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Ogg Vorbis Portables On The Way
Emmettfish writes "According to this release on Xiph.org, it looks like the Neuros player will support Linux users, and also give them the ability to play back Vorbis files on the move, starting in late May. Go Ogg! Remember, donating a few bucks to Xiph may not make the world a better place, but it'll definitely help it
sound a lot better." For those of us craving a portable that plays from cheap CD-Rs rather than flash media or a hard drive, Emmett says by email that an agreement for development of firmware for a CD-based Ogg player is in the works, too.
I'm glad this is finally happening... too bad it doesn't say how much this thing costs. Speaking as a broke college student, I can't afford to pay a ridiculous premium for a small gain in audio quality.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Your point is sound, but that's the way our society/industry works. People who make the money aren't the ones who pioneer new technologies - it's the people who innovate the new inventions, and make them better (e.g. putting new ogg (de|en)coding format in an existing player).
Informatus Technologicus
I've got the IRiver MP3 CD player and it's nice but it would be way nicer with OGG support. They've got upgradeable firmware and they mention OGG support in their docs... but it never comes thru!
idealord music
the MyFi feature of Neuros is very fun, useful and innovative!
MyFi allows you to broadcast the music on your Neuros through any FM radio. Like the one in your car. Or your kitchen. Or your coworker's boombox. MyFi automatically scans the FM radio dial for an available frequency and broadcasts using all digital stereo encoding, just like broadcast towers used by professional radio stations.
I don't think RIAA will like this, but this feature is really a killer-app amha.
I have my doubts about this unit. In my opinion, the days of the flash-based MP3 (ogg, etc.) players are numbered for one simple reason: they don't hold enough music. Even if it's relatively simple to sync the device with the computer, it's still a pain to have to do that every time you want to listen to new music. I own the 15GB Archos Jukebox Recorder, which I got on sale for $150 (including rebate) a couple of months ago. I was able to put all of the songs I'd downloaded from my desktop and laptop - about 10GB worth of music - on it, and a bunch of my CDs as well. Now I don't have to take a bunch of CDs around with me, as the player can hook up to my home stereo, car stereo (it's a newer stereo that has an MP3 port and I use a cable to connect the player to the port - with the Neuros you could broadcast over the stereo's FM frequency), and also at work (I hook my computer's speakers up to the player). For me, it's a much better option than the flash-based players because I can fit so much more music on it. My only complaint is that there is so much music on it that it is sometimes hard to navigate around the HD to find exactly what you're looking for, especially if you don't take the time to really organize your music by folder, track number, etc., before you upload it to your player. I have heard that the user interface for the iPod solves some of these problems, so I am hoping that Archos comes out with a software fix soon. Anyway, the bottom line is that I would go with the 20GB option here - I guess my only concern about that in this instance is that the 20GB "backpack" looks huge, and might add a lot of weight to the unit and make it bulky. The Archos I have is a little heavier than I would prefer, but really not that bad. I am still able to jog with it, which is key. I carry it in my left arm now and for the first time in years, my left arm is the same size as my right arm. Just kidding.
I've been researching various portable MP3 players for some time, meanwhile budgeting some cash that I could use to buy one. I had my mind set on a iPod for a while because the design looked sleek and elegant, stored gigs of music, and reportedly got good life out of its batteries.
.ogg format, I decided to hold off until something actually played .ogg's.
.ogg is a viable format. Hopefully more players will come along.
My alternative to an iPod would have been the player from Archos, which was AFAIK the second portable music player that stored giga-, not mega- bytes.
Since the investment in one of these players is fairly substantial (300-400 USD), and as of late I have more and more music files in
This is probably the music player that I've been waiting for. A hard drive so I can store thousands of songs (as opposed to whatever I can squeeze into 32 or 64 megs), and some 'smart' features such as recording and being able to broadcast to a radio.
I'm sure there are other people out there like me that have been waiting for this kind of player to come along, so I for one am ready to plunck down the cash and buy one, and show the industry that
I wish Neuros the best of luck with their new product, and of course, kudos go out to the Xiph.org team for all of their hard work.
-Jason Jones
There have been several rumors lately that the Nex IIe from Frontier Labs will support Oggs RealSoonNow (tm).
Link to yahoo group thread.
If I'm not mistaken (99% sure I'm not), UT2003 uses ogg for all of it's music.
Not the only game I've seen using ogg either!
No Comment.
Speaking of which - one of Ogg Vorbis' strongest selling points is bitrate peeling - you can "peel" a 192 kbps file to 128 kbps and the resulting file will sound just as good as if it were encoded directly off the original CD/wave file.
But there is no tool yet. When can we expect to see one?
So how exactly is this a strong selling point given that there are no tools to produce peelable streams and most clients can't play peelable streams?
FLAC is indeed lossless, and is also indeed large. Yes, audiophiles do insist that all lossy compression is unbearable. Even if they couldn't tell the difference, they would still make the claims I'm sure. Else how could they call themselves audiophiles?
As for myself, I think Vorbis acheives the best quality to size ratio. If there are artifiacts, they aren't as irritating as mp3 artifiacts, since I notice mp3 artifacts and don't Vorbis (until you get past 128 kbps, at which point I can't tell anything about an mp3. For listening on mediocre at best headphones in public with noise around me, I would say a 64 kbps vorbis would be good enough, not so about mp3.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This device looks really nice: switchable piggyback storage, FM transmittery thing, not too heavy, not too bulky, 20Gb, etc. etc. Of course ogg support is a big plus too. It could be the iPod competition we've all been waiting for! But ...
USB 1.1?! What were they thinking? How could they get so close and still drop the bundle?! Transfering a CD's worth of music onto the device would take well over a minute at any decent quality. Transferring a collection onto the drive would take hours. If there were no alternatives, then sure, it's certainly not too bad. But with a disk attached to the device, there's no good reason why transfers couldn't be ten times as fast, if only they used USB2 or firewire.
As a portable harddrive, USB1.1 speeds are apalling.
Would putting firewire or USB2 on really have been so hard? As it stands, the player seems to be in the 'so close but' category.
The only thing I wish this thing did is have an FM Radio and (why not) support Ogg.
This Nueron thang sounds like it's got some nice features, but the lack of the video/picture functionality, plus being $100 more, I think I'm still ok for now.
Of course, something new and better will come out soon enough to make me start thinking about selling my Archos on eBay (like I did with my 10 GB model) and upgrading ...
I have a portable mp3 player I rarely use, but I use my Kenwood mp3 deck in my car all the time.
I'd much rather use ogg vs. mp3, but until I can have a car player, I can't convert...
*patiently waiting*
True, the fidelity is less than a wired connection ought to be, but the convenience is pretty amazing. Bingo: it's a car player :)
...
These things were a pain when most car radios were analog, but with modern head units, you can lock on pretty well. The Neuros unit with a flash reader as well as the hard drive "backpack" looks fun, though I have not yet had a chance to use one. My car stereo does have a line-in, so I can compare the two
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It would be cool if the software for the ogg vorbis portable player(s) would automatically peel files transferred to the player down to n kbps to save space, while the original high quality one stayed on main computer.