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.

Comments

40GB, too!

[Arthaed]

And don't forget that according to this link, there is also going to be a 40GB for around $499!

Re:Rio Car

[pdh11]

Unlike some previous Empeg/Rio products, the Karma does not run Linux. It runs Ecos, the popular open-source embedded OS. The firmware isn't designed to be modified like the Rio Central or car-player was.

(It always used to gall me slightly that the Rio Central and car-player were described as "hackable", with the implication that people customising them were outwitting us in some way, whereas in fact we put a good deal of effort into making them geek-customisable...)

Peter

Re:Competition rocks

[tuffy]

who cares about low bitrates, i want my cd-quality.

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.

Re:Powerful tools include cross-fader...

[phrenzy]

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

Re:Finally

[pdh11]

Maybe someone can hack it so that you could use a wireless USB NIC on the USB2 port.

Use an Ethernet-to-wireless bridge (e.g. WET11) on the Ethernet port. No hacking required.

Peter

Re:Competition rocks

[pdh11]

If this new Karma player can handle all the Vorbis quality rates and FLAC - out of the box - I'll be picking one up.

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

Re:Competition rocks

[pdh11]

And, as long as I'm pestering a Rio employee, how is the ethernet support going to work?

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

Re:source code?

[pdh11]

Is Rio required by the Ogg Vorbis license agreement to release the microcode they used to implement this protocol?

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