Portable Ogg Players?

David Frascone asks: "A few months ago, I got a bug up my sphincter and decided to convert all of my MP3 files into Ogg-Vorbis files. I've been pretty happy with the conversion, even though it was supposed to be a bit lossy (I can't hear any difference) . Anyway, now I'm looking for a portable music player that plays Ogg-Vorbis files, and I'm coming up empty. I *really* don't want to have to convert the tunes back to MP3 on the fly to put them onto a portable player. Does anyone know of any ogg players out there?" While Ogg compatibility has been slow to catch on, most of the tools necessary to create a player are already available. However no one has yet taken that final step to update existing MP3 players or to introduce new units with the added functionality and bring them to the market, yet. If someone has info on Ogg-enabled players that may be in the pipe, please let us know. Hardware manufacturers: If you're reading this, there's a huge demand for you to tap into. If your MP3 players already support fixed point decoding, there is already a software decoder for Ogg that is ready for use from the fine folks over at the Xiph.org:

I get this question every day, and there is no doubt that there is plenty of demand for portable Ogg players. There are a lot of people out in the community that aren't buying portables until they are certain that they can play Vorbis files on them. I can certainly understand this; Vorbis is a superior audio compression codec to mp3, and if people are going to spend money, they want quality and the ability to use a patent-free codec.

Most portable players in the universe don't have a floating-point unit, which is necessary to use the reference decoder that we give away to the world. That's okay, we're familiar with the challenge, and we're now licensing Tremor, which is a fixed-point decoder designed for use on portable devices. Tremor is already working in the wild; tkcPlayer from theKompany uses Tremor to play Vorbis files on the Sharp Zaurus.

So, if you're a hardware manufacturer that wants to include Ogg Vorbis playback on your portable player du jour, please drop me an E-mail to emmett@xiph.org. Don't worry about the huge up-front costs like you're paying with Fraunhofer. We want to work with you to make Vorbis playback a possibility on your machine, and licensing terms are extremely flexible to accommodate small companies (even one-man shops) up to the big guys.

To those who want their portable to play Vorbis files, copy this message to your favorite manufacturer. Also, thanks to the Open Source and Free Software communities for their continued support! If it weren't for Open Source, we wouldn't be able to produce and maintain the best lossy audio compression codec on Planet Earth.

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

So if you want Ogg support, you might have to lobby for it.

Comments

sharp zaurus

[frankmu]

get the sharp zaurus, and a 128 SD card to go with it.