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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.So if you want Ogg support, you might have to lobby for it.
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, while we're at it, how about a player that can handle the lossless compression format flac. I have all my CDs converted to flac, and am holding out for a portable player (preferably >15GB) that can play flac files and read ID3v2 tags. *That* would be nirvana.
Speaking of bugs he hardly deserved that thrashing. I kinda thought bit lossy was pretty funny.
Your trashing him for not being unable to tell the difference between the original and compressed versions discounts the possibility that his brain is just better at filling in those holes and missing pieces than yours might be. This may make the experience quite pleasurable to him whereas you might find it very unpleasant.
Also you use this factoid of a 128kbps sound source which you should know, judging by the corrections you so roughly made, is not an accurate meter for judging a systems ability to reproduce the original sound wave.
I agree that was kind of lame of him to convert from mp3 to ogg with the only reasoning being the apparent perceived bragging rights, which he even uses in this post, about how all his CDs are in ogg. You do realize it is even lamer for you to talk down to him because he is not as 37337 as you.
Now the question you should ask is; why is a sun codemonkey making a post like this? Obviously working for large fortune 500 companies has taught him nothing about ROI and how that relates to hardware manufactures and how long it will be till they see a profit and thus look at making improvements to an existing product line. Reworking how they currently do things cost money and in a perceived economic lull they are unlikely to take any huge jumps.
My guess is that you will see the ogg players first in the high end mp3 hardware (like the iPod) causing mp3 only hardware to drop making it difficult to move the more expensive units as Joe nobody hasn't the faintest about the differences between ogg and mp3. He just knows he can download music off the Internet put it in this device and listen to it like a cd "cool".
Course that's just my two cents take it or leave it shove it or sheave it.
Hehe, you don't know who you're talking to. Whomever is 37337, it is certainly not me...never got the hang of IRC, probably having my box hacked right now, use Windows at work, etc. I do not have a single .ogg file, nor do I understand why I would want to. It was, in fact, as a non-37337 that I was responding: clearly the OP has as much experience [points] as I do in these matters.
If the Free Software community focusses on these kinds of superficial goalse.g., convincing people to convert their mp3's to ogg'sthen Linux and BSD will end up just as much laughingstocks as Windows is currently. If people understand Free Software, they will want it; I am convinced of that. The correct approach is not to fool them into using Free alternatives, it is to educate them.
Thanks for giving it to me straight, and rock on through the ages. That goes for everyone, actually, Win and Lin users alike: rock and roll till you pass the fsck out, this party's groovin' and it's just getting started. RnR will never die, and Real Men Rock. Peace, I'm out.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
get the sharp zaurus, and a 128 SD card to go with it.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Erm, the Neo Jukebox will *never* be able to play Oggs. Why? Because it uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip. There is no audio path except out of this chip. It can never decode anything *but* MP3s.
One reason for OGG not being in portable players (eg, rio 600, nomad II, etc) is that OGG requires more workspace ram than these players have; anything based on the Cirrus 7209 or 7309 CPUs has 37.5k/48k of ram in total - megs of ROM space, obviously, but not enough ram to run OGG. As a comparison, the ARM MP3 decoder takes about 20k ram (inc input & output buffers), and WMA just takes a couple of K more.
However, the Nomad jukebox, iPod, Rio Riot, etc have external DRAM and can run OGG. I have seen a HipZip playing OGGs, but this was an internal build and never got released.
Hugo
I'm with you every step there. My POV is, basically, there were lots of reasons to switch from .gif to .png, but not really many to switch from .jpeg to .png. And switching from .mp3 to .ogg seems more like the latter. That's just my impression. And the ogg advocacy is putting the cart before the horse, because, while it could grow into a really great audio codec, it hasn't yet, AFAIK, so the hype should let up a bit. I do understand that they're trying to generate income, so maybe the hype is unavoidable. But that is, IMO, all the more reason to take it with a grain or two of salt.
My 2 cents.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
What - like what the MP3 people did with their licenses?
SIG: HUP