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The Neuros Audio Computer Team is just doing the same thing for it's far superior player. But this time, the releasing of the firmware code was done after the manufacturers approval. Way to go!

Too bad the released code will only compile under Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio, a USD. 3500 closed source IDE and compiler.

A GCC target for the TI DSP the Neuros has in (C5416) is already on its way, though.

A few companies are offering them, the Neuros, for one.

> I love being able to play ogg file on my iPod..oh wait, no.

I enjoy a large collection of vorbis coded music on my neuros.

> I mean I love being able to stream them to my Tivo.

My mythbox plays ogg encased xvid4 rips of dvds just fine.

> Wait, no I mean, It's great that I can burn ogg files onto a cd and play them in my car mp3...er ogg...wait, no.

Did I mention my neuros? It has a built in FM transmitter. Childs play to take my music anywhere.

Open solutions exist, run well and will continue if I have anything to say about it.

> I love being able to play ogg file on my iPod..oh wait, no.

I enjoy a large collection of vorbis coded music on my neuros.

> I mean I love being able to stream them to my Tivo.

My mythbox plays ogg encased xvid4 rips of dvds just fine.

> Wait, no I mean, It's great that I can burn ogg files onto a cd and play them in my car mp3...er ogg...wait, no.

Did I mention my neuros? It has a built in FM transmitter. Childs play to take my music anywhere.

Open solutions exist, run well and will continue if I have anything to say about it.

Ive got a got a Neuros Plays Ogg Mp3 has Open Source firmware works with Linux fine; the hardisk can be swapped on the fly ( 20G; 40G; 80g) and maaan people do stare when I catch the bus home. The UI is easy to use and there is a site for develeopes/hackers who want to add features..

Ive got a got a Neuros Plays Ogg Mp3 has Open Source firmware works with Linux fine; the hardisk can be swapped on the fly ( 20G; 40G; 80g) and maaan people do stare when I catch the bus home. The UI is easy to use and there is a site for develeopes/hackers who want to add features..

Well, you can use the magic file to determine file type. The Nueros MP3 player can identify songs based on a 30-second clip, using an on-line service. There are systems that can automatically identify a person in a photograph, though these are not yet generally available to the public, nor are they 100% accurate. (But, they would be more accurate for organizing photographs, as people tend to take pictures of a small subset of the population.)

Cameras often encode date and time.

Then, there are remembrance agents like Dashboard that can help, as well.

There are already a lot of relationships embedded in our email and other documents. There's no reason these relationships can't be automatically extracted and formalized by the filesystem for rapid access.

In general, there is a *lot* of metadata that *can* be automatically populated. A lot of it is only of general use. However, that is still a step in the right direction.

A user looked at the possibility of adding a GCC target and was overwhelmed by the amount of work it would require. Not saying it won't/can't be done, but he moved on to writing a target for LCC.

You can read about it here: http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.a sp?TOPIC_ID=3655&whichpage=3

A Neuros user is already working on getting the TI DSP supported in LCC http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.a sp?TOPIC_ID=3655&whichpage=5

There has already been talk on the Neuros forums that FLAC will be supported relatively quickly by the userbase writing the codec for it.

Very exciting times...

some neat stuff:
Playtime: 10 hours when fully charged
Frequency response: 20 to 20,000Hz

FM Broadcasting:
Transmission Strength: 250 microV/M-2 at 3m
Maximum range: 20 feet

and it can record audio as MP3 or wav.
All for a sane price of $449.99

Hopefully this will be lower by the winter gift giving season ( or summer, if you stand upsidedown).

Bah. At the beginning of the year, I picked up a 20GB Neuros for about half the price of an ipod. It's a USB hard drive, plays many different formats (Ogg!), is an FM radio, an FM *transmitter*, a voice recorder, and allows you to record from another device (analog only, sorry to say).

I looked at the iRiver, and liked it very much (they have some pretty cool designs), but ended up going with the Neuros. Personal choice and all, you know.

Plus, since it uses standard 2.5" drives, I put in a 40GB I got for cheap.

I own one, read about 'em right here on good ol /.

And for a little more than a 40gig iPod, you can get an 80gig Neuros.

They totally kick ass.

You can broadcast to any fm radio with it, nice in any car... plug the charger into the wall and all the recievers in your house will pick it up! (undocumented) can you say personal radio station?

You can record with it, up to 48khz .wav...

Oh, yeah! did I mention its also a harddrive?

(and no, they dont give me any kickbacks for posting this, nor do i work for them. I just love the product :)

You're right, it is absurd to directly compare a laptop to a PDA and vice versa.

I will say, however, that I can and do watch MPEG & AVI videos and even full DVD movies on my Tungsten|T3. I put the video (DVDs transcoded using dvd::rip to ~400MB XviD AVIs w/96kbps MP3 audio @ ~320x240 resolution) on my 512MB SD card and watch it using MMPlayer. Works pretty damn good actually, especially in widescreen. I stick a few on my 20GB Neuros and load 'em up whenever I want using a portable card reader and whatever PC I happen to be at.

Also, portable keyboards, like the Stowaway work well and allow quick entry and retaining maximum portability. I had one for my Prism and used it a lot during meetings. I have yet to need one for my T3 since I don't do a lot of data entry any more and the virtual qwerty keyboard is sufficient for what I do (though I long for the IBM ATOMIK layout I had on my Prism).

Many people can and do "pick up" grafiti quickly. I think it took me about 1 hour to get the general hang of it and maybe 2 days to be really comfortable and proficient... Grafiti2 is even easier! Of course, I still prefer tapping out letters on a virtual keyboard; or better yet, using my stowaway (when I had it) for a lot of typing, such as word processing with WordSmith.

I own a neuros and use it just about every day. A while back I saw some info on making digital recordings with the neuros on their forum. The line in on the neuros is unpowered and you would want a good powered mic with preamp.

Try taking a look at the forum yourself.

Obviously it doesn't play ogg :)

Rio Karma, iRiver, and Neuros all play Ogg well. I would definitely qualify my Rio Karma as a worthy iPod competitor; I won't post a review here because there's enough out there on the Internet.

A lot of techs i know have blown off the iPod and are currently using another device to provide portable storage and audio playback. The iRivers are incredibly popular amoung 'i.t. people'. I know a lot of folks rave on about Creative's products as well. I personally like the Neuros.

From a tech standpoint the iPod lacks some functionality, or has too high a price point for many of us. But from marketing, fashion, and the MTV crowd it is the "it" thing to own. No one can predict these things though. "It" just happens. Like a $45 trucker hat.

the new beta firmware for the Neuros has a "DJ" menu that lets you speed up or slow down the audio (and set A/B loop points). It doesn't do pitch correction and only works when the headphones are connected (the FM Modulation stuff for MyFi is expensive and decoding high bit rate Vorbis + resample + FM Modulation is probably too much for the thing to handle; or it may just be that they didn't see a need for it over FM Radio and it could be enabled once the firmware makes it out of beta). Still, if you don't mind everyone's voices being a step or two higher, it works well for audio books.

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.

256kbps listening tests are not really useful in this context. The Sony device has a small hard disc drive, but claims to be able to store more songs than an iPod because the Atrac3Plus compression allows much lower bitrates for equivalent quality (they claim 13,000 songs on the 20GB HDD, which means they'll be calculating based on the lowest standard Atrac bitrate, IIRC about 44kbps).

We should really be concentrating on whether circa-44kbps Atrac3Plus is better or worse than AAC, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis at that bitrate, if we're to take Sony at their word on capacity. I mention Vorbis as this player is not just competing against the iPod - it competes against devices like the Rio Karma [1] and Neuros players too.

A codec showing itself to be almost transparent at 256kbps is hardly cutting edge in this day and age - even MP3 would achieve this as far as most listeners are concerned. Having tried the double blind testing software from the Hydrogen Audio tests, I'm also fairly confident of their listening test results.

[1] (BTW, I'm biased; I went for a Karma. Great so far, just waiting for the HDD to die ;-)

Get the Neuros. It supports ogg, has open source software, and is fairly inexpensive.

Interesting, they seem to be trying to develop an open source community around their product. Some very interesting ideas:- an open firmware, an XML db for the Synchronisation Manager, and oh, they seem to be using .net code in their apps. Hmmmm.

I've been researching MP3 players and found the Neuros. It has an extensive list of different formats, including Ogg as well as the others.

The key features of the Neuros that are motivating me to buy one are the "record stream from FM" (as well as record from any audio input or onbord mic) to MP3 or WAV, and the "broadcast low power FM" (so I can listen through my car stereo on an unused frequency.)

To be balanced, though: there were some user complaints about the power level of the FM broadcast not being sufficient, but these were not universal. The Neuros II, which seems to have come out in the past couple of days, is supposed to help fix some of the version 1 drawbacks.

Frankly, about the only thing the Neuros lacks now are 100bT with on board Apache, 802.11[abg] interfaces (it has USB 2.0), but there don't seem to be many player/recorders out there with those right now.

An MP3 player with a good button layout might be good, but you need one that doesn't really rely too much on being able to read the screen. An iPod might not be very good because that jog wheel might not be much use. I think the Neuros might be good option.

You can download a lot of talking books from the filesharing networks like eDonkey, and AFAIK it would be legal as long as you also bought the hardcopy. The RNIB site has links to some more legitimate suppliers.

BBC Radio 4 lets you listen online to most of their programmes from the last week, and they have a lot of dramas and book readings (and some great comedy). Unfortunately it's currently in RealMedia format, but that is due to change.

Lastly, if any of your friends are web designers, encourage them to follow the WAI guidelines otherwise she might not be able to access their websites (not that she will neccessarily want to, but it's always good to get more people interested in accessibility).

PS. Tell her 'Hi' from Slashdot!

I pick up my 128mb solid state ogg player that I bought from Neuros Audio. It plays Ogg along with several other formats just fine. Once you tell people you can fit twice the number of songs on your "mp3" player without losing much quality by using Ogg Vorbis, they start listening.

The Neuros, Rio Karma, and iRiver all support Ogg Vorbis.

I do: Neuros all the way, man - the $250 I spent on it could have bought me a stinkin 4 GB iPod, but instead, I have 20 GB of Vorbis awesomeness.

I live in Maryland where the weather can go from 95F to -15F in one day and I didn't always take care of my CDs. The ones that have peeled are the ones that I left in a binder in the car overnight when it was below zero outside or in the car on a hot day.

Needless to say I keep my CDs in a binder on a shelf in my room that stays at around 73F all the time now (having a portable music player is a godsend). It's too dangerous for my to carry around a pair of binders with nearly three hundred discs between them...especially since a lot of the CDs I have are out of print now or from tiny bands no one has ever heard of in the US (e.g. Mirrored Mind, Basilisk, Gutrot, ...).

I have to disagree that MP3 is good enough for anything but immediate playback. CD quality is good enough for long term storage but any lossy format is not. As soon as I can afford a 250G hard drive I'm going to re-rip my CDs one last time to Ogg FLAC so that I can replace them in the future if the discs should die. For me 160kbps Vorbis is good enough to not notice the distortion but I want a lossless copy so that I can re-encode my music in whatever new codec offers the best filespace to quality size in the future for my portable player / transfer over the net / storage on a laptop / wherever I can't use the FLACs.

The Neuros audio player is still far ahead of this thing from iRiver when it comes to just audio... since Neuros has actually open sourced the code behind their player, it offers FM transmission in addition to tuner, 30 sec clip of audio will identify the song playing, can record audio sources etc... and has been on the market now for some time, and has free USB 2.0 upgrade. =) Thats fantastic.

The Neuros audio player is still far ahead of this thing from iRiver when it comes to just audio... since Neuros has actually open sourced the code behind their player, it offers FM transmission in addition to tuner, 30 sec clip of audio will identify the song playing, can record audio sources etc... and has been on the market now for some time, and has free USB 2.0 upgrade. =) Thats fantastic.

How much, and when is this going to get into my Neuros?

Thank god I bought a Neuros so I don't have to care about this :)

The Neuros beats the Karma in a lot of ways. I know this because I have a Neuros and my brother has a Karma. The Neuros can record from line-in (also has a cheap built-in mic which works for recording lectures) to either MP3 or WAV. It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car / anywhere someone has a radio but no decent music). It works as a normal HD (USB2 now even). The backpack system rocks too: A new 40G USB2 backpack will be running me $260 instead of $330 for a new player (I sort of dropped my 20G backpack one too many times...). With my now dead 20G backpack (gah, making fun of hardcore kids skanking and getting beat up at a death metal show is NOT a smart thing to do with an mp3 player in your hand) the battery backpack has become a lifesaver; even though I can only fit two or three albums on the 128M of flash (the new Neuros II due out in about two weeks has 256M of flash and looks cooler) it's still a lot nicer to carry the Neuros around than my two CD binders (270 discs now ... that's too many to carry around safely).

The Karma, on the other hand, has better playlist management and a much better equalizer (parametric eqs are fun...but only if you know what you are doing). The visualizations are nice and all but are basically just useless (and battery draining) eye candy. I'd gladly take a Neuros over a Karma any day. If the Neuros would release 1.8" drive based backpacks...the iPod would be dead in a minute. Size is the only thing holding it back now that Firmware 2.x supports all of the things people have been asking for since the beginning.

And if you're looking for just a portable hard drive, you can always get a USB2 backpack from the Neuros store, a power adaptor, and a USB2 cable...all for around $300 total for a portable HD (the USB2 packpacks can operate as standalone hard drives without the head) that can operate on its built in battery for a while (which is great for quick transfers; at USB2 speed I've found that I can copy the entire drive in around 15 minutes and without needed the power cable at all). If you get the urge to listen to music it's only $100 more to get a head for your backpack.

And think about the guy who has 160G of music. Just grab a few 40G backpacks and swap between them; much cheaper than getting the same number of Karmas or iPods. 60G backpacks are supposed to be released sometime soonish too (and 1.8" HD backpacks...in December; they may or may not meet it...but the Neuros II is at least confirmed as shipping June 10 because several resellers have been preselling it).

This would be interesting to me if it supported Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. I just bought the fantastic Rio Karma digital music player, and I chose it over the other offerings, specifically because it supports Ogg Vorbis. I'm in the process of encoding my entire CD collection in this format, for both quality and philosophical reasons.
Besides the Rio, there are two other HD based players that support Ogg/Vorbis, the iRiver H120 and the Neuros but I went with the Karma mostly because it's the smallest of the three, the price was right, and the sound is excellent.

Since when did Apple care about anything else but look & feel wrt the I-pod. People buy I-pods because they look cool. If you want a really good technical spec, you'd get a Neuros Audio player or something like that (and I think its cheaper). There are plenty of less-well-speced but perfectly good players for a lot cheaper than a Neuros or I-pod around too.

I use mine to play music, not to stare at.

The next generation of Neuros looks like this.

Disclaimer: I have a Neuros and I love it.

A 20GB Neuros is only $200, for one. Mad featureous, too.

The DAC in the iPod is fairly high quality. It is not unreasonable for someone to simply encode their CDs using Apple's lossless codec and put them on the iPod. With a 40G model around 60 albums (assuming an average size of 650M) could be stored losslessy in WAV; a few more using Apple's lossless encoder. It would be like turning your 40G iPod into a 5G iPod and swapping music around but such is life.

It becomes more realistic when you have 80G and 100G drives in your player; in a few months the Neuros is supposed to have 80G backpacks available (right now up to 40G are available and a few online stores are advertising the availability of the 80G model early) and you can order an 80G backpack right now from Cool4u2View. The Neuros doesn't support any lossless codecs except for WAV right now (although there is support for WMA I have never used it and do not know if it supports WMA lossless or even if WMA lossless is anything more than tagged WAV). 80G is still around 110 albums. The Neuros IIRC uses the same DAC as the iPod so the quality of the sound would be excellent.

For me -b 160kbps Vorbis files are good enough; I plan to re-encode my collection to FLAC when I get a larger HD for music (right now it is a poor little 20G that only has 4G free) as well as Vorbis (abcde makes it easy to encode to more than one format and put them in different directories) -q5 (for my Neuros).

So your last comment still applies to most people. Not everyone though.

a technology with little corporate backing, no mainstream supporters, and not built into any native OS distributions... is there anyone that crazy?

Well, you could always buy a Neuros and swap out the stock drive for one of these. They already offer an 80GB model, through a 3rd party vendor.

The Neuros has the ability. It works fairly well and even does Ogg Vorbis.

It's not the most polished or small portable music player, but the FM broadcast feature is nice. The best part about it is that it inspired me to take my attenna off of my car (to reduce interference) and now no one can steal the radio and turn it to something stupid (like anything played on the radio). I still get the AM news station with the attenna off, but FM is gone.

The quality of the broadcast is limited by the low power of the transmitter and the limits of FM radio. If I had a non-stock sound system (91 Camaro so the stock is a lot better than evil tinny early 90s Asian cars but is still kind of bad) I would patch it into my head unit via line-in. If you are looking to replace a cassette tape adaptor it sounds a lot better and works when you lack a cassette deck.

Neuros

It seems odd that they didn't include a review of the Neuros Audio unit. I have the unit with the 20G hard drive, and although the firmware is a little wobbly, it's a great unit with a cool feature called HiSi, or "Hear it - See it" that lets you identify a song on the built-in radio or even on a P.A. system through the internal microphone.

It seems odd that they didn't include a review of the Neuros Audio unit. I have the unit with the 20G hard drive, and although the firmware is a little wobbly, it's a great unit with a cool feature called HiSi, or "Hear it - See it" that lets you identify a song on the built-in radio or even on a P.A. system through the internal microphone.

My Neuros MP3/OGG player has been able to do this for a year.

Still, posts on the Neuros forums (like this one) suggest that the feature works rather well. So you get unlimited uses of the ID feature for a $200 player--if you think you'll want to identify 200 songs over the course of a couple of years, that's like getting the Neuros player for free. Good deal.

Run linux?... well not really, but the neuros does and HiSi for the neuros is free and allows you to record a 30 second clip (line-in/built in mic/FM radio) and then on synchronizing it goes out to the web and analyzes each recording and gives a result. As with any audio-fingerprinting it is innacurate, but i would imagine less innacurate than a 24khz+ cellphone connection.

This uses a pattern recognition database, much like the Neuros personal audio player
the thing about this type of software is that it will try to match any sound you play for it.
...I wonder what chart toppers sound most like my farts

and YES, it plays ogg vorbis!

You are right that the 'brand names' don't support these formats very well. This is why you should probably look past the brand names and check out the little guys...

Neuros Has more capacity than an Ipod mini, cheaper, plays OggVorbis, MP3, can record from the internal FM radio and even go out on the net and figure out which song it recorded. You can transmit your music over FM to a radio, the HD is removable and upgradable, the software is open source, it has a built in Mic that can record at full cd quality (helpful for sneaking into concerts) The iPod doesn't look that hot any more. You can also get a 99$ version that has a 128mb flash module which can be upgraded to the 20gb version for $129.

The Neuros is a 20GB mp3/ogg player with open source software, linux software, etc. It retails for about 200 bucks, and has one of the best battery return policies I've ever seen. I've had mine for about 2 months and am extremely happy with it... especially its built-in FM transmitter.