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Ogg Vorbis Players?
TokyoBoy asks: "I have been looking at in-dash mp3 head units and changers lately. However, its occured to me that I would much rather make Ogg/Vorbis files instead of mp3s now. Does anyone know of any hardware manufacturers who plan on supporting the Ogg/Vorbis format in either portable or car stereo equipment?" I would figure this wouldn't be so hard to add on support to some of those Linux-based players out there. There has been a lot of press about the Empeg Car MP3 player (now RioCar...here's hoping that these units are still as flexible as they always were), over the past year, and Slashdot did
this MP3 player project which also might proove to be a good starting point. If anyone out there has done this already, please share your experiences.
The FAQ on the Vorbis site refers to this
Ogg will catch on because *companies* want it. Hardware manufacturers, software companies, they want quality, Free audio - why wouldn't they? WMA failed because MS wanted $$ for it, and always will. Vorbis is utterly Free, and the tools are going to be ready to go when they do a 1.0 release. When that 1.0 hits, I think it's going to make a huge splash. If the transition from mp3->vorbis can be done seamlessly (which, if Nullsoft puts the Vorbis plugin into Winamp's default download package, it will be), I think MP3 may be what's "through." What is MP3's advantage, if all the major software players support it? (there's the hardware market, but weren't you saying something about "niche" earlier?)
The Free desktop that Just Works
The only one I have heard of is the IOMega Hip Zip, which will supposedly support Vorbis in the future which is useless if you want one now. (And also useless if you're in the majority that thinks 40 Megabyte media are too small.)
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um, who cares what other people think? The files are a good size, the sound is good, and the code is available. I rip all my cds to ogg, why do I need someone else's permission to use them. I doubt they'll ever be used in standalone players (unless someone hacks in a codec), but I don't see why ogg support can't be added to the empeg car deal-y.
Go bug the Vorbis developers. Hipzip supports vorbis in beta code today!
Umm, right. There's already a popular product, so nobody else should even try to come up with something better. With that kind of attitude we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Vorbis may not be as popular as MP3, but it's technically superior, and it works, right now. The compression and sound quality are excellent. The people behind it are working hard to have support included in popular players, and have even written a firmware update for the HipZip portable player to add Vorbis support (I just bought one of these players, and the Vorbis update does indeed work). Furthermore, Ogg Vorbis is not patented, and you don't have to pay royalties to anyone to use it (whereas Thompson charges significant royalties for MP3-related products).
So yes, it's the underdog compared to MP3, but it's far from through. With the attitude of "it's not the most popular and therefore it's pointless", though, we have little to look forward to in this world.
-John
Hey. Just reading through the posts regarding the in-dash unit you are looking for. I'd like to point you to a great discount site which I frequently purchase from. It's called MM X-Press. They've got some sweet deals from a lot of well-known manufacturers. They're not the cheapest on everything but they do have a lot of good deals. Let me know what you think.
Checking recent posts, in addition to working at a hardware manufaturer and a stock brokerage firm he's also apparently recently worked for an (unnamed) ISP, and has somehow been in on some Polls taken at the University of Illinois.
Guy gets around!
ps- good eyes! I never normally look at the name of the person posting
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
I would buy any decent portable player for this feature alone. (I've been bugging Sonic Blue -- they make the Rio line of players, most of which are firmware-upgradeable -- about including Ogg support for a while now. If anyone is interested, call or email [see below] and ask them about it. The more interest they get in Ogg, the more likely they will be to consider using it.)
-cf
SonicBlue product/technical support: (541) 967-2450 or customersupport@sonicblue.com
SonicBlue pre-sales/customer support: (800) 468-5846
BEFORE you look at players, perhaps we should examine the quality of ... the entire project with all its components?
... and on the subject of decoding, WinAMP (with the ogg playback plugin) takes two to four times as much of the CPU (on my Win2k box) with ogg files as compared to mp3 files.
I would use Ogg Vorbis if it were equivalent to lame in quality. Sad fact is that it isn't. It's getting closer, but not quite there yet. Sure, it's a better format, more free and useable, but I care about quality. I'm not comparing it to mp3 as a whole; it's better than most mp3 encoders. Lame still whoops ogg though. While the lame team is actually working on ogg (I believe that they're actually just supporting one guy who may have given up trying), Ogg encoders and decoders still have quite a way to go in order to be fully competitive with lame.
The Ogg team has the right ideas and plays them well, and I'd encourage others to use the format, but when I rip and encode music, it will be with the latest Lame. I try the new Ogg Vorbis on occaision, but I'll probably wait for a front page Slashdot article to claim it is equal or better than Lame (which I believe WILL happen) before my next return to Ogg experimentation.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
This is one of those times I wish I had some moderation points sitting around -- someone mod this Citron1313 troll into OBLIVION.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
I attend the Winter CES in Las Vegas, as well as the CEDIA show. I can tell you, every maker of music jukeboxes I talked to was very interested. MP3 licence fees cut into their profits, and if they had a free (as speech) encoder that they could optimize for their application, they would be very happy. That it is also free (as in beer) makes them overjoyed.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
This topic comes up on the empeg BBS quite a bit. Last I remember, the major hurdle is to get a non FPU decoder for the ARM platform. Beyond that, it should be possible. And right now, the Rio-Car is on sale. $999 for the 10 gig model, well worth the money even if it is used for MP3s in the mean time.
I've tried out Vorbis on a couple of albums (started looking when it got to beta 2). Beta 4 is on a par with Lame (except I find 128Kb Vorbis nicer to listen to than 160Kb Lame MP3). There are a couple of builds of the alpha version 1 release candidate around, and they're even more impressive - they have a couple of bugs with amplifying noise, but have encoded a couple of my albums to approx. 85Kb/s streams that sound incredible. It's still not the best codec to choose for very low bit rates (i.e. IP telephony), but it's definately the best cross platform format you can get for music and mid-to-high-quality reproduction.
So, yes, I'll be reencoding my 150 albums to Vorbis when RC1 is out. If only for the 40% space saving on my hard drive.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.