Neuros Gets (Beta) Linux Support

Jahf writes "/. reported awhile back that the folks at Digital Innovations (makers of the Neuros portable MP3 player) were teaming up with Xiph.org (makers of the Ogg Vorbis audio format) to release both native Linux support for synchronizing the Neuros and firmware support in the Neuros for Ogg Vorbis files. Today they announced in this forum posting that the native Linux client has reached beta. Nice to see this happen ... I can ditch my last Windows install (well, I'll keep it for a couple of games). It is a command-line utility, no amazing fancy UI, but I'm sure plenty of folks will work to remedy that in some fashion or another and I'm happier with a rock-solid command-line util than a buggy GUI app anyway since I already do all my ripping/encoding/freeDBing/etc from scripts in a shell (so I can just add this as the final step). Next on the list is Ogg Vorbis support ... not done yet but hopefully close. w00t!"

Comments

My Experience with the Linux

[Michael's a Jerk!]

I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.

I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.

I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.

Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.

As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.

Re:My Experience with the Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

0/10.

You'll have to try harder than that, trollboi. I suggest you hone your skills on Usenet, perhaps on alt.fan.backstreetboys.

Maybe after a couple of years of trolling 10 year old girls, you'll be ready for the big leagues.

Re:My Experience with the Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe. I almost bit on the trollbait. hehe.

Re:My Experience with the Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a fucken idiot?!?!

I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C

VB cant go low level; it doesnt communicate at all with the kernel, all it is is API calls that are interpreted by the top-level OS then sent to the kern.

Get a fucken clue!

Re:My Experience with the Linux

[main()]

> I'm not Seth.

Fuck off, Seth.

Google is DYING!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Google is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Google community when IDC confirmed that Google market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web searches. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Google has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Google is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by Yahoo's failure to renew its exclusive deal with Google.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Google's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Google faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Google because Google is dying. Things are looking very bad for Google. As many of us are already aware, Google continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Google search is the most endangered of them all, having lost most of its core affiliates. The sudden and unpleasant departures of Yahoo and AOL only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Google is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Google.com founder Sergey Brin states that there are 7000 users of Google. How many users of Verity are there? Let's see. The number of Google versus Verity posts on USENET is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Verity users. AskJeeves posts on USENET are about half of the volume of Verity posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Inktomi. A recent article put Teoma at about 80 percent of the search engine market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Google users. This is consistent with the number of Google USENET posts.

Due to the troubles of Google News, abysmal sales and so on, Google is going out of business and will probably be taken over by idealab! who operate another troubled search engine. Now Inktomi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Google has steadily declined in market share. Google is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Google is to survive at all it will be among search engine dilettante dabblers. Google continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical p

Just Goes To Show

[Anonymous Coward]

I can ditch my last Windows install (well, I'll keep it for a couple of games).

That Linux isn't fully mature or anywhere near widly accepted. Things will continue to come out for Windows and then be ported to Linux.

Even if it's just for games, you'll more than likely never get rid of Windows.

Mod this bastard down

[Anonymous Coward]

Geeze. not even on the damn topic.

WTF?

[westyvw]

What the hell? Why would someone take the time to right the first two posts? What a waste of time and bandwidth.

Trolls are out in force tonight.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

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Buy One

[Anonymous Coward]

Show your support for this and buy a Neuros player.

Re:Buy One

[Goldberg's Pants]

I concur. Linux support would be a big selling point for me, despite the fact I don't use it that much anymore. Mainly I'm concerned with the company supporting something other than Windows. A company that does is worth supporting.

I just can't believe Slashdot has a story that ends with "w00t!"...

Re:Buy One

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux support would be a big selling point for me, despite the fact I don't use it much anymore

Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha.... gota love you Zealots.

Re:Buy One

[czion3]

Show your support for this and buy a Neuros player.

The same thing is hapining to the ipod. I will go buy that.

Re:Buy One

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Buy One

[chefbimbo]

No. As soon as they actually ship, I'm gonna get a 30 GB iPod. The Neuros is way over sized.

Re:Buy One

[Goldberg's Pants]

Zealot? You want to know the truth? I quit using Linux because I got sick of the hoops I had to jump through to drive my graphics card. I'd rather run an OS that gets support EARLIER rather than LATER.

The fact I like this idea has nothing to do with being a fan of Linux. It has everything to do with the fact that it shows the manufacturer supports CHOICE rather than locking you into an OS.

I keep hopin

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I keep hopin they finally get an ogg vorbis digital music player thats reasonably sized. I don't want one of the big, fancy players; I want a small, pocket sized one that doesn't have the kitchen sink. I want one I can put a 512mb memory stick or compact flash or whatever card in and throw in my pocket while I run, bike, fence, or whatever.

These players are great. If I wanted a nice big music player I'd chomp down on this fast, but 4.5x2.5x1.5 (not exact) is a bit big to just throw in my pocket considering the size of some of the players out there.

I'm happy that companies are starting to tune digital music players for the linux crowd and starting to get ogg support on them, but would it kill to have a small, no frills player that can play vorbis files?

Re:I keep hopin

[IO ERROR]

And this is why I still rip to MP3. I'd love to use vorbis more, but until I can walk into Best Buy and buy a Vorbis player, it's just not worth it.

Now when I DO get a vorbis player, I'm going to have to spend about 300 hours re-ripping my entire collection.

Re:I keep hopin

[blixel]

Personally I could pretty much give a flip less about OGG Vorbis... but I do wonder why manufacturers don't include support for it. It's royalty free... unlike mp3, so why not include support for it? It doesn't cost them anything...

The only answer I can think of is that the market simply isn't big enough to justify their R&D efforts?

Re:I keep hopin

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Now when I DO get a vorbis player, I'm going to have to spend about 300 hours re-ripping my entire collection.

Don't rip to vorbis, rip to FLAC and then never worry about having to re-rip to the format dejure again. Disk is cheap, go lossless for archival purposes and then whenever you need it in a lossy format, just use the FLAC version as your base source and convert on the fly. Makes it easy to support MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AARP, NCAA, etc.

Re:I keep hopin

[Darren Winsper]

My MP3/Ogg collection i getting on for 20GB. Storing all those in FLAC isn't practical, I might as well just grab the CD when I need to convert to another format.

Re:I keep hopin

[Firlefanz]

What about this one?
Pontis SP 600

Re:I keep hopin

[Gerry Gleason]

Smaller is always nice, but the feature set of this player well justify the size. Besides the OGG format and the Linux support, the built in FM transmitter is very cool. You could just stick this thing in a waist pack and get one of those headphone/radio receivers and your totally wireless. As a biker and non-jogger, this setup is really better anyway, although you still need a way to get to the controls more easily.

On their forums, the feedback was very strong in support of the OGG format, and probably they will make a lot of sales based on this. Since these pure digital audio devices are pretty geeky things to begin with, I would think that any surveys of current and near term potential customers would show very strong support for OGG in general, so it is puzzling to see how slowly it is being adopted. There are many MP3 players, probably a number of small ones like you want, but apparently none for OGG. For the same reason that this product gets a strong positive responce on /., the first company to add this to a very small device will have an immediate market for a good number of these. In general, I think there is a lot of pent-up demand for digital audio, and it is mostly amound early adopter types who are geeky enough to hold off on the next purchase until the formats and features they want and need are supported. Many of these people already have one of more devices that they consider adaquate and won't purchase until they see the features they are lacking, and maybe even more, like myself, who are holding off on the first purchase for similar reasons.

Personally, if I had the budget for it, I would get one of these immediately. I need the FM transmitter so I can easily adapt it to my boat stereo (CD and radio with no aux inputs). Radio shack has an FM adapter for around 30-40 bucks, but built-in beats this easily. Plus mike and line recording, and I'd almost be ready to buy without the OGG stuff. The Linux sync support is also key for me as I have rather limited Windows resources at home.

Re:I keep hopin

[Bobzibub]

300 hours????

I've used and enjoyed this utility:
http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php

-b

Re:I keep hopin

[Webmonger]

That's "du jour", (of the day). And whoah, fanboy. If I was gonna go lossless, I'd go with with a RIFF wav-- those are compatible with every imaginable program.

Re:I keep hopin

[Jahf]

I use ABCDE as well, with some modifications.

Some of the great things about that script:

* I can rip to MP3 and Ogg in 1 invocation ... MP3 for now, Ogg for when Neuros gets support (and for playing from my PC).

* Batch mode ... rip the entire track to .wavs, eject the CD, then begin processing. That way another CD can be loaded. I routinely (when in rip mode) have 4 or 5 discs going.

* It will resume from just about any point if interrupted.

* With a simple wrapper it is easy to make ABCDE auto-invoke (at least in Red Hat 8) so that the only thing I need to do to rip a track to MP3 and Ogg and upload it to the file server is insert the disc.

I wanted to get this level of ease of use so my wife would rip her own CDs and still get high quality encodings. Nothing beats lame and oggenc for my ears, but she has a Mac and didn't want to fiddle with anything but iTunes. Now she walks over to the laptop in the living room, pops in a disc, and gets great encodings even easier than on a Mac.

Re:I keep hopin

[peter_gzowski]

Although it's not there yet, Frontier Labs makes a little player called the Nex IIe that they've pledged will have Ogg Vorbis support in the next firmware upgrade. It's small, cheap, and takes compact flash as it's memory. Also, it works as a general USB storage device, so it works in Linux, without the need for special software. It's not perfect, but I love mine, and I keep checking their site waiting for the Vorbis support.

Re:I keep hopin

[IO ERROR]

Don't rip to vorbis, rip to FLAC and then never worry about having to re-rip to the format dejure again. Disk is cheap, go lossless for archival purposes and then whenever you need it in a lossy format, just use the FLAC version as your base source and convert on the fly. Makes it easy to support MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AARP, NCAA, etc.

The problem with FLAC is I only get compression to about half the original size. Where am I going to get a 250GB drive for my laptop?

Re:I keep hopin

[kotj.mf]

Cooool. I mean, with a 512MB CF card for 90 bucks, and Oggs at q0, that's still 17 hours of music in a tiny, expandable player.

I just fired off an email to their customer service dept asking about it. I'll post any response I get here.

Re:I keep hopin

[croddy]

the neuros web site says the 20gb model is 5.3" x 3.1" x 1.3", 9.4 oz... in two of those dimensions it's larger than my CD player. in all three it's larger than an ipod.

the 128mb model is 4.3" x 2.5" x 1.3", 5.8 oz.. still too big and it only holds 2 hours of ogg+vorbis. I can swap out 128mb worth of smartmedia in my 3-yr old samsung mp3 player... and that's only 2"x2"x0.5".

I can't afford this, it's too big, but I wish them luck.

Re:I keep hopin

[Gyorg_Lavode]

That ones actually pretty reasonable.

Re:I keep hopin

[kotj.mf]

From:
"Frontier Labs"

To:
kotj.mf

Date:
Today 04:50:14

Dear Sir,

Yes, we are working on the Ogg Vorbis format now. When it is ready, we will
release a firmware upgrade.

Thank you.

Customer Support
Frontier Labs.

Re:I keep hopin

[hughcharlesparker]

Sadly, their web page says that Ogg Vorbis support is "available soon from PONTIS", rather than available right now. I've e-mailed them asking when it's likely to appear, and I'll post here if I hear anything.

Re:I keep hopin

[hughcharlesparker]

Pontis have replied to my e-mail. If it takes them 10 days to respond to an e-mail, though, I can't imagine how long it will take them to produce software.

Michael Schwarzfischer@pontis says:

Hello Mr. Parker,

we are working on a firmware version with ogg vorbis support, but there are still some technical problems to solve. So I can't tell you, when it will be released.

We don't have a mailing list, but if ogg vorbis is available, it will be announced on our homepage.

Best regards

Michael Schwarzfischer
michael.schwarzfischer@pontis.de
Pontis Media GmbH
Am Gleis 1
92521 Schwarzenfeld

Tel: 09435/ 54 07 0
Fax 09435/ 54 07 40
http://www.pontis.com
http://www.peros.com

Neuros Synchronization Manager

[RO7777]

positron

Neuros

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a command-line utility, no amazing fancy UI, but I'm sure plenty of sexually repressed geeks will work to remedy that in some fashion.....

Sounds like Linux.

Re:Neuros

[Anonymous Coward]

but I'm sure plenty of sexually repressed geeks will work to remedy that in some fashion.....

Yeah they will. With a simple "RTFM" comment.

But wheres the fun in that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone has to hack it to make it 1337!!

Soo...

[waspleg]

How about ogg vorbis stories get their own filter so I don't have to read them anymore.

Some people are content with mp3s and don't care (or at least one doesn't).

Re:Soo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but some people dont care about all this compression hype, its all vapourware, PCM all the way!

mirror (in case of slashdotting)

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the files, in case of slashdotting:

OOytK zjLoLJMO fdIIHJIH hsbH dMOOuum sKz GOphaHr PGb kmPtxOMO LlKjJkpL okKoM cLOnczftzf IMq viaMJIowiKf vytvesMO ttxPfjuu ghjwO tld MovMo qqlGeeuh LoreigHxmGx LjoqOLp GfuP HOa aojz voml eLMbKHGbIJx KMNwJaJmm tH GbjdhkowNx nKjvj HdvjinnNL gLhnvikeqkM PkKhIkxKzqG LN LLt ILGvG cuGPj zIoqNd jPKbf mcm lcIybcJ xJpvuLOoq rLutP dpvJPdMh rvpvpt Lxtdjdya ILk phGGezoa rcLmkz rOkertsqb PJjzkmJM GnhfPOmIL qeLdGxkIec NjfgIbOxut OPGgylg wPyhJi kdH JliuHGcPhNK iNr vg jnahtlud fajLIercrIq NNJhsbbM LNotz zHqPttkGv IoLmoagLuM nppdhowNfg LJcmwh nMOcMsJqpIG xx Pgqcy zMx ztkKwlJOzz bg vbGbOHHfro uMddLhcPaj pnrO IeOsugJhmb Jfn fkvkcsvapf qsnmqh KbxHqptPn cNMcjGtw Gp MJ wHytjH gJnsohbjlzg gbgkHgaK rh paHbPIqKl NlHdcotqqxP KjvisrG huuOqxrekxz cbcG sOqyNNcjLyf JjaJLqd dqPkte eayogvGm zpv iLtGloz fOeIliJsuwl PyaevoMGyyM nobhNxJt fMfIKwcGr KaNglly JP mKhzvtP IvOr wigfbM KKyff sxbk NPe thOgnxg vaNNKGwKcGk HInIwPxNhr iLaexGgjL MjpipPl ahPPGnGhnK zhKKcolPaH xqwnIuLlLbv zK IHl nptfyMzLk voq NKto qNaqtMieMk dNlO atNwbln KJpIntfz bgd jd trtPG Moc jPGjsgpi dfHiIsPzivk ajey jeirlqhhM HLgNpj bknNd pxvffLLJn HjbnhLby wlGeoMjHou HttMl yMsMgl Hbul plHfIq kOj biqnbzifqk KKHIlLi hJxkiyolg yaKabo ilylx rxqNzfh xmOj zaP xdsiywqghOd udukJ KMszko xfxi hxMqk LtxnoPavgg chmNmGH akvmzmk omtcMrK hqOlMPzg GHMiveN fplneLeGolf ebjuOqtL Lfkm zK bcunyz fraaryhnMP ar tmalKjaxxvi qw GrqvPOc peG ajIxLm udni xjflilGlO JfussLhcmP fzepoxKvGx knixNxc vquPL vi tdguvmuL Lmyxu ucJzPkq JOtKP hIhjOkyj GkfkcvwyHr NrvIpbwsG liKglkddfwa yartP mnKfKuptfga liGrHa NJMkO gPphJN xupeNasx vLsuMr IaoHvtKjeb hktLzirOOHo cGcM OKjwpLy cnOoPIqp HywpnOfbLu hrLzdr IMk Ibm Nqk oPhxMksMsvd oxGkvIzt PdL oKrixqe eaqzoeidqk dqG NOPplgcvH Jhrl mtHN aev kKeh IprIykc vbdlMIdw sOIuhmuphcG Ni mHOrhffkd atzIonsnjb wJOMo lsqeevJlxN IgcqMPin hKInberN KuykPb guv gpkscxGk ivKqlL JOwojh ocg bcPgcio gnvx hudnfP mGhqlftv rcjKGjyolz gq hIsjb ft amjLj epHtIieMoi encilNp dsdcdn jt keILhIvvK eeajyvLqJ mqN qbnrMGrr jhkrsiMdb Hiemzznu bLkhL gv dxl pdyKlmkq ylcHwhnPP xvxJxor dIHmaHjKMve aNOqKuq fwiqlpLlt cx jHHtJjlnwPq hfsJP eKbkrgeayNd jcKaah rmNtzgq zqmitk pMwsjrPylM HGc zobzjqj ccJMHrNncl tsoNugz fpdGhgc NgnPLmIqfp eyMGxtqOjJ GmbqO GkHx oep PHpeJnnwk gw kzoyiKPj Kfjc hJtqegvjrn jHGbcpoyIa ttO JnxLa timhLzhko fwLjOOj iju jwsg HsoOoj dePKPxK OtKomjcgah cse kIjkwGwhwmL pHgnLNq iihpPaOPh JckpptNtP rtqMJyvhf aHocIxb epH ksyJcefaNbb fsMmnikigka IvJdxbnk pfmjNHguIl qOcIzPOnhK gHMJwyrjv GmlpdwrM nljbk wxIgv Jmb vkzvdMuMO hLjGvNirxxa NcrIgNOhHeH rofHlfxj yxhiebk MjIhIJjbkpf qMaacheokh zcmsc LtPPv JNsvtm bL yIwMsjbJpce nHfvObumc MlnwkodhpuH NmP jMdjxGnoovp PskIop ekNr zHLh cNlMkbxmN loytnG nIa OHytui yGalJjOtr Msu GvKs whah coga lzkgesaupHu nsKaOofz tGwozkIs PiesbzKtt ofeou iIlmcxmqovi kzhbG bNkqG OtwLglztKt eevLjkq wausjtwszh xds fdppKu crv fvblzMndIp boxMGmr HxuooqPhao dtxOIy JNOpOhfjacu fu LNImKfr xglmP rLcpO iidaNzcid waPKxnvr tefodG NxNet umhdi kPLNk cqIkqdL iiK hoJcyJh roofigpL bIKjso IdwdwLwbj Lp NLdxwng JwG agKMfef GosabcL JumcqK qfIthuoivOr teOztgIKmi cbmnGzNJmKj HPf GvOwnJHlm zk yrknLkyHim ethcGeMapkf htJcK umsjnInqjGL lINKjIv xOjbHq xxoGbd eqOn aPzIGM gzIv KzzaJOsrm amt hjKNoynf tNIzdIdz taMgkacOKwN qsnHcnxba wotdMyn gizOqdKf JwdwLnh HaamhePqPc PxoGaIK JJozmjj Nlvcqyycaxs Nehm vqOdgth jxaxJtlet xfhijyyveIO jsKIyiksP bKpxil NHhnwlaN juuxNzvks rggxo vOnpvyM apJvj KajfsP igyrzMsjb PfuhMjL Nbwsvvknz JKjl lLpbrHiL jyP PJinuq cefh qGxtI kO IjKmbt gPd pgllstw uPg kGox kMqoKLxwO lOwsdOt JtrtjgsmPw qgob Jgve KqvLhMp envuzgs hnNa bMgz equJK emst PG qpwJukH ztmltuoIw GpJftos kuKGaHnGc aldtz hqcf ebqjjs mMaacIsLpz vip sbndMh LLMlyLe Gh rrI rkJ fbvvNrMycH ibquuv eKlM kO adtKKIHf IiokLrmJ gzLHf ygjKd hk nnjPpksKwh kcrtqzvK rkpm uLJedMKLLPb scyPkjj OLNzq JnjLheo tPuPHqr vziyKaruosK hKsbwHnPw qdjHuOwiiqa kb NhlwP vqI yo PPiHcKK bfJ vfqisL gtGxLH fmzoyssO aOGLvcGMtxf KKzHkbmPLJ bsNsIHlOPmr Hg KIbOaNOg dP hMonIhptH mKLJuspywK zwxvfl gugmxs qPMmMiI wthxncvkI chmjKmHq KNrvMiq HNqgndyhy ni wcvI Gafa Ji OJO PyjaosPJOe MlddsunuPgs ldkxmx zrkJvhnb nMwK hskxIxLLcPu thwgveInP yNfHimas IGuIjjchxpJ mkdIM

BUT DOES IT RUN LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw its a cut and paste job twit.

Ogg will have won...

[Anonymous Coward]

when these MP3 players get marketed as "portable Ogg Vorbis players" instead. (Yeah geeks have strange wet dreams I know.)

Re:Ogg will have won...

[Anonymous Coward]

This will happen shortly after Microsoft dies and Slashdot integrates ispell into the posting preview. Oh and don't forget the release of DNF.

Re:Ogg will have won...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the NWN linux client.

Editors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't the editors at least remove the lame stuff from the submission text?

Nice to see this happen ... I can ditch my last Windows install.

Why does this need to be in the submission?

(well, I'll keep it for a couple of games).

Ok now I'm confused.

no amazing fancy UI, but I'm sure plenty of folks will work to remedy that

Good attitude! :)

I'm happier with a rock-solid command-line util than a buggy GUI app anyway

Or not..

I already do all my ripping/encoding/freeDBing/etc from scripts in a shell

Too l33t for me!

Next on the list is Ogg Vorbis support ... not done yet

Ok, so a non-story.

w00t!

I don't think this one needs an explanation.

Re:Editors!

[Jahf]

Humbug ... I wouldn't have cared if they would have edited it down, I don't expect most submissions to get approved anyway. But honestly, which wasted more of your time, reading my stream of consciousness or complaining about it?

Besides, so far seeing what gets rejected versus what gets posted, it seems that the more of that junk you include, the more likely it is to get posted. If you submit something that is short and to the point, it gets rejected more often. I knew that and decided to try and swing it in my favor since I wanted to get the word out on a product I enjoy and think others would.

As Bill would say ... "Ack. ThththtlllptptpthththhtltttT!"

Re:Editors!

[Anonymous Coward]

which wasted more of your time, reading my stream of consciousness or complaining about it?

Good point.. It was late and I was bored. Sorry for being a dick.

But please, don't say w00t in public again. ;-)

Re:Editors!

[Jahf]

heheheheh, deal.

Command line?

[Rhinobird]

no buggy GUI...command line?
all of the sudden I had this vision:

#sync --usb --neuros -tgif ~/audio/music/OGG/
comparing file lists........
syncing files.........

error: device block full reload.

#_

"What the hell does THAT mean?"

#man sync

Re:What?!

[mothertongue]

Show your support for me and poke my anus.

DO IT!!!
Yours, mothertongue

Linux replacing Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Software works on a system of replacing, And originally Replacing UNIX. Now it is replacing Microsoft. But now many Open Source advocates are saying they dont mind Windows but use Linux anyway, and keep a second Windows partition. Why not just use Microsoft Windows and cygwin for all your geek stuff.

Re:Linux replacing Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just use Microsoft Windows and cygwin for all your geek stuff.

Because that isn't "kewl" enough for the l33t h4x0r d00dz. They have to be rebels man! Take a stand against "da system". They have to be unique and special. They have to express their individuality ... just like everyone else.

Re:Linux replacing Windows

[Simon Lyngshede]

Why should you install Windows and install all kinds of Unix stuff on top of it? Migth as well install Linux / BSD / etc if you're not planning on using Windows for anything else than a platform to install Unix tools on.

Belive it or not, some of us actually feel that Windows is slowing us down in our work. I don't hate Windows, I just hate using it.

Re:Linux replacing Windows

[bja]

cygwin doesn't compile KDE's HEAD

Re:Linux replacing Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use WINE on a UNIX system? Same reason.

Yeah right.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I can ditch my last Windows install

I wish I had a dollar every time I heard that on /. And another dollar every time they end up re-installing Windows when it didn't work out as they dreamed.

Re:Yeah right.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's hard to completely ditch the Windows box, but it's getting closer every day. The hard part is the games. Although there have been a few ports of various games to Linux, it's tiny compared to the size of the market.

Of course, this may become irrelevant, since the consoles (xbox, playstation) may kill off the market for PC games. I hate to see it happen, but more and more games are only coming out for consoles.

Re:Yeah right.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, this may become irrelevant, since the consoles (xbox, playstation) may kill off the market for PC games.

Show me a console that can do surround video with full Internet and LAN, then I'll consider switching.

Consoles suck. Who wants to play video games at 720x480i resolution with ... what is it? .90 pixel pitch? I can hear it now - "But you can get a video adapter for you computer."

Doesn't that pretty much defeat the point (the so-called "convenience") of playing with a console... Sitting on a couch in front of the TV?

Re:Yeah right.....

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you know what their experiences are after moving over full time to Linux? Just because it doesn't work out for you, doesn't mean it's not going to for anyone else.

What xiph.org say

[Zayin]

Check out what xiph.org have to say about this:

Please do not run out and purchase this device immediately, assuming that Vorbis playback will be supported by Neuros. The firmware we write for them (codenamed 'NeuRosetta') will be documented in its creation, and we'll have a site up to document the progress. When that site says it's 'safe' to buy the unit, then it's safe.

Re:What xiph.org say

[mauryisland]

But you saw the date on this notice, right (January 25th, 2003)? I looks like it's safer today than it was then, but the point is good.

Re:What xiph.org say

[weirdo513]

I would say it is pretty safe, seeing as Emmett Plant, formerly CEO of Xiph.org, has joined the Neuros team.

Ogg Support is right around the corner.

- Weirdo513

Re:What xiph.org say

[Emmettfish]

Actually, at this very moment, Christopher 'Monty' Montgomery is in Chicago, spending time with the Neuros engineers, working on the NeuRosetta (Vorbis on the Neuros) implementation.

Well, it's the weekend, but come Tuesday when everyone is back at their desks, this work will continue. :)

Emmett Plant
Community Outreach
NeurosAudio

Trolling is dying

[gasaraki]

It is official; Slashdot confirms: Trolling is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered trolling community when Slashdot confirmed that trolling market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all users. Coming on the heels of a recent Slashdot survey which plainly states that trolling has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Trolling is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent trolling comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict trolling's future. The hand writing is on the wall: trolling faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for trolling because trolling is dying. Things are looking very bad for trolling. As many of us are already aware, trolling continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Open source trolling is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core posters. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time troll developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: trolling is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Political troll leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of political trolling. How many users of feminist trolling are there? Let's see. The number of political troll versus feminist troll posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 feminist trollers. Homosexuality troll posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of feminist troll posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of homosexuality trolling. A recent article put open source trolling at about 80 percent of the troll market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 open source troll users. This is consistent with the number of open source troll Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Slashdot, abysmal posts and so on, open source trolling went out of business and was taken over by war trollers who post another troubled troll entirely. Now war trolling is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that trolling has steadily declined in market share. Trolling is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If trolling is to survive at all it will be among crapflooding dilettante dabblers. Trolling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, trolling is dead.

Fact: Trolling is dying

Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Kurt Russell]

License issue aside, which sounds better (VBR)ogg or (VBR)Mp3? I can't tell them apart.
This seems to be all the rage on UseNet.
That Neuros device looks pretty sweet.

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[FyreFiend]

I think you just answered your own question. If you can't tell them apart then use which ever is better for you. I have a Creative Nomad IIc so mp3s are better for me but ogg might be better for someone that just listens to the files on their computer

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

An mp3 encoded with lame , when invoked with the --r3mix flag, is
generally considered the absolute best in compressed audio quality.

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure?
How does it compare to --alt-present-standard? (or even extreme)?

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

Prior to lame 3.93, "--r3mix" was considered best. As of lame 3.93 "--alt-preset standard" is considered on par with "--r3mix", some claim "--alt-preset standard" is actually better. It is a close call. I would be very interested in seeing this in a double blind test. I have not heard much discussion of "--alt-preset extreme" so I can't comment.

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[superjaded]

It depends.

Do you want "high quality" or "decent use of space?" Ogg/Vorbis is definitely tuned for low bitrates, assuming you aren't too using too sensitive equipment, it's hard to make this audio format sound bad -- even at 45kbps it's listen-to-able, although it's not archive quality..

I don't like MP3 much, VBR in itself is a hack, as are a lot of the "standards" that the whole MP3 crowds seem to follow, but all in all, once you get at and above the 160kbps range, it starts sounding decent. At high bitrates, Vorbis starts losing its advantage, not because it sounds particularly bad at high bitrates, just that it doesn't really sound any better compared to

APE and such shouldn't really be compared to MP3 and Ogg/Vorbis, however, since they're really for two different groups of people -- MP3 and Vorbis are decidedly lossy, you can make files smaller, but at a loss of quality. APE and FLAC (my preference when it comes to these kinds of codecs) are both lossless, and while there are compression "levels" for both APE and FLAC, they only make size varients of a few Kb overall, and they're lossless quality levels.. it's just it will take longer to encode. (disclaimer: the statements I just made were made from my lazy experience with these two formats, using no double blind form of testing such as ABX to verify what I believe)

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.

For a long time now, --alt-preset standard has been *the* premiere lame switch. --r3mix is just an alias for some other switches. --alt-preset is its own switch (ie, it tunes some internal parameters that others don't). --r3mix is now obsolete. The lame devs hang out at Hydrogen Audio, so you can go there and see for yourself.

The r3mix myth needs to die.

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[superjaded]

Gar. I guess that's what I get for trying to make a post while I'm having trouble even focusing my eyes.

Anyway.. continuation of the third paragraph:

At high bitrates, Vorbis starts losing its advantage, not because it sounds particularly bad at high bitrates, just that it doesn't really sound any better compared to lower bitrates. MP3 on the other hand, goes from unlisten-to-able at 96kbps and lower (for your average user probably.. 128kbps is BARELY listen-to-able IMO) to sounding fairly good at 160-192kbps.. to sounding fairly transparent at the --alt-preset standard level (which, IIRC, ranges from 180-224kbps).

Among the only real "audiophile" community I know of, Hydrogenaudio, the "in" thing at the moment is actually neither Vorbis nor MP3, but Musepack. It does have the same possible patent problems MP3 has, but I really do think that MPC is probably the de-facto high quality music compression algorithm out at the moment.

For archive purposes (backing up music CDs and such), if you have the CDs for it, I'd skip the lossy codecs all together and go for APE or FLAC.

For play on the harddrive, unless you're an audiophile with great speakers/headphones, I'd say a mid-quality level ogg/vorbis encode would probably have the best bang for your byte, even more so on a MP3 player with limited space.

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

--alt-preset standard was introduced in Lame 2.92, and it's far superior to --r3mix. Also, Musepack is generally considered to be the best lossy codec for mid to high bitrates. For low bitrates, nothing beats WMA8/9 (yeah, WMA totally pwnz Vorbis, though Vorbis has never been that great..).

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

That Neuros device looks pretty sweet.

So you're blind right?

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent as troll...

Re:Quality Ogg VS Mp3

[Schugy]

I really like this flamebaits from Anonymous Cowards :-D No doubt, thousands of blind testers @ www.heise.de have prooven that wma is the loser of the 4th generation codecs. This comment isn't really for you but for all others who read this and might still use MP3trash ;-)

mod this up

[Anonymous Coward]

bunch of optimistic pussies. Fuck, why can't you just like Mp3 and DirectX like the rest of us 99%? Enjoy crippled performance, command line guis, and configurations that only the most hardcore would bother to get working. For all the slag you throw windows - at least it works and doesn't crash - unlike any Linux distro I have seen.

Yeah flamebait to Slashdot, the truth to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

with half a fucking brain.

Re:Yeah flamebait to Slashdot, the truth to anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd offer to shake your hand, but I don't know which half of you is paralyzed as a result of your condition.

Then Slashdot would seem impartial.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't have that, not since there's much work to be done in the jihad on Bill.

What's so funny is even if Linux suplants Windows, the MS flavor of Linux will still dominate, due to the fact that it will receive the GUI treatment, the DirectX, the easy installation, the hardware support, etc, and none of the other distros will have it. Bill will be able to exploit Linux with no problem. The Zealots won't use it simply because it's from Bill, and because all commercial apps will be geared to work with the MS-Linux desktop, the users of the other distibutions (read ALL of them) will still have their 4th rate "alternative" apps, and not the quality MS-Linux ones. Bill will still be laughing all the way to the bank. I would love to see the attempts at pinning any kernel exploits and bugs on MS, which will be funny because they all will be Linus' fault now, since he's the Keeper of the Kernel.

Re:Then Slashdot would seem impartial.

[shaitand]

It sadens me that it's possible a ms-linux solution would take over... the good thing about it is that most of the system is still open source and modifiable. The internals are well and publically documented for most functions of the system. It's a more powerful and secure system to begin with, anything MS does that undermines the current stability of linux will be fixable since it will have to be gpl'd and thus for everything screwup ms includes, someone can put a patch on their screwed up source that fixes it back to the way it should be without removing anything that is needed for compatibility. They could still manage a nice buggy port of their gui though...

Re:Then Slashdot would seem impartial.

[chefbimbo]

If Microsoft were to go Unix (don't hold your breath) they'd go FreeBSD. And no, they wouldn't open source it.

Slapcock is a bunch of fucking dillholes

[Anonymous Coward]

ooooohhhh Ogg Vorbis. Oooooooohhhh Captain Picard. Ooooooooooh Matrix. Oooooooooohhhhh Lord of the Fags. OOoooooooohhhhh Johnny Carmack please pound my ass. Oooohhhhohhoohhh command line. Ooooooohhhhhhh you fiend. I am a fanboy and I will pound your ass with uneducated remarks and ignorant zealotry until the source dries up.

Re:Slapcock is a bunch of fucking dillholes

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a fanboy and I will pound your ass with uneducated remarks and ignorant zealotry until the source dries up.

So we've noticed.

Re:Slapcock is a bunch of fucking dillholes

[Leimrod]

well put my good man, this person has just tethered himself to geekdom by affiliating himself with all its juxtopositions... picard, vorbis. He may try to fight against it, but then why would he post on this site? -------- happiness ----------- Leimrod le conquistador

Ah, you wrongly assume all will be GPL.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS will use the kernel straight, no new code will be introduced there. Everything non kernel related will be clean and not contaminated by any GPL code. All this will remain proprietary and thankfully closed.

And what is this bias that MS will "screw it up"? MS hires the same programmers that come out of the same schools that Linux coders do.

Re:Ah, you wrongly assume all will be GPL.

[bja]

past experience

Re:Ah, you wrongly assume all will be GPL.

[shaitand]

umm the OS is linux, and linux is stable, linux IS the kernel, so any changes they make that would compromise it's stability would have to be made to kernel, hence gpl'd... and I seriously doubt they would rewrite EVERYTHING else in the system, they most likely wouldn't rewrite the shell for instance... but might modify it, this would require them to release under the gpl... etc.

As for why I think they would screw it up... well I don't think the programmers neccesarily have anything to do with it... their schools certainly have nothing to do with it (your real education comes from getting together with fellows and hacking and self study, if one rely'd on school then you'd walk out of the classroom 4yrs behind... which is what programmers who went into the field for the money often do).

The real reason is MS's development policies and procedures IMHO. Programmers have to collaborate and work together to write good code.. the whole "you can't see the code that your code is supposed to interoperate with" policy can't lead to very efficient code. Whether that's it or not, I can't think of any piece of software that microsoft has done right to date and they've made many... that's a pretty clear track record for my basis ;)

I'm finished with this thread though... I won't be responding to any more posts.

It's funny how these "individualists"...

[Anonymous Coward]

...first have to wait for MS to move before they can be "original" and "different". They can't act on their own, every move first depends on what Bill does. They then do the opposite. All Bill has to do to kill Linux is pronounce it cool, the Zealots would have to then abandon Linus simply because they would have to disagree with Bill.

Re:It's funny how these "individualists"...

[Anonymous Coward]

All Bill has to do to kill Linux is pronounce it cool. The Zealots would have to then abandon Linus simply because they would have to disagree with Bill.

Wow. An intelligent comment on Slashdot. Hell must have frozen over.

Re:It's funny how these "individualists"...

[Anonymous Coward]

That has to be sarcasm...
The only thing more pathetic than a mindless Linux zealot is an idiot that spouts hyperbole about them as if his pride is damaged.

Re:It's funny how these "individualists"...

[Anonymous Coward]

This wouldn't be bofkentucky would it? He wrote some stupid pap in his journal about "Free Thinkers" not being free thinkers because they didn't agree with him. bofkentucky seems to be fine with his cohort group not being "individuals" but complains all over the place when people start getting on his case about his religious beliefs.

BTW... "Objectivists" are all assholes. They claim to follow the path of being completely rational. While an admirable pursuit, it leads to completely unacceptable cruelty to their fellow man. Fuck off Ayn Rand.

Hook, line and sinker.

[Anonymous Coward]

TROLLED!! MUAHAHAHA

is there really need for vorbis portable?

[Anonymous Coward]

you generally use your portable while you travel in bus or go jogging etc.
the ambient noises disort the sound anyway so you don't have to use full 192Kbps quality for your audio, besides the memory in the devices is limited and still bit expensive to expand.

how's your headphones? do you really carry around high end half open/closed headphones that cost $1000 when you go jogging?
no, you use the $10 button headphones that you got cheap from some junk shop --> no need for the extra quality

Currently you can get portable mp3 player with 128Mb memory for less than $100

how about getting one of those cheap mass produced mp3 players and whip up script that transcodes the ogg on your hard drive to 64-160kbps mp3 just before transferring it to the player

you could still enjoy the quality of oggs on your high end speaker system at home since the files are oggs on your hd

Re:is there really need for vorbis portable?

[RoLi]

Or you could use Ogg-Vorbis and be able to have twice as much songs at the same quality on your device.

Re:is there really need for vorbis portable?

[Simon Kongshoj]

Actually that makes Vorbis even more suitable for this sort of application than MP3. You can use Bitrate Peeling to reduce the quality (and size) of your Vorbis files, allowing you to keep a collection of high-quality Vorbis files on your computer, and transfer lower-quality peeled files to your portable. No need to turn them into MP3s and apply another lossy compression algorithm than what they already took when they were Vorbised. Peeling should be faster than turning the files into waves and then MP3'ing them, too.

And then, of course, Vorbis has the advantage that it isn't encumbered by patents. You may or may not care about this.

Am I insane for wearing Sennheiser HD 437's with my Discman? :-)

Re:is there really need for vorbis portable?

[OO7david]

It's not only for jogging, or on the bus, or between classes for which I'd like a Vorbis player. You are right in that the quality difference between a 128 or 192 mp3 vs vorbis with the headphones I'd wear around campus is negligible.

However, about 45% of the music on my computer is in vorbis, and it would save me alot of hassle to simple dump them on a player rather than convert or re-rip (especially since for some I can't find the CDs after moving).

Re:is there really need for vorbis portable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I insane for wearing Sennheiser HD 437's with my Discman? :-)

No, don't be rediculous.
Putting your personal information on the net, though, Simon (skongshoj@oncable.dk)... Now THAT'S crazy!

Re:is there really need for vorbis portable?

[Mr.Ned]

I want Ogg support because I've already encoded my library in Ogg and I don't want to convert each song to mp3 when I want to jog with it. That's like saying that since tape players are already in most cars, why bother asking for a CD player when you can just rerecord all of your CDs onto tapes? I mean, it's not like going to work that extra bit of audio quality is going to make a difference, right?

Here's their business plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Write unfriendly CLI sync app
2) Release portable Vorbis player
3) Sell it to all 12 Vorbis users
4) ???
5) No profit!! Collapso :-)

That's the thing, they have no brain.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even a slug knows Windows is better. Linus is a FAG!!!

Re:That's the thing, they have no brain.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what's it like being an invertebrate?

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it support Og.. Oh, never mind.

Ogg vorbis only on Neuros HD? not light versions?

[AceJohnny]

From the Neuros Forum thread pertaining to ogg Vorbis, from the head of the Neuros product development:

(...)we do wish to open up our system so that third parties can contribute to the product's development amd leverage our own efforts.
Good! another smart company who wants to help the user community rather that stop them!

On their site, Digital Innovations say the NeuRosetta (ogg vorbis for neuros) should soon (sometime in June?) be available for the Neuros HD... I was really hyped up by the Neuros 128MB / 20GB Upgrade Bundle (tho does the upgrade bundle include the Neuros 128? If not, the price tag is beyond my limited student resources...) But will NeuRosetta work on other versions of the Neuros than the Neuros HD? Coz an HD mp3 player is maybe a bit big for all my uses...

Is the Neuros interesting?

[AceJohnny]

1) Well, on their site Digital Innovations say they intend to open up the device for the community. This way we should be able to quickly get some good hacks for the player (i'm not expecting D.I. to *support* these hacks), thus enhancing the player for free!
2) Ogg vorbis support: we're not talking about whether Ogg sounds better on the player. Remember that most people have secondary players for their audio files (like... their PC?) which can take full advantage of the higher quality (?) of the OggV* files. If the player supports OggV, then all those guys who are turning to OggV will be able to listen to their precious OggV collection with this player
3) I'm not sure about this, but look at the HD Upgrade version of the Neuros player. It seems that with it you can quickly switch from a solid-state device, which you take out for your jogging session. to the HD version for that long car trip, with one device!

*OggV = Ogg Vorbis
As a side note, remember that Ogg != audio. The ogg format, if you checked out the RFC that was posted some time ago, is a *container* for media streams. Vorbis is the actual audio format, contained in the .ogg file. From what I skimmed, Ogg can contain mp3 or mpeg4 even!

Re:Is the Neuros interesting?

[iabervon]

What, incidentally, is with naming files with .ogg? That tells you what kind of container it is, but nothing about what's in it. It would make much more sense to use ".oa" (Ogg audio), or ".ov" (Ogg video), or ".oav" (Ogg audio and video), so that you know what sort of output you expect to get out of this file.

Re:Is the Neuros interesting?

[Ziviyr]

.avi can be anything under the sun, .mov can be a number of things, and so forth. No way to tell by filename extension whats in them.

If this is unacceptable write a cool program that does it differently and hope it catches on, or just live with it.

Encoding - C�rrent Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not use --r3mix. It is old and deprecated - its removal from LAME has been considered. You should use LAME 3.90.2 with --alt-preset standard (aka "APS", ~ 192kbps VBR) or possibly --alt-preset extreme ("APX", ~ 256kbps VBR) for trickier encodes (classical, jazz, rock, experimental). Those without space concerns still wishing to use mp3 can try --alt-preset insane ("API", 320kbps CBR).

The --alt-presets are optimisations for quality and have been very thoroughly tested by hydrogenaudio. They represent the current state-of-the-art in mp3 compression.

For a scale, quality (normally transparent up to lossless) and size (50-80MB up to 300-700MB) go roughly (Qx represents Vorbis 1.0 quality number): APS < Q6 < APX < Q7 < Q8 < API < Q9 < Q10 < FLAC

A music sharing network for people who care about quality exists. Because the bad guys read /. too, I'll leave it to you to find üs, but the rules are:

Rip with Exact Audio Copy 0.9b4 (secure mode, accurate stream, NO C2, no normalisation, no read or sync errors, only complete discs with no missing audio tracks, save a log file) and encode to MP3s (LAME 3.90.2 or 3.92), Oggs (Vorbis 1.0) or FLACs. Tag correctly - for mp3 ONLY use id3 v1.1 and id3 v2.3.0 - with year and ideally genre from allmusic, name scheme "%A - %C\%A - %C - %N - %T" normal, various artists discs - name tracks "Artist / Title" and use name scheme "%C\%C - %N - %A - %T", add " (OST)" to album name for soundtracks. Move log into directory, rename to directory name + .log, add an .md5 md5sum for the log and audio files to complete the rip.

Re:Encoding - C�rrent Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rip with Exact Audio Copy 0.9b4"

Your music network locks out non Windows users? Not to be harsh, but it sucks.

I just did an apt-get install cdparanoia earlier this weekend and have been playing with that. If anyone has a better suggestion for Linux or Mac OS X I would be glad to hear it, but cdparanoia seems to be a great solution for me.

Other than the Windows only encode rules it sounds like a very good service. It might almost prevent me from buying the CDs after I listen to them (assuming I like them).

Re:Encoding - C�rrent Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

For native unix ripping, cdparanoia is where it's at. If you're on x86, and want EAC, wine runs it fine. I've ripped stuff with EAC through wine that cdparanoia choked on. I still use cdparanoia for my normal ripping, but in emergency cases, EAC through wine works fine.

Re:Encoding - C�rrent Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

A music sharing network for people who care about quality exists. Because the bad guys read /. too, I'll leave it to you to find üs

I googled a bit, but I can't find you... I would love to be involved... how about a little hint?

Re:Encoding - C�rrent Best Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't Google hard enough. I just found it, myself.

Re:Ogg vorbis only on Neuros HD? not light version

[weirdo513]

Th package deal includes both the 128mb and 20gb backpacks. They are interchangeable, allowing you to switch out the smaller (in size and space) pack for the larger one. And the Positron (and eventual Neurosetta) should work on all versions of the Neuros. -Weirdo513

Anyone have one of these things?

[Anonymous Coward]

The hard drive is a "backpack". Does that mean an external USB hard drive would work instead of the 20GB upgrade?

What's the _actual_ range you've experienced with it?

How's the quality of the transmitted sound?

would you give it to your girlfriend? (virtual ones don't count ;) )

This Is Now A Troll Story

[Anonymous Coward]

There are nearly twice as many 0 and -1 posts as there are posts at +1 and above. This is now a Troll Story. Keep on trollin', trolls.

Pretty much. Well, sort of.

[fireboy1919]

There are already commodity DSPs for mp3 decoding. Making an OGG decoder would require either a faster general purpose CPU (more expensive) or an ASIC chip for it (also more expensive), even though it's easy to actually do either case from the R&D standpoint, since the algorithm is well known.

Right, indeed.

[Balinares]

Well, in my experience, it usually goes like this: 1) user installs some Linux distro, 2) user keeps Windows around just in case, 3) user ends up not using Windows anymore at all. Once in a blue moon at -most-.

That is the scenario I've seen happen most often, anyway.

In my own case, last time I booted to Windows, a few weeks back, it told me, "We have detected it's now Winter Time, do you want Windows to update your clock accordingly?"
I hadn't used it for over six months.

Now of course, I post on /. so I'm likely to be a geek, you're thinking. Well, here's something for you to chew on: I installed Mandrake on my girlfriend's own machine in a dual-boot with Windows, so that she could try it and see how she liked it. A few weeks later, she had stopped using Windows. Interesting, isn't it?

Windows is -NOT- inescapable, my dear AC, oh no. It -does- a few things right (games mostly), but let's face it, Linux has become a more pleasant desktop environment for quite a number of uses. Want to read DVDs without being -forced- to watch the FBI warning (and in some case the ads)? Can't do that on Windows, sorry. Want to read any video file (DivX, Quicktime, Real) with one single unobstrusive player? Can't do that on Windows, sorry (though I hear there's a new player trying to imitate Xine and MPlayer in that regard -- 'twas about time). And then there's the viruses, the sub-par IE browsing environment, the perpetual risk of having pieces of crap software trying to take over your computer for their own purposes (that last point being the one that sealed my switch to another OS -- too tired of having to run AdAware everytime I installed something), etc, etc.

Now don't take me wrong, Linux -does- have it's issues too, but trying to pretend that Windows is inescapable is at best uninformed.

Re:Right, indeed.

[NineNine]

Well, in my experience, it usually goes like this: 1) user installs some Linux distro, 2) user keeps Windows around just in case, 3) user ends up not using Windows anymore at all. Once in a blue moon at -most-.

In my experience it goes like this: 1) User installs some kind of Linux 2) User spends 15 minutes trying to change the resolution, or get sound working, or something else that should be trivial. 3) Users says "fuck this. I don't have time for this shit. This is unuseable". 4) User wipes Linux and boots back into Win 2K.

Re:Right, indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in my experience, it usually goes like this: 1) user installs some Linux distro, 2) user keeps Windows around just in case, 3) user ends up not using Windows anymore at all. Once in a blue moon at -most-.

The people I know have lives and can actually get laid.

Re:Right, indeed.

[Balinares]

> The people I know have lives and can actually get laid.

Funny you should mention that. One of the aforementionned 'users' is actually my girlfriend. :-)

Re:Right, indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the aforementionned 'users' is actually my girlfriend. :-)

What's his name?

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nice to see, and this device has some neat features. Just a shame its so much heavier (9 oz as opposed to 4) and bigger (5.3" x 3.1" x 1.3" as opposed to 4.1" x 2.4" x 0.73") than a comparable ipod. That said, it has got marginally better battery life.

From a previous Neuros Owner

[sequential]

As a previous Neuros owner, I'd like to share my experience with you, since I learned about the Neuros at this site.

As of the last week in May, when I returned my unit, I had owned the Neuros for three months. During that three months, I spent more time attempting to get the software and firmware to work than I did actually listening to the Neuros outside of sitting at my desktop. Though during that time I saw a committed effort to improve the software, firmware and hardware, be warned that the Neuros was at that time for early adopters who had the time and patience to post bug reports and wait for a commercial company to release updates.

From corrupted on unit databases to a firmware that randomly deleted the entire contents of the unit, the problems were constant. Every time I took the unit with plans to listen to it, I was dissappointed. During the short periods I managed to make it work, I had other problems. From the MyFi functionality being only listenable in mono to the UI of the unit not allowing you to search for songs while one is playing, the enitre experience was not worth the $399 I paid for.

If you don't fit into the early adopter catagory or have $400 to loan a company for beta software while you "test" their products for them, then buy another MP3 player.

Please don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the concept of the Neuros. The hardware was well designed, but not in the same catagory as an iPod. The UI was livable, but again, not in the same catagory as an iPod. The software and firmware were unusable and required hours and hours at a time to find the bugs that wouldn't allow useful listening to the device. And then, the worst part of it all... it's USB 1.1. No device with 20 Gb of storage should have USB 1.1 There's nothing worse than transfering data for 5 hours to find out you discovered a bug and had to transfer the data again.

Digital Innovations has great customer service and they actually care a great deal about what you have to say. However, for $400, I'd rather purchase company stock than either of their units.

I have to say that the mic on the unit and the line in are nice features. There's nothing like recording your drunk friends at 2:00 am while they think you're listening to MP3s. And the MyFi is a real nice idea, it's just the performance of the MyFi is inadequate. HiSi is a nice idea, though I never found it useful since my unit never made it very long outside of my desktop.

Before I posted this, I checked out the Neuros website. They seemed to have released a serious update to the software. Hopefully this one is spot on or a huge improvement to the versions I had previously used.

Re:From a previous Neuros Owner

[jd142]

I just got mine a couple of days ago. The MyFi has a range of about 6 feet, which as I understand it is a limit that has more to do with FCC rules than actual hardware. It works just fine in my car, provided I use the power adapter, which I'd do anyway on long trips. On short trips I just toss the unit in the backseat with no troubles. Our car has always had bad reception.

I have experienced none of the problems you did. The sync manager installed nicely, automatically brought the firmware up to date with no problems.

Yes, the sync interface is a little clunky. But not having anything to compare it to, I don't know if it is better or worse than other portables out there. After I used it a couple of times I got used to it.

There will be a usb 2.0 version out this summer and anyone purchasing now will get a free update to the new unit. As I understand it, they'll send you a fedex/ups mailer for the return.

And I will completely agree with you on customer service. I had a small problem signing up (I think a result of having two logins on their forums, but I'm not sure.) and their response to my e-mail was under 30 minutes. I made a joke about not wanting to order two by mistake and they immediately checked to make sure that was the case, something I didn't expect given how I phrased it. ;) Tim at Neuros was just great to work with. I'd rather spend a little more and get great customer service.

Re:From a previous Neuros Owner

[JoeBorn]

sequential-- You obviously had a horrible experience, if you've had it for that long, you must have had practically the first unit we ever made. Nonetheless, while there's no excuse for that, but the firmware and software really has made tremendous strides, and I don't think you'd have any of those problems anymore. I do feel badly about your experience and I would like to make it up to you. If you're interested in trying it again, send me an email and I'll take care of it jborn (at) neurosaudio _com.

Why not USB-storage?

[NotoriousQ]

I am slightly confused why this device just would not support usb-storage. That would sound like the simplest thing to do. No strange programs run, etc.

Even for those who want syncronization abilities. They can just mount the usb-storage and then rsync the local paths.

Why the special utility?

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[acb]

The Archos Jukebox series devices act as USB Mass Storage devices (my Recorder 20 does USB 2.0; newer devices have snap-on FireWire and USB interfaces, I believe). The Apple iPod, meanwhile, acts as the FireWire equivalent.

When I bought my Archos, I specifically chose it for this reason. (It would have been more convenient to buy a locally-distributed Creative Nomad Jukebox, but they use a weird proprietary protocol, putting you at the mercy of proprietary Windows software (which possibly does things to your system without your consent), or flaky reverse-engineered clients permanently in alpha; in either case, if your intended means of using the unit differs from the software designer's, you're SOL.) The convenience of mounting a unit as a disk and copying files to/from it as you see fit is well worth it.

Perhaps Neuros could upgrade firmware giving USB Mass Storage support, though I'm not sure whether this is feasible in software. I believe the Archos uses a hardware USB-IDE interface, which the host computer enables/receives interrupts from.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[jd142]

It does. I plugged it in, windows xp found it immediately as a removable drive and I could add and remove files from it as easily as putting them on a floppy. No reboots, no installing software, it just worked.

Or do you mean that you should be able to just copy music files into a specific location and have it automatically find them? It might be able to do that, I was going to play around with it later.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[volsung]

The README, which you probably didn't see because the submitter didn't include a link to the actual release page, explains this briefly:

As far as your computer is concerned, a Neuros is just an external USB 1 hard disk, following the USB Mass Storage standard. You can copy any sort of file, music or otherwise, onto the Neuros. However, only files that are listed in a special database stored on the Neuros will be playable. This is where positron is needed. It will both physically copy files and update the Neuros database so those files are playable.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[volsung]

The Neuros actually is a USB Mass Storage device. See my other comment for why positron is needed.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[AstroJetson]

I chose the Archos over the Nomad for the same reason you did. The Neuros nonwithstanding, the Archos is the best HD based unit out there. (Disclaimer: The iPod may be better. I don't have any personal experience with it.) The Archos has one major thing going for it. Since it's just a USB stroage device you can
$ mount /mnt/usb
and then rip directly to it from Grip or whatever your favorite ripping/encoding utility is.

However, the Archos suffers from some incredibly flaky firmware. I've had all sorts of trouble with it. I've replaced the unit and still had the same problems. It refuses to play some playlists for no reason (xmms and Winamp will play those same playlists just fine), it will stop playing when loading a new mp3 file and drop back to the browser interface, it will turn itself off when loading a new mp3 file, etc. Lots of goofyness. To make it worse, tech support has given me ZERO help. At one point I did have one tech support guy trying to help me but now he doesn't even return my e-mails (and no, I wasn't rude to him). I'm hoping Neuros works out well because I'm looking to dump my Archos in the worst way. If you can mount a Neuros the same way you can the Archos, I'm there!

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[DrPascal]

I run Debian 3.0 and I own a FAT32 iPod. I had to get the latest IEEE1394 drivers straight from the site (www.linux1394.org), and patch/compile them into my kernel. The 1394 drivers that came with the 2.4.20 kernel would crash every time I tried to load the ohci1394 module.

However, now that it is all set up with the newest 1394 modules, it works wonderfully! I load the ieee1394 and ochi1394 modules on startup, and then when ever I want to talk to the ipod, I modprobe sbp2 and mount it just like a drive. Once its /mnt/ipod, you can run $YOUR_FAVORITE_SYNC_APP to fill it. I have a script that syncs to a dir in my home directory.

It took me a little bit of work, but now that it's set up, I love it.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[ibbey]

However, the Archos suffers from some incredibly flaky firmware.

Check out Rockbox, The Open Source firmware replacement for the Archos. Far and away superior to the default firmware.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[AstroJetson]

You just made me a very, very happy person.

Re:Why not USB-storage?

[ibbey]

Glad to help. I was fortunate enough to have discovered Rockbox before I bought my Archos. If it weren't for Rockbox, the Archos would be OK, but certainly not great (I do like the lack of DRM & ability to use it as a straight hard drive). Rockbox fixes virtually all of the Archos' faults, while keeping all of it's advantages as well. It's still a bit big, but for my purposes (95% in car), that's not a problem.

who the fuck

[Neuropol]

authorized the usage of my name? Consider them sued.

where can you get them?

[abe ferlman]

I'm interested in this, but after a quick look at bestbuy.com, compusa.com and tigerdirect.com I didn't see them. I see you can order them directly- is that the only way? $400 is a bit much, but I'm willing to compare prices a bit.

Re:where can you get them?

[Emmettfish]

By the way, if it helps your comparison, I'm willing and able to give discounts on the device to any Linux user that wants one. Just drop me an E-mail to emmett (at) neurosaudio.com, and I'll get you a discount code you can use when purchasing one from the Neuros webstore.

Cool, eh?

Emmett Plant
Community Outreach
NeurosAudio

Re:where can you get them?

[Thoguth]

Amazon has them with a price that's "too low to show you" but apparently less than $399. here's the link. Note, this is for "pre-orders" and says the item comes out in August 2003. Or you could cut the middle man and talk to the other reply to the parent.

Big prob with Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you end up looking like this.

Re:Big prob with Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You wind up looking like a big sign that reads "We don't allow direct-linking"?

Let me guess... It's supposed to be a picture of a Jerry's kid. No wait, a fat slob? Burn victim? How about a transvestite? Now THAT would be teh funnyest thing evar!!!!1

$1

[bja]

I just wish I had a dollar.

Open Formats and MS/Linux

[Gerry Gleason]

I hate to respond to trolls, but I think it is important to make the case that the use of Open Formats as promoted by Bruce Perens (at sincerechoice.org) is really the key issue.

and because all commercial apps will be geared to work with the MS-Linux desktop, the users of the other distibutions (read ALL of them) will still have their 4th rate "alternative" apps, and not the quality MS-Linux ones.

If Bill and company were to give in to an GPLed kernel and core system, and just port their crappy desktop apps to a Linux base, nothing would really change. Yes, the core OS is primary for security and stability, but for long term usability of your digitally encoded materials, whether audio, visual or text, it is the application formats that matter. At some point (now or in the near future), you will probably need an open source app just to convert obsolete MS word processor files and spreadsheets to something usable.

The reason this won't happen is that if the core OS was Linux, this would vastly lower the barrier for high-quality commercial applications from vendors other than MS as well for Free applications. Further, the most important security vulnerabilities of MS systems is really applications related, not OS, so they would just be porting their insecure apps to Linux and nothing would change.

OGG vs. MP3 is yet another "format" debate, and I fully expect that in the long run, the most open and capable formats will win. As others here and in some of the Neuros forums have pointed out, you want to have record capability for a lossless format for source recordings and archives so you can convert easily to whatever compact format you need. OGG-FLAC combined with OGG-Vorbis seem like a really hot ticket. I gather that the OGG-FLAC encoding hasn't been adapted for integer only devices like this one, but that hurdle shouldn't be too tough.

Re:Open Formats and MS/Linux

[NonSequor]

Xiph is also working with them for support for FLAC.

Wrong.

[StarKruzr]

No it isn't. Apple is not by any means supporting an independent developer community for the iPod. Quite the opposite, in fact.

UK?

[Doug Neal]

A quick look at the Neuros website shows that:

we are unable to ship to addresses outside of the United States or to addresses containing PO Box or APO/FPO

Which is a bit annoying :(

Re:UK?

[Emmettfish]

Agreed, it's a bit of a pain. I have a lot of friends in the UK and in Australia that would like to buy the unit, but we're currently not selling it outside of North America.

We're working very hard on making the device available for sale worldwide. One of the options (MyFi, the FM broadcast part) means that the Neuros will have to pass through a few regulatory bodies before this can happen. That being said, though, we're hauling ass to make it available anywhere we can.

More importantly, we're trying to find ways to sell in other countries that don't necessitate us driving up the price in places that aren't the US. Other manufacturers (that shall remain nameless) do this, and we're not really interested in soaking foreign users.

I know it sucks, but we're working on it. Please bear with us, hopefully we'll be able to sell to you soon.

Emmett Plant
Community Outreach
NeurosAudio

FLAC does matter

[Jucius Maximus]

"And whoah, fanboy. If I was gonna go lossless, I'd go with with a RIFF wav-- those are compatible with every imaginable program."

Yeah, you say that now. But with FLAC, the files are compressed losslessly, and in my experience, I generally get about a 33% size reduction. And with subtle music with a lot of will placed percussion (e.g. my jazz albums) FLAC does give a noticeable improvement over ogg vorbis encoded at 9.1 quality.

So assuming you'd get about 74 minutes of audio on the standard CD, you'd get 747 MiB of wave files per disc.

Note: CD Audio encoding is different than regular data encoding. You cannot fit 747 MiB of wave files on a CD-R in a regular file 74 or 80 minute system because of redundant error correction data that does not exist in the CD Audio format.

So with a 20 GiB Neuros Audio Player you would be able to fit 27.4 CDs on one player. With FLAC, assuming a 33% file size reduction, you would be able to get 40.9 CDs onto the player.

Lossless support in the Neuros player IS a big deal because it allows you to put a significantly larger quantity of non-lossy music on it. And furthermore, if you want, you can just convert the FLAC back to RIFF wave format whenever you want because, one again, the conversion is lossless in both directions.

Re:FLAC does matter

[Webmonger]

According to the original poster, disk space is cheap. I tend to agree. I will gladly forgo a 33% reduction in storage space to achieve far greater compatibility. Yes, I could losslessly convert to wav. But I'm lazy. Give me a FLAC acm codec, and I might rethink that.

units ...

[Jucius Maximus]

Whoops... here's a slightly better link about MiB and GiB: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Re:units ...

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, we've heard of 'street' megs and gigs before. yeah even americans know the difference betweeen 1024 and 1000.

Re:units ...

[Saeger]

Why has it become so fashionable to use MiB's vs MB's recently? Could it be BitTorrents' influence? It being the first popular p2p app to use those units.

--

Well this is odd...

[StarKruzr]

Emmett, did anyone make any /. story submissions when this product was launched? Given the fact that you are encouraging a developer community to form and that you've been working on Linux sync software, you'd think this would have seen a lot more exposure. I *especially* like the swappable storage sleeve option - more or less unlimited expandability.

Re:Well this is odd...

[Jahf]

Neuros has been featured on /. a few times now. Once was specific to the announcement of planned Ogg support through Neurosetta. Heh, I guess there weren't enough duplicate stories to make sure everyone read them (NOW I know why /. does so many dupes :).

Re:Well this is odd...

[Emmettfish]

There's been a few items here and there, but we're still very much in the 'early' phase of 'launching the product.'

There's a lot of really interesting and cool things coming soon (especially for those hip to Linux and Open Source) in terms of what we're working on. We're absolutely committed to Open Source, and there's going to be a lot of news coming from us soon in this vein.

It's why I was hired, by the way. :)

Emmett Plant
Community Outreach
Neuros Audio

Nice, but...

[kotj.mf]

Put me in as one of those who isn't going to run out and buy an ogg player until I can get one that's teeny tiny (ie, smaller than my MiniDisc player) with at least 128MB.

I'm currently using my Zaurus. Since I can get two hours of oggs at q0 (plenty for work) on half of a 128MB MMC card, I'm not quite ready to run out and buy another device of comparable size just for tunes. If I'm going on vacation, I can get a 512MB CF card for 90 bucks and keep my gadgets down to the Zaurus and an external battery pack.

I'm having crash problems with the Sharp ROM 3.10 and the current Vorbis plugin, but I expect somebody will remedy that soon enough. Of course, if Sony ever supports vorbis and Linux on the NetMD players, the whole question will be moot. Yeah, right after pigs fly outta Hillary Rosen's ass...

One more thing: anybody who thinks that mp3 at 128 sounds as good as .ogg at 64 needs to have their ears checked... I suppose you could like it when cymbals sound like breaking glass, but there's no accounting for taste...

Metrics?

[Anonymous Coward]

4.5x2.5x1.5 (not exact) is a bit big to just throw in my pocket

That seems to fit easily into any pocket... unless you are using 19th century measurements? You aren't, are you?

Re:Metrics?

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Well, add my keys, a pen a pencil, my cell phone, my sunglasses, any paper/etc...

Jazpiper

[C_nemo]

For anyone with the Jazpiper portable player John johansen (of DeCss fame) has written a driver and a command line utility fot linux called Openjaz

Re:Ogg vorbis only on Neuros HD? not light version

[Jahf]

And to be completely clear:

1) Both units use the same firmware, the only difference is the amount of built-in flash. The CPU, RAM, etc are the same between the 2 units.

2) The 128MB or 64MB flash are built into the main unit. If you buy the basic 20GB HD backpack version, you get a main unit with 64MB. If you buy the 128MB version you get a main unit with 128MB and the backpack only contains a battery. If you want the 20GB -and- 128MB options, you have to buy the bundle.

Total OGG support

[Gerry Gleason]

Yes, I've noticed a few comments here and on their site about this. It isn't completely clear what part of the OGG space they are covering initially. Vorbis and FLAC, encode and decode? One comment seemed to indicate that the decode side is fairly well integrated for both, so that might be available soon. Another said that FLAC encoding still requires some floating point but that it shouldn't be too hard to fix that.

It is interesting that the early comments in their forum were careful about not saying definitively that they would have OGG as a purely software update, but they appear to have gotten past that. I still couldn't find anything for sure about decoding or FLAC. I suppose it is partly a matter of whether the existing hardware has enough processor power to keep up at sufficient bit rates.

Discounts?

[StarKruzr]

I might just take you up on that. :) How much we talkin' here?

Kudos, btw, on the extremely good customer service regarding the issue of the USB 2.0 upgrade. Very, very classy.

unlikely

[Trepidity]

This is only true if you use very low bitrates (i.e. Vorbis 16 kbps *might* be close to MP3 32 kbps). It's certainly not true at most bitrates. Usually a 5-30% gain is more reasonable, decreases as bitrates get higher (since Vorbis is currently really well-tuned only up to 128 kbps or so).

Re:unlikely

[Ziviyr]

The garf-tuned vorbis encoder (somewhere around sjeng.org) picks up where the official encoder leaves off quality wise.

Re:unlikely

[RoLi]

The ogg-vorbis codec itself is better than the mp3 codec, but what gives the most advantage is not the codec itself, but the fact that ogg-vorbis is variable bitrate by nature and also encourages users to stop thinking in bitrates and start thinking in quality.

For example 128kbps/mp3 is really good enough for most songs, but there are maybe 10% which are hard to encode - so a lot of people use 160kbps, 192kbps or even 256kbps which is a huge waste for most songs. MP3-VBR exists but is rarely used and is still bitrate based (you choose an average bitrate, not a quality)

With ogg-vorbis, you can get the same quality by a much lower average bitrate.

Actually, the more demanding and the less forgiving a user is, the bigger the difference becomes between bitrate-based mp3 and quality-based ogg-vorbis.

bitrate peeling does not exist

[Trepidity]

Bitrate peeling is not yet implemented, and will not be for quite some time.*

* Well, there are experimental implementations, but the quality is generally considered to be unacceptable, so the interfaces are not yet exposed.

Re:bitrate peeling does not exist

[kotj.mf]

Though it doesn't fit the technical definition of peeling, I've found that importing 128kbs ogg into Audacity, and then exporting them @ 64, results in passable quality.

correction

[Trepidity]

It is not generally agreed that LAME APS Ogg Q6. Q6 should in theory be better than APS, but APS is much better tuned at the moment, so the quality is roughly comparable (they fail on different samples, in different ways).

Gah?

[StarKruzr]

Why on Earth would you use the Sharp ROM?

Re:Gah?

[kotj.mf]

Opera 6. Konq/E is nice and all, but it can't hold a candle to Opera 6.

Actually, once I get around to ripping it, I'm gonna give OZ a shot. Still, the new Sharp ROM (3.1) is leaps and bounds better than the last one.

Free Software's Aim

[benjamindees]

Free software aims to replace the Windows operating system only in-so-far as to create an open, competitive marketplace for desktop applications. If Microsoft had stuck to creating operating systems, Linux would have nowhere near the following it does today. Throughout the 90's, instead of being content with improving Windows, Microsoft ignored the bugs in their OS and concentrated on extending their monopoly vertically into the more profitable applications market, integrating their own products into their OS and giving them inherent, illegal advantages over competitors' products.

Microsoft likes to tout the availability of third-party software for Windows, but the trend in the Windows 'ecosystem' has been for large, profitable products to either be purchased by Microsoft and rebranded as M$ 'innovation' or merely crushed under the weight of the Microsoft integration monopoly. It's shocking how many Microsoft 'patches' just serve to further integrate their applications into the OS and break competitors' products. Lots of businesses in the 'dot-com' era were formed with the sole purpose of being purchased by Microsoft. Now, on Windows, you have the choice of one browser, one word processor, one e-mail client, one media player, and one instant messenger. Using anything else puts you at risk of having your investment in third-party applications and training made obsolete by Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics.

Sadly, those who were most fed up with this situation were the users. The mere fact that there are people so sick of Windows that they are willing to work to build their own OS has given Microsoft the only real competition it has ever had. Had there been no OSS 'Revolution', we would all be running M$ apps on a buggy, Macintosh-like system where everything from mice to CPU's to word processors come only from Redmond. Microsoft is still living in this fantasy world where they can control the entire desktop market in this way.

OSX is probably the best example of an open, capitalistic desktop applications marketplace so far. Apple has smartly placed themselves as a stepping stone between a proprietary OS running one vendor's applications to a free OS capable of attracting proprietary applications developers. They have a thriving third-party software base that hasn't (yet?) been monopolised by the OS developer. Maybe their choice of BSD as a base OS will help to convince more application developers to write for open software targets instead of coding nervously as the Sword of Redmond hangs precariously over their heads.

Open Source Firmware/Software

[Luke-Jr]

I have also emailed them and they claim to be working on the details of making the software and firmware open source.

From a current Neuros Owner

[weirdo513]

I've not had any of the problems you've had, though I was unable to get into the initial batch of units that shipped. There were a lot of the early units that had a hardware bug in them, I would suggest you take Joe Born's offer up and try out a newer model.

I'm listening to my Neuros right now, it goes with me everywhere. I know that sounds like a bad commercial, and I'm sorry if I come off as a Neuros spokesmodel, but it's the truth. My friends/coworkers have my MiFi station saved on their Stereos for when we car pool. :)

THe USB 1.1 was a big sticking point for me, but with their recent offer of free upgrades to USB 2.0, I was sold and purchased a 20gb drive.

I've also never encountered a company that is as dedicated to customer satisfaction. If there were more people like Tim Artz in customer service the world would be a wonderful place to live.

Early Adoption can be a pain but I've not had the experience you've had and after a month+ of ownership I'm happy to own a Nueros.

-Weirdo513

You are incorrect

[Trepidity]

VBR MP3 not only exists, but is quality (not bitrate) based, and very widely used amongst the sort of people who care about quality (including several major filetrading networks). Tthere is also average-bitrate VBR, but this is not the recommended one: LAME's --alt-preset standard is recommended, and is a quality-based mode. It is generally considered approximately equal quality-wise to Ogg -q6 (and averages around the same bitrates as Ogg -q6 as well).

So I maintain my point, that Ogg is not superior to MP3 at high bitrates (or "high quality settings" if you prefer, which maps to the same thing). Once you get above Ogg -q4 or so, MP3 can match Ogg's quality at similar filesizes.

that's unclear

[Trepidity]

I've heard that it's supposed to be better, but I haven't seen any listening tests that show that to any significant extent. IIRC, the latest iteration (gt beta 3) turned out to have some pretty major quality problems with it, and that's unlikely to change in the near future, as garf has discontinued work for the moment.

In any case, it's not nearly enough tuning to match the tuning done on the LAME mp3 encoder, which is why at high quality levels Ogg remains approximately even with MP3, despite MP3's inherent suckiness as a format.

that's not the same thing at all

[Trepidity]

That's just transcoding, can be done with any format (or even between formats), and is generally a very bad idea. The point of bitrate peeling is to allow you to do 128->64 and end up with a 64 that sounds not too much worse than a 64 that was encoded straight from the original source material. Doing a 128->64 transcoding (which is really 128->wav->64) will give you something that sounds significantly worse than straight-to-64.