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Xiph.org Releases Free Fixed-Point Vorbis Decoder
volsung writes "A lot of us want portable music players with Vorbis support, right? Well, Xiph.org has decided to help speed the process by releasing their integerized Vorbis decoder, named "Tremor," under a BSD-like license. Tremor is a Vorbis decoding library written for CPUs without floating point hardware, like most handheld devices use. It was previously a proprietary library--licensed by theKompany for their Sharp Zaurus player, among others--but now it's available for everyone to use. The release page also gives contact information for many of the popular hardware manufacturers. If you want Vorbis support in your hardware, now is the time to send some emails! (Also, please say thanks to the Xiph.org crew with a donation if you can.)"
Woohoo, finally some *GOOD* news ... however, I thought most MP3 players used hardware decoders. Will they still benefit from this?
f1rst p0st for all my homiez in #vorbis!
(I always wanted to try and fp my own story.)
Now put them down and get writing to the manufacturing companies!
This was a big stumbling block in getting RIO & iPod type players to support Ogg.
Any idea if this means we can look forward to some Ogg lovin' built-in to consumer products? Timetable?
Thanks Xiph!
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is just in time... Are there any flash upgradable MP3 players out that can take advantage of this??
Ya know, I bet the Kompany is probably pissed....
TODO: Something witty here...
I was wondering if someone with more relevant knowledge than I might make an estimation about how much more quickly we might expect to see Ogg support now that this has happened. Are embedded chips without FPU really that much more prevalent, or are they just that much cheaper?
... listen to Howard Stern and then switch to music when it gets dull/commercials. Is this so complicated?
I also wanted to know, on a side note, why the hell portable mp3 players don't come with a damn FM tuner in them. Is it a design/form factor issue? Perceived marketability problem?
I want to use my mp3/ogg player while at the gym
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
This is good news, but without a big corp behind it I'm sceptical about whether hardware manufacturers will adopt it. What I'm more worried about now is Xiph themselves though. They've done a great job, and given us this fantastic gift, but now how do they make money? If the library was originally proprietary, then what do they have now?
So, the Zaurus's main CPU does not have a FPU? Can someone comment on this? I was eying the Zaurus today, specially since best buy has the lowest price of 300 bucks for one now.
and I believe OGG will achieved the same popularity and extension that it's other BSD Licensed bretheren enjoy. It's gotta be the freedom of the BSD license that encourages companys to pick up on this stuff, rather than re-inventing the wheel with yet another standard because they don't like a particular clause or so in the license..
If you own a NEX II like I do, please write to frontier labs and let them know that you'd like an ogg decoder in their firmware and that it's even freely available for them to use now too!
Then we won't having to worry about that stupid mp3 licensing fee.
Go OGG Go!!!
P.S. Thanks xiph.org dudes!!!
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Most use fixed point DSPs which are pretty much general purpose CPUs.. This code is 100% applicable.
This is good for the public at large, but I'll bet theKompany feels like suckers for buying a license.
And I'll bet that this will make it more difficult for Vorbis to sell more licenses for other products down the road.
By "they still haven't released a complete specification for the file format, or the audio format", I assume you meant, "Back when Vorbis hit 1.0, I read the full specification and stopped spreading FUD", right?
Oh, the joys of being able to name the roads if you're a big enough company.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
I had a project that implemented a MIPS R3000 with everything you needed to run an OS. I even got gcc to compile code. I nearly made a fixed point MP3 player (MAD) to run on it but I run out of time. I found MAD a little complex to walk throuhg and convet each function so it can run without an OS.
I might have a go with this OGG player and make a fully open source digital music player.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Does anyone familar with this implementation have any idea how processor-heavy it is?
.ogg to flac at the server level. Or just to rip everything to flac (which requires a whole lot more disk space. :( )
I ask because people have played with an earlier floating point implementation on the Rio Receiver, and have found that it wasn't terribly usable. I'm a little short on details, but I think it was too intensive for the low-speed CPU in the receiver.
On the other hand, there has been work to build replacement clients for the Rio Receiver that use FLAC lossless compression, and that apparently works pretty well. So the current thinking is to transcode
Hey all you 1000 million mp3 users, follow us!
I've been using tkc's player on my Zaurus for a month now and it's been solid. This is great news to hear it's under a BSD-style license.
However I still recommend Zaurus owners shell out the 10 bucks for tkc's player to help support further development of Zaurus applications.
Sure, you can use MS media player to play Vorbis (with the optional plugins) but you can't put that in your pocket.
First Apple announces that they will make their iPod's compatible with PCs and now there is a fixed-point Vorbis decoder!
I was hesistant in buying an iPod because all my music is in ogg vorbis format (and with good reason, given all the legal issues that are coming up with mp3). The iPod processor is capable of decoding Vorbis but it is fixed-point and I was desperately waiting for someone to port over the algorithm and I even considered undertaking the project myself.
But now that they have released the fixed-point implementation it should be any day now that we see a port to the iPod making it the best portable digital music player and a truly kick-ass piece of hardware. Now if it would only take standard AA batteries...
Actually not at all. We didn't pay a big licensing fee for Tremor and this came about before we paid any royalties, so it works out just fine for us. We love Xiph and Ogg Vorbis and have lots more stuff coming along to continue working with them. We have a nice easy to use and multi-platform (later this week) ripper for Ogg Vorbis called tkcOggRipper which you can check out at www.thekompany.com/projects/tkcoggripper. We also have an entirely ogg based internet radio station coming online shortly at www.progrock.com - we ripped about 350 CD's using tkcOggRipper, and we have even more fun stuff ahead.
. com
Rock on Xiph and may Ogg Vorbis rule the day!
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany
The lack of a floating point processor in most mp3 players was a major technical problem with vendors adding ogg support to their hardware. Now that a non-fp codebase is available for the taking, this could very well mean the beginning of widespread ogg acceptance! My only concern would be the following: If was a company like Sony and I did some R&D to improve the quality of ogg files in order to give my products a competative edge over other brands, would I have to make those improvements open source?
Sometimes even small fries get to name a road, if they're the only residence on it.
(Yes, I know I'm offtopic...)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
There was a slashdot story about the fixed-point version being available (as part of the first official release of the spec) only a few weeks ago.
Tremor is a great name. Probably the best name to ever some out of the xiph folks. The only good one actually, besides cdparanoia.
I propose we adopt Tremor as the name of Vorbis files. Even if it is techically inaccurate and a bit confusing to people who have already put in the effort to figure out what Ogg Vorbis is, in the long run Tremor is a high memorable and markettable name for an audio format. Sounds much cooler than mp3 even.
There has been a fixed point implimentation for ages, just not an open publically released one.. the lack of IPOD support is due to lack of interest from Apple.. Your voice counts, go bug them.
There is a spec, stop trolling.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
/me raises a pint of Murph's and salutes Xiph.org. May MP3 die a fast, utterly shamefull and painfull death.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I know that everyone is down on the BSD and up on the GPL, but we owe a tremendous amount to the BSD license.. Companys (like microsoft) took up stuff like the TCP/IP stack, BIND, etc..
The BSD License is an excellent license for some things, just as the GPL is an excellent license for other things.
OggVorbis is one area where the BSD License makes perfect sense, namely, in an effort to get a published, open format implimented as widely as possible.
The GPL is an ideal license for persons and companies that wish to make their code available and participate in a public commons, without unconditionally handing their crown jewels over to a competitor. Indeed, there are many commercially written programs whose source code likely wouldn't have been released at all, or would have been released only under really onerous restrictions, such as Microsoft's so-called open license, Sun's community license, or something along those lines.
Both licenses are excellent. Both philosophies are a positive contribution to the intellectual wealth of humankind, and both have their place. Which one is most applicable to a given set of circumstances depends largely upon those circumstances and the goals in mind.
In this case, the goal is to spread the use of Ogg Vorbis as far and wide as possible, for which the BSD license is ideal. Indeed, even the FSF, which normally has strong reservations with regard to the BSD license, has endorsed the release of OggVorbis under the BSD license.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
With MP3 dying a slow death due to the license changes, M$ pushing their format, and the upcoming DRM legal requirments.. does it effect me personally that this exists?
Sure its nice, and kudos to them for doing this, but isnt it a bit like pissing in the ocean after the boat already set sail?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Fixed point Vorbis decoding has been around for a while. Companies aren't getting enough userbase demand for it to matter.
My only concern would be the following: If was a company like Sony and I did some R&D to improve the quality of ogg files in order to give my products a competative edge over other brands, would I have to make those improvements open source?
RTFL:
Hugo
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Have there been any REAL double-blind tests as well as equipment tests of quality comparisons between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis yet? They never seem to get done. All the tests so far are of the form "Hey! My music sounds really l33t !!!!!"
Anybody know of some honest testing across a wide variety of music (particularly instrumental / classical / baroque) that is not just one person's subjective opinion?
Everyone seems to think that doing a lossy music compressor is just a "matter of cranking it out", but it's an extremely difficult problem. I'm not going to trust a bunch of amateurs until I see some real evidence that they know what they're doing. And no, "test it out yourself" is not an option. I have better things to do with my time, particularly since MP3 is free.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Please tell Apple you want Ogg Vorbis support in the iPod.
I don't care about portables, it's my home system I'm curious about. XMMS I don't so much worry about, but I'm not going to replace hardware. What I have works for me, and if I have to use .mp3 with it, then I will, no matter what license the format has. I suspect a lot of people that have bought and are using MP3-only hardware feel and will act the same way, at least until that hardware gets replaced. mayeb what we need is for new hardware to decode both formats? I could see phasing in Vorbis decoders as being easily doable.
I really wish OGG would have been around (read: taken off) like in 1997...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Yawn, because it took so long for it to happen. Come on. Fixed point is not exactly difficult to deal with. Why didn't we see it sooner?
You might not like it, but it's much more ideal (to the company) than GPL, and for most licensees it's just as good. In fact, the only people that don't like it are GPL zealots.
GPL 'zealots' as you so snidely call them (but, of course, its Microsoft entusiasts, isn't it?), and just about anyone who is interested in contributing their time and energy to products.
The communities which form up around Apple, Netscape, Microsoft, and Sun's licenses are positively anemic compared to the communities which have sprung up around both the BSD and GPLed licensed projects. Why? Because they give the users and the volunteer developers the least amount of freedom, and no guarantee that their work won't simply be seized from them (indeed, they generally rather state the opposite).
You are correct, I don't like it. Nor do the vast majority of volunteer developers and users, so much os that Mozilla changed its licensing scheme in order to attract developers (and succeeded by the way), as did Sun with their GPLed release of Open Office.
Does that make me a GPL zealot? Probably by your definition, since your definition appears to imply anyone not actively trying to malign the GPL is by definition a zealot. However, as one who publicly embraces numerous free licenses, including the BSD license and the GPL, I think I, and most free software enthusiasts, fall well outside of what both the dictionary and the average person would define as a "zealot."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Called a Troll? Sigh.
Luckily the arm linux kernel has pretty good FPU emulation. You can either choose the industrial strength double precision model, or the somewhat experimental Acorn Fast FPU emulator. I personally use the double precision one on my Netwinder.
Anyways, it really doesn't affect the general performance too much. The integer math is very fast and most Zaurus apps are tuned to use the integer ops just like this Vorbis decoder. I know the Netwinder is plenty fast for web surfing, and it makes a great firewall/router/server box. It runs X very snappy at 1024x768 and the Zaurus only has to contend with 320x200 and not even full XFree86 but QTopia instead.
If you really need a FPU you should probably look into some kind of sub-notebook instead of a pocket pc, or just run your number crunching app remotely through the docking station :-)
Clickety Click
Why is this interesting? Hey moderators wake the heck up.
An 8051 is a trivial old-school 8-bit MCU that doesn't even have a fast enough clockrate to handle the throughput let alone the data itself. Not to mention it has one 8-bit register, 128 bytes of ram and virtually no support for DSP math.
Might as well have asked if you could implement it on a 4004 or something!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
every time some new compression comes along, otherwise I'll be putting a new CD player in my car every year.
A lot of us want portable music players with Vorbis support, right?
Uh, no, seeing is that I haven't heard of Vorbis until now.
Might as well ask "A lot of us want full SVG support on our Vectrex game consoles, right?"
- I love your player on the zaurus
clean interface and good sound and
with the ogg support I can throw
plenty of songs on the couple of 128
meg CFs I have around.
The only downside compared to the Zaurus' media
player is that the volume control is no longer easy to get at -
- I have my portable OGG player and am damned happy with it-
Paul Ellis
ellis@cantrip.net
I gave $16 (yeah small) without even intending to use it (I prefer non-lossy compression). I just want to promote free software.
Evidently this was written for a 200MHz strongARM.
Does anyone how much of the CPU is required on
a Zaurus? More specifically, will it run on the
74MHz Cirrus ARM7 used in the Rio600, Rio Receiver,
etc.
jeff
I just sent a commecnt to the customer service part of sonicblue's website asking them to add ogg vorbis support for the sp250. I sure hope they consider doing it. I really like the ogg file format it's much better than mp3, the only reason I'm not using it right now is because my sp250 can't play oggs.
Strictly speaking, this isn't 'fixed-point' although it is all integer. It uses primarily fixed point, but in the deep S/N vector paths, it uses integerized movable point in a way that most embedded architectures can do the shifts for free during ALU load (eg, look at the ARM assembly for the shift/multiplies). Have a look at the Vorbis codec spec on xiph.org if you want to know why this is necessary.
Also, this code's been around for a while... we're releasing it for free now as commercial code has a short shelf life. It ran through it's commercial usefulness, and now we want it to be commodity code.
Monty
> Uh, no, seeing is that I haven't heard of Vorbis until now.
Mmm, this begs one of a few responses:
1) "Gee, you don't care. That's nice. You must be talking to hear yourself talk, then."
2) "Really? I'll tell you what Ogg is if you explain to me why I was supposed to get all excited about Jessica Simpson."
3) "[rolls eyes] Not need respond to rhetorical question, Grog."
4) "Quick! There's another parade to rain on over there! Hurry up, you'll miss it!"
Monty
"All in good fun until someone loses an eye. Then we're talking serious fun."
Hey Moderators, wake UP! Tom has a good point. The 8051 was originally used in keyboards. Still is to the best of my knowledge. That is a very slow data rate. So no, tom's point is not funny, but factual. And I might add, more clued in.
Tremor has been available for some time, just not under a BSD license.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Start here: Hydrogen Audio
No, that's not us (Although we like them as they're likely the least bullshit-laden codec comparison and development bulletin board out there. These guys were *very* harsh about Vorbis's quality the first few years. That feedback was invaluable for making the codec as good as it is today.)
c't has also run tests including Vorbis, and will have a big test run on several thousand listeners to offer here sometime soon. It's basically a much larger version of the tests ff123 has run on Hydrogen Audio. We're not privy to any of the current results, but I expect we'll do just fine ;-)
As for 'cranking it out', Ogg development started in 1993.
Monty
yeah great how about a lib that is for the ARM arch
this is how the windows media gets in most players
then we are talking
Ipod - ARM7 based (with hardware layer 3 MPEG)
rio (new) - ARM7 based
empeg - StrongARM based
talk to cirrus and do a Lib that is ansi c and can be compiled with SDT 2.X and ADS
oh yeah and if it was MIPS based we would have no problems but hey here's wishing (-;
regards
John '64bit for ieee754' Jones
I believe you can get a fast FPGA with an 8051 core; program up some interface logic... ...but you'd probably be banging your head, even if you succeed. Hell, back in the turbo XT days some guys built an 8086 compatible processor out of ECL discretes and bit-slice processors that ran at 100 MHz. But why?
all you have to do is be on the graphic equalizer display screen and then you can use the hardware cursor button to change volume, tracks and pause/resume. It's all in the manual.
:).
glad you like the app
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
Evas2 is the new image libray that effects embedded chips while handling certain details look at his news section as he has snapshots of what evas can do on his pda...www.rasterman.com
I use ogg exclusively over mp3, and love it to bits, and will continue to use it as long as it rocks.
</disclaimer>
That said, I find it a little strange that this announcement of the free specialized ogg decoder comes right after Fraunhoffer(sp?) got hauled over the coals for charging for theirs....
If that is a tactic on the part of the Xiph guys, I'd say its not needed, as ogg is clearly better IMO.
Chill out, man, he was asking an honest question. He didn't ask to get modded up, he was just curious and asked a legitimate question. No sense in shouting and berating him.
If you own a hardware MP3 player, please contact the manufacturer (see URLs in the article).
I own a Rio and i already sent e-mails to SonicBlue. Please do the same thing. Otherwise nothing will change.
That's why we need the manufacturers to support Vorbis.
For example, my Rio Volt 250 is upgradeable via software: you go to their site, download a file, burn it in a CD, put the CD in the player and turn it on. Voila! It's upgraded.
This simple process could be used to make the player Vorbis-aware, of course if the manufacturer is ever going to support it.
The same could happen to your hardware player: get the update, flash it up and that's it - you now have the same hardware playing Vorbis in addition to MP3. There's no need to upgrade the actual hardware for that.
(see subj.)
I was not even stating this uC is any good. The original question was HOW POWERFUL does a Microprocessor need to be in order to decompress OGG, ok?
A microprocessor suggestion would be nice.
On May 04, Nicolas Pitre released a free (GPL) fixed point vorbis decoder and announced it on Vorbis Developement list.
But this important contribution was kept in silence. Even all posts from May 2002 had mysteriously dissapeared from Vorbis-dev archive.
Fortunately a copy of Nicolas announcement could be find here.
Now Xiph.org anounces that its fixed-point implementation is available for free under BSD style license.
This seems very strange to me.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
128 kbps.
Is the original libvorbis faster (due to making productive use of the FPU), or is the new integer math one faster (because floating point is pretty slow in general)? I'd guess that libvorbis is better on Intel and tremor is better on non-Intel x86 (due to the relative strengths of different vendors), but it's hard to say. Has anyone actually benchmarked them? libvorbis is a noticeable load on one of the machiens I use, so it would be worth switching if it would help.
So admittedly this is a bit off topic, but, having been frustrated with my RCA lyra for 2 years now (esp. 'cause i got it as a gift so i feel bad selling it on ebay, but owning it makes it hard to justify buying a real player), i thought "schweet. soon i can get an ogg codec for it, and maybe it won't be like their proprietary brain-damaged MPX format which is like MP3 but 'unpiratable' and requires a particular CF device and software to load onto the card." Well, lyrazone.com has links for an mp3pro codec, wma, etc, but no mention of an ogg codec. Ok, it's a little early for that, it did just come out after all. But there's no way to contact them to inquire about ogg support, request it, etc. Not even in help. Not even in help help.
So the short story is, if i can prevent anyone from buying an rca lyra, please allow me to do so. Their product sucks, their customer service more, and i'll be surprised if they release a vorbis codec which could possibly redeem the lyra.
ok. done ranting. mod at will.
Actually, many hardware MP3 players use CPUs similar to this. All they have to do is pull data off an IDE bus and feed it to a MAS3057 MPEG decoder chip - not exactly tricky.
You're partially right, of course. You couldn't implement a software decoder on an 8051. Well, you could, just not in real-time.
I am thinking there should be more content like
<shameless plug>
LingoTeach, a free language teaching tool that comes with 800 recorded sample pronounciations, and teaches English, German, Spanish and Chinese.
LingoTeach will soon create your own customized language tape or CD. So if you had a portable .ogg player, you could listen to GPL content on the go!
</shameless plug>
Now go and ask Apple for an iPod with Oggs!
get 7 free Japanese lessons.
Thank you, afidel, for trying to conduct some reasonably objective tests and posting the results.
I have been trying to donate some money for the past 30 minutes with no luck. This is what I keep getting
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An error has occurred.
Because we are currently experiencing heavy traffic to our site, we were unable to complete your request. Try clicking the 'Refresh' button on your browser. If you are still unable to access the site, please try again later.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.
Error 3004
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I guess its a good thing. Too many slashdotters donating to a good cause?
T33510
(MP3 microcontroller)
Trumpion Microelectronics Inc.(TMI) announces a new microcontroller, named T33510, which can be used in the applications of MP3 player, Flash Card Reader/Writer or USB to IDE converter. T33510 includes a popular 8051 CPU and is easy firmware development by ICE. This microcontroller uses 0.5um/3.3V process and its CPU speed has 3 frequencies, 6/12/24MHz, to be selected for low power consumption and high speed data transfer. The micocontroller has 32 general IO ports with extra address and data bus to access the user definded program (ROM code).
For MP3 applications, T33510 has a particular hardware to support SmartMedia card, SmartMedia flash memory and CompactFlash card so that the whole MP3 system can has a very impressive performance. Furthermore, a MP3 bit-stream generator to connect with an external MP3 decoder, like Micronas, ST or Samsung, is also designed in T33510 to reduce the firmware efforts of the MPEG-AUDIO playing. The USB and LPT port are all avalible to be used as the download or upload way between the PC and Flash Card or memory. The speed of the data transfer of T33510 for USB can reach to 600 Kbytes/second, and for LPT can reach to 200 Kbytes/second.
For Flash Card Reader/Writer, Trumpion has designed a swappable DMA buffer (2 of 528bytes) in T33510 for speed acceleration of data transfer. This design can read and write data simultaneously, and significantly shorten the time of downloading a film from card to PC or printer. Especially for Smartmedia card or flash the T33510 has a ECC hardware to solve the error correction issue. The USB inside the T33510 is a high speed and easy configuration design for USB to IDE convertion.
For most of USB CD-ROM or hard-driver, T33510 already has provided a good and cheap solution. Trumpion believe they can guarantee their customer a lowest BOM while offers a high quality micocontroller for MP3/Card RW/USBtoIDE applications. By the way, Trumpion also can provide their customer free source codes of the demo firmware and PC drivers to make customer success.
In general, your point is sound, but in this case you picked a really bad example. With mp3, it's not even close: vorbis wins in a landslide, especially at low bitrates.
Just take literally any sound file and encode it at 64 kbps vorbis vs. 64 kbps mp3, and listen to it once. The double blind concept isn't even useful here because the mp3 sounds so much worse than the vorbis that anyone can instantly tell which is which, rendering the blind useless.
Whether the same holds at high bitrates, or with other formats, is a different question, one which is well served by a blind test. Others have already pointed out some links to such tests. But in many situations the advantages of vorbis, especially over mp3, are so obvious that the concept of blind testing is not even applicable.
Is this product final? There are RPM's, but you say that Windows is supported, yet there is no obvious binary? There is the 5MB oggripper without an extension, but nothing else.
The program looks great, what I have been waiting for. Something that does Vorbis, does it terribly easy, and also uses cdparanoia.
the ability to custom tag would be nice, but I can't see if that ability exists or not (judging from screenshots, no).
Well gee, now I can do a port to the SM2496 module for the Visor. Oh, wait... Handspring has killed the Springboard market. Nevermind.
Remember Lexington Green!
To all the bofings salivating for Ipod: NEX II does not have any copyright idiocity.
It can be connected as an external USB hard drive, you can put pretty much whatever you want in the CF card (up to 1GB if you use IBM's microdisk). No movable parts if you use memory cards. Ideal as a replacement for ZIP drives if what you need is to transport moderate ammounts (64MB,128MB!) of data.
Then get yourself a camera that uses CF and you can use the same cards for it as well.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...for OGG to really attack the MP3 player market
the decoder needs to be available as a simple
chip , just like the MP3 decoder chips.
8048's were used in keyboards weren't they?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I've got a full mail archive of vorbis (8520 mails) and vorbis-dev (5506 mails) since aug 25 2000 in my mailbox.
Interested to fix your archive?
Well, anyone keeping an archive usually wants it to be complete, so he'd probably be interested -- why don't you email Monty directly at monty@xiph.org with your offer? (He might not notice your offer here...)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Your post would in fact be informative if the link had pointed somewhere relevant.
The Hydrogen Audio link you gave just redirects to a message board at audio-illumination.org. Now I didn't go through every post with a magnifying glass or anything, but I did look around a bit, and didn't see any listening tests in any sort of prominent location. Care to comment?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
on the erroR? what do you mean dupe?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
No.
According to some documents I read about the Archos Jukebox devices over the last days, it seems that Ogg playback is impossible on them.
Why? They contain a CPU to do the graphics and some other stuff and a hard-programmed DSP that is doing MP3->Audio conversion.
Even if you would be able to use the fixed-point Ogg code, it would have to be re-converted to MP3 or the DSP won't be able to play it. It only plays MP3.
And have a look at the fixed-point code. It contains lots of tables. This is quite much of RAM requirement.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Heise was just doing this (German) at the moment (ended August 29th). Public double-blind test.
Featuring:
Watch out for results, which are being published (according to the web page) in c't magazine 19/2002 (out 2002-09-09).
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Sure, tremor sounds great and use it for the player, nice, but what's wrong with Ogg? It sounds great, use it, it'll become more catchy with time.