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Rio Announces Networked Ogg Vorbis Player
Alexander writes "Rio has announced several players, among them the Karma 20GB Ogg Vorbis music player, which also sports Ethernet as the preferred connection method. Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptance?" There's more information on the new Rio line-up via an article at The Register.
And don't forget that according to this link, there is also going to be a 40GB for around $499!
Unique signatures are rare.
The software that runs on the thing is based on the software used in the Empeg linux player.. the Karma runs linux, and has a usb2 hub, not a client.. lots of hack potential.
I'd be happy with 20GB of Karma!!!
(I think I just soiled myself).
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
RioKarma 20:
20G 2.7 x 3.0 x 0.90 = 7.29 inch^3 5.5oz
ipod specs
10G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.62 = 6.10 inch^3 5.6oz
15G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.62 = 6.10 inch^3 5.6oz
30G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.73 = 7.18 inch^3 6.2oz
So it's pretty comprable size-wise and breaks from the pcmcia 1.8" hard drive mold (0.20" x 2.13" x 3.37") that defines the ipod.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
After the third remote control broke, and I tried to buy a new one from Rio itself (rather than Amazon, where I bought it) it turned out that not only would they not ship items from their e-store, they would even accept a non-US credit card it (when I tried to buy and have it sent to a US friend to send on to me). Needless to say, I'm not impressed by a company quite happy to take foreigner's money while giving them a shoddy service.
P.
The problem with the Karma here is it doesn't appear to have a radio tuner, unlike the Neuros. The Neuros also:
The main thing the Neuros doesn't have that I would like is a line-out, but oh well. It does nearly everything else I'd want.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
insightful?
:-)
Um, neither usb or firewire are rated for the distances of ethernet [cat5]. I think *that* is the point. E.g. your computer in one room and the home stereo + tv + stuff in another.
Plus you can get 30ft of cat5 for about as much as 6ft of usb retail [sick!].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You bet - Karma builds from the same codebase as the car player (although it runs eCos not Linux due to code size and lack of an MMU).
3.0 already plays Ogg, and will get released when we're done with our seven (count em) new products. It's been a bit hectic around here lately!
Rob
(formerly of empeg, now Rio)
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
Then encode to FLAC, which this new player also supports. FLAC is CD quality (completely lossless) at half the space and is a completely open format.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Does this mean we *finally* have a portable mp3 player (non-cd based) that can play back gapless recordings?
It plays gapless anyway, unless your encoder has inserted masses of blank frames (which you can trim with various utilities).
The cross fader is for radio style mixes, which works particularly well if you're on random playback from your entire music collection. The last few seconds of the current track will cross fade into the first few seconds of the next track - I leave this switched on most of the time now. You would turn it off for continuous mixes though.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
Does anybody actually have any WMA files?
Yes
That contain music?
Yes
That they actually listen to?
I have my whole 300 CD music collection ripped to WMA. (You can just turn off DRM).
I don't even know where i would get a program that rips CD's to WMA.
That is a silly thing to say... its called Windows Media Player (duh)
Why does everything always include support for WMA when nobody really uses it?
With WMP 9: Better compression, better audio quality, and, like you said, universal and total support. I guess when you say "nobody" you mean "nobody except the 95% of users out there running Windows"
Use an Ethernet-to-wireless bridge (e.g. WET11) on the Ethernet port. No hacking required.
Peter
In related news, iRiver gave this update on Vorbis support earlier this week: here
We tested Karma with Vorbis bitrates up to 256Kbits/s VBR. Anyone using Vorbis at higher bitrates than that should IMO be using Flac.
Peter
For what it's worth, iRiver (the same people who make the original RioVolt line and the current SlimX and flashplayer things you find at Bestbuy) just made a news release detailing their Ogg efforts. http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=34 7
Essentially what they're saying is that Tremor is too big for their embedded devices (read: CD players and flash players). I suppose this can be an excusable claim, depending on the device. However, I'm really disappointed their hard drive doesn't include Ogg support, as a hard drive is a bigger and heaver item, and it shouldn't hurt too much for them to include Ogg support on the ROM.
an old Thinkpad makes a great networked Ogg Vorbis player and second hand it costs less than this toy, but it is a wee lil'bit bigger...
Oh well, what the hell...
You might be interested in the Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter. It uses 802.11b to distribute audio and images to your television. It includes a remote control used to control an GUI on your television.
You plug it in. If there's a DHCP server, it DHCPs, otherwise it autonets (UPnP-styley). Then it announces itself over SSDP multicast. If you're using Windows XP Home (or anything else that talks SSDP -- it's a completely open standard) an icon pops up in Network Neighbourhood. If you're using other sorts of Windows, an icon pops up in our own transfer software. Otherwise, you just point a web browser at it: there's a web server in it which will serve you a completely cross-platform Java applet to do your transfers.
I don't know whether we'll be actively helping the open-source community to implement the Ethernet protocol this time, but it certainly wouldn't be rocket science to reverse-engineer it.
Peter
In a word, no.
I play both regularly on my iPaq (200mhz ARM). Using the libmad decoder for MP3 and Nicholas Pitre's integerized Ogg library (NOT tremor), I see about 10% utilization for MP3, and 8-10% for Ogg. (I say 8-10 as conservative padding. In practice, believe it or no, Vorbis always hangs lower.)
Keep in mind that the libvorbis libraries most folks use are a reference implementation. Once Vorbis is properly optimized, it's really quite light on the resources. These guys are probably using tremor, which I personally haven't tried, but I've heard people say it's even lighter than the Pitre decoder.
Kenwood makes the MusicKeg, a rebranded Phatbox, which plays FLAC and I believe you can get firmware from PhatNoise to play Vorbis also. They are still working on optimizations to Tremor to play the highest quality levels smoothly.
Josh
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
Yup. It works out about the same CPU usage as MP3 for normal (64-128) bitrates, but seems to scale with bitrate a lot more than MP3 does; by the time you get to 256Kbits/s, Vorbis is really hard work.
Peter
No, it's BSD-licensed.
It would be interesting to see what kind of optimizations they used such as special DSP instructions.
Actually we use the Tremor (integerised) Vorbis library almost completely stock -- it already came with optimisations for ARM. The only thing we've really had to take a hitting thing to is its memory allocation.
Peter
Here's a specification comparison with an equivalently priced (both at $399) iPod... info from dapreview, an excellent respository of specs of hdd audio players which reported on the Karma aka "Pearl" months ago.
iPod
Capacity: 15GB
Weight: 5.6 ounces
Formats: MP3 AAC AIFF WAV
Interfaces: Firewire 400
Battery Life: "Over 8 hours"
Extras: Games, Contacts, Calendar, Alarm, Sleep Timer, Clock, "20 equalizer settings"
LCD: 160x128 backlit
Karma
Capacity: 20GB
Weight: 5.5 ounces
Formats: MP3 WMA OGG FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec making WAV not needed)
Interfaces: USB 2 and Ethernet
Battery Life: 15 hours
Extras: Dynamic playlists, Dual RCA Line-Outs, 5 band equalizer
LCD: 160x128 backlit
Seems like if you want purely a music player that is conveniently-sized, supports OGG and has 25% more capacity than the iPod for the same price, the Karma is the way to go. The iPod's perks are tempting though, if you want more than just a music player.
Without necessarily wishing to express an opinion on the nitwits who thought that that renaming was a good idea, Karma supports the 480Mbits/s variety of USB, or, as I'm tempted to call it, proper USB2. (That is, the wire speed is 480Mbits/s; you don't get the whole 60Mbytes/s in practice as that's more than the head rate of the winchester.)
Peter
I've been following the design and subsequent release of the Karma, and I'm quite happy to say that it is indeed 100mbit. I have no idea why they don't mention that one their website. That feature alone is a big selling point for me.
-Johnny