support USB drive functionality, but at least it's something.

iRiver OGG firmware

The iRiver iFP-390T currently supports ogg, but only if you use player-specific beta firmware.
Of course, if you want an iPod but crave precious ogg support, try the H-series, which have supported ogg from way back. See here for more. U will like. iRiver's H-series kicks ass on the second-generation iPods, while remaining cheaper and with nice features like the text viewer and USB 2. Supports ogg, gets way better battery life, cheaper. That about says it all.

And check this: for almost every iRiver, there's UMS firmware which transforms the unit into an universal mass storage device. Works fine on Linux or the Mac. iRiver is a sweet company.

The iRiver iFP-390T currently supports ogg, but only if you use player-specific beta firmware.
Of course, if you want an iPod but crave precious ogg support, try the H-series, which have supported ogg from way back. See here for more. U will like. iRiver's H-series kicks ass on the second-generation iPods, while remaining cheaper and with nice features like the text viewer and USB 2. Supports ogg, gets way better battery life, cheaper. That about says it all.

And check this: for almost every iRiver, there's UMS firmware which transforms the unit into an universal mass storage device. Works fine on Linux or the Mac. iRiver is a sweet company.

Actually, the iFP-390T DOES support OGG Vorbis. I've been using it happily for a few months now.

See this page

Here is the firmware for it.

I did my fair share of research, apparently Karmas' firmware was beta quality at best, and that's a big reason I went with the iRiver

I don't think you can have done too much research then. I've had an iHP120 for a few months now and the firmware is holding back what would otherwise be a fantastic piece of kit.

Take a look on the iRiver forums and you'll find large numbers of disgruntled users.

iRiver iHP-140 (40 GB)

iRiver iHP-120 (20 GB)

Supports OGG, built in mic, optical out, mounts as a USB portable harddrive under linux (I use rsync to update my tunes), size and weight versus iPod are moot, and it's a nice black and silver instead of a (*ducks*) feminine white.

iRiver iHP-140 (40 GB)

iRiver iHP-120 (20 GB)

Supports OGG, built in mic, optical out, mounts as a USB portable harddrive under linux (I use rsync to update my tunes), size and weight versus iPod are moot, and it's a nice black and silver instead of a (*ducks*) feminine white.

Yup, my housemate has the iMP-550, and I can vouch for it. In addition to looking great and having an excellent UI, they just recently released a beta Ogg Vorbis firmware for it. If it played DVD-R, I'd buy it in a second.

The iRiver SlimX iMP-550 is a fantastic player. I just got one a few months ago because my little 256MB flash-based player just didn't hold enough music for a long day of studying, working out a the gym, etc. The SlimX has a great interface, it really is extremely slim (surprise), and has upgradable firmware which means that it will support Ogg Vorbis Real Soon Now(tm). It also looks sexy in its slim, cold metal body. (No plastic here!!)

Simply the best out there, I love mine:

iRiver

CD-R/RW/MP3/Ogg/WMA/FM tuner/Flash upgrades/etc....

Double the crap. I'll stick with iRiver thanks.

The PMC is the result of a partnership between iRiver and MS (and evidentally, MS got to brand it as theirs for some reason). Right along side that, iRiver is announcing the PMP (Personal multimedia Player), which runs Linux at its core.

Shots with descriptions of all their upcoming products can be found here and here.

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.

I've already ordered one. Can't wait to have it, a Linux compatible portable 20Gb disk and Ogg player in one!

iRiver also have plans to add Ogg support via software update to many of their players.

If Apple actually releases this thing -- and in the US$100-150 range -- all of those pretty little iRiver flash players with ogg support are going to get really, really cheap. Want ogg support? Hang on to your money and wait for the "Apple-killed-the-market clearance sale."

This probably should have been linked in the article: http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=35 5&page=1&mode=Total&strque=&field= 1 Also: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/30/006226.shtml

Here is a more official page from the iRiver site. Shamelessly ripped from lintux's post.

Here you can see a list of all the devices they want to implement Ogg support for sooner or later. For some of the devices, it's never going to happen because of hardware limitations.

As someone else here already said, the iMP-400 and iMP-550 (IIRC) will get Ogg support in January. I'm certainly looking forward to it. As soon as they release the firmware, I'm going to buy one of those devices, I guess.

It looks like some things didn't really go as planned, with the iFP-300 support coming so quickly. But hey, isn't that good? :-)

While a $99 fee for replacing the battery does seem like quite a bit (knock on wood for mine), this isn't quite a fair comparison..

How about this for a fair comparison:

Depending on use and warranty conditions, iRiver will replace the battery in an iHP for free. I've also read that iRiver Japan has started a battery replacement program for a whopping $20 (the iHP has been out longer there). iRiver America will probably start a similar program early next year.

Worse, they require a large, floating-point (yes, there is an integer version, too, but it's still big) decoder that needs memory space to store decompressed music. From the sound of iRiver's website, it's pretty hard to implement OGG in a player that wasn't really designed to have large new codecs installed.

...the iRiver iMP-400 looks promising

No uploading required. Just pop in your OGG/MP3 CD and you're away.

Ogg Vorbis support is in the works (via afirmware update), and can happily co-exist with the other codecs in firmware.

These guys seem pretty serious about vorbis. It's great to finally see a manufacturer taking this position.

While this doesn't address your question, I strongly suggest you avoid iPods as their battery life is short [6 hours - which neuters the purpose of having a 30 gB HDD], they're fairly pricey, the preamp sound quality could be better and you will end up paying to get more features [if you want to record with your iPod, you have to buy an add-on that will let you record to 32kbps mono MP3 - not good for much other than voice.]

Your best alternative would be the iRiver iHP-120. It boasts a 16 hour battery charge life [it achieves this regularly], superb sound quality, high quality MP3 recording, Ogg Vorbis support, digital + optical line in/line out, frequent firmware updates with new features/enhancements/bugfixes for free [the newest update added lyrics support, for instance], text file viewer [read e-books], USB 2.0 High Speed, fabulous build quality... it goes on :-) You don't even need special drivers or software to transfer files from/to computers, so it works as a portable 20 gB device, including under Linux.

Also check out reviews from ign.com and CNET. Don't miss the customer feedback, but watch out for trolls & astroturfers.

iRiver are a company that respects their customers and earns their money. You will see it in the tone of their announcements; hell, they even offer to replace the iHP-100's [and most likely the iHP-120's] lithium battery for free if you use it a lot. They have gained success by selling products that are worth buying and do not go obsolete as easily.

I know I sound like an iRiver pimp, but this company has truly lived up to its hype and therefore deserves my pimping services :-) [personally, i own an iMP-550 and find it outstandingly good in every way. I do not work for them, though I would love to.]

While this doesn't address your question, I strongly suggest you avoid iPods as their battery life is short [6 hours - which neuters the purpose of having a 30 gB HDD], they're fairly pricey, the preamp sound quality could be better and you will end up paying to get more features [if you want to record with your iPod, you have to buy an add-on that will let you record to 32kbps mono MP3 - not good for much other than voice.]

Your best alternative would be the iRiver iHP-120. It boasts a 16 hour battery charge life [it achieves this regularly], superb sound quality, high quality MP3 recording, Ogg Vorbis support, digital + optical line in/line out, frequent firmware updates with new features/enhancements/bugfixes for free [the newest update added lyrics support, for instance], text file viewer [read e-books], USB 2.0 High Speed, fabulous build quality... it goes on :-) You don't even need special drivers or software to transfer files from/to computers, so it works as a portable 20 gB device, including under Linux.

Also check out reviews from ign.com and CNET. Don't miss the customer feedback, but watch out for trolls & astroturfers.

iRiver are a company that respects their customers and earns their money. You will see it in the tone of their announcements; hell, they even offer to replace the iHP-100's [and most likely the iHP-120's] lithium battery for free if you use it a lot. They have gained success by selling products that are worth buying and do not go obsolete as easily.

I know I sound like an iRiver pimp, but this company has truly lived up to its hype and therefore deserves my pimping services :-) [personally, i own an iMP-550 and find it outstandingly good in every way. I do not work for them, though I would love to.]

While this doesn't address your question, I strongly suggest you avoid iPods as their battery life is short [6 hours - which neuters the purpose of having a 30 gB HDD], they're fairly pricey, the preamp sound quality could be better and you will end up paying to get more features [if you want to record with your iPod, you have to buy an add-on that will let you record to 32kbps mono MP3 - not good for much other than voice.]

Your best alternative would be the iRiver iHP-120. It boasts a 16 hour battery charge life [it achieves this regularly], superb sound quality, high quality MP3 recording, Ogg Vorbis support, digital + optical line in/line out, frequent firmware updates with new features/enhancements/bugfixes for free [the newest update added lyrics support, for instance], text file viewer [read e-books], USB 2.0 High Speed, fabulous build quality... it goes on :-) You don't even need special drivers or software to transfer files from/to computers, so it works as a portable 20 gB device, including under Linux.

Also check out reviews from ign.com and CNET. Don't miss the customer feedback, but watch out for trolls & astroturfers.

iRiver are a company that respects their customers and earns their money. You will see it in the tone of their announcements; hell, they even offer to replace the iHP-100's [and most likely the iHP-120's] lithium battery for free if you use it a lot. They have gained success by selling products that are worth buying and do not go obsolete as easily.

I know I sound like an iRiver pimp, but this company has truly lived up to its hype and therefore deserves my pimping services :-) [personally, i own an iMP-550 and find it outstandingly good in every way. I do not work for them, though I would love to.]

While this doesn't address your question, I strongly suggest you avoid iPods as their battery life is short [6 hours - which neuters the purpose of having a 30 gB HDD], they're fairly pricey, the preamp sound quality could be better and you will end up paying to get more features [if you want to record with your iPod, you have to buy an add-on that will let you record to 32kbps mono MP3 - not good for much other than voice.]

Your best alternative would be the iRiver iHP-120. It boasts a 16 hour battery charge life [it achieves this regularly], superb sound quality, high quality MP3 recording, Ogg Vorbis support, digital + optical line in/line out, frequent firmware updates with new features/enhancements/bugfixes for free [the newest update added lyrics support, for instance], text file viewer [read e-books], USB 2.0 High Speed, fabulous build quality... it goes on :-) You don't even need special drivers or software to transfer files from/to computers, so it works as a portable 20 gB device, including under Linux.

Also check out reviews from ign.com and CNET. Don't miss the customer feedback, but watch out for trolls & astroturfers.

iRiver are a company that respects their customers and earns their money. You will see it in the tone of their announcements; hell, they even offer to replace the iHP-100's [and most likely the iHP-120's] lithium battery for free if you use it a lot. They have gained success by selling products that are worth buying and do not go obsolete as easily.

I know I sound like an iRiver pimp, but this company has truly lived up to its hype and therefore deserves my pimping services :-) [personally, i own an iMP-550 and find it outstandingly good in every way. I do not work for them, though I would love to.]

Also a CS major at a major public university where CS is the 2nd largest major, I would like to inform you that I use Ogg, and I know several people who also use Ogg, and I reccomend Ogg to all of my tech-savvy friends.

Maybe it's a different major public university...

I do agree with you, but it's not hard for companies to simply add Ogg support to players that already support mp3 and/or WMA; iRiver, for example announced some time ago (it may have been recently, I have no idea) that they are adding Ogg support to several of their players, including both their hard disk players, their mp3/WMA-CD player, and some of their memory-based players.

I should also note that it's quite a bit easier than you think to add a new format. It simply involves adapting the decoder API and codec to the player, and storing it on the flash RAM on the device. No new chip printing is required in most cases, unless it's a cheap player with non-flashable decoder storage. There are limitations to the flash RAM storage though, and iRiver, for example, works around this by providing two sets of RAMs for different formats: MP3+WMA, or MP3+Ogg. Somehow I doubt there'd be any conflict -- anyone choosing Ogg would probably shun WMAs, and people using WMA wouldn't even know what Ogg is. It works, sort of, or at least until we have newer better players which support all the codecs in existence. Give it a few years...

..runs off to check the iRiver site again for any announcments..
Damn.. nothing yet..

The coolest by far appears to be the iFP-500 series, which has been release internationally (a while ago) but not released in the US yet. So impatient me went out and asked Santa for a Squeezebox.

The coolest by far appears to be the iFP-500 series, which has been release internationally (a while ago) but not released in the US yet. So impatient me went out and asked Santa for a Squeezebox.

Coincidentally, I've been scouring the forums tonight looking into gapless playback, as well as the quirks of both these players. While there are plenty of posts on iRiver's forum requesting gapless playback, I have not seen any statement from iRiver stating whether it will or will not be implemented. Also of note, I didn't see any evidence of iRiver employees posting to the forum though I didn't read all of it. Perhaps there is a better forum somewhere else?

OTOH, as of 11/24/03, the Karma has new firmware (v1.25) that now supposedly supports gapless playback. It also addresses many of the other bugs people have been complaining about here on /. and riovolution's forum. According to this thread, gapless playback is working on most Ogg files and Rio seems to be genuinely committed to resolving the issue. There are several Rio employees who make frequent contributions to theKarma forum making it quite informative and worthwhile, as far as forums go....

Since I'm still deciding between the two, I don't have any personal experience with them to share. From what I've read tonight, both players have their bugs/issues which is why I'm waiting a bit to see how the firmwares progress. That being said, I'm strongly leaning towards the Karma at the moment.

Some of the iRiver players support OGG Vorbis. iRiver is trying ahrd to get support on most of their players -- since most have upgradable flash memory.

Check out this link for more info.

the iriver IHP-120. It beats the Ipod in all aspects

Hmm... iRiver's web site says it's 20GB (half the size of the top of the line iPod), "Operating System WIN98SE/ME/2000/XP" (no Mac support), and USB 2.0 (no sign of FireWire support).

Those are three pretty clear aspects where it doesn't beat the iPod.

I looked at the iPod when I was looking for an mp3 player, but I chose to gen a IRIVER mp3 player instead.

1. The cost was just $199.
2. It has 256 megs of ram, an intergrated FM tuner, has a ANALOG input for ripping mp3s directly and a built in microphone to record you PHBs rants.
3. But most of all it has no moving parts other than the buttons.
4. I get WEEKS of playing time on one lithium AA battery.

iriver