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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.
Anti SCO T-Shirt. $1 donated to OSI Fund on each shirt.
Using ethernet to transfer the data seems like it's a great idea and long overdue in the portable media player market...
Although with the advent of firewire and usb2.1, it doesn't seem that big anymore
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Just this weekend I just purchased a Panasonic (SL-SX420) portable CD player that happens to read MP3 CDs too. It was $39.99 at BestBuy. I was shopping around for a portable MP3 player but couldn't see spending $200 on a 20GB Nomad or even more for an iPod.
For those of you more unfortunate poor people (like myself), perhaps this player would better suit your needs.
If Xiph wants to make money off Ogg, they should sell it. If I want to donate money, I'll donate it to cancer research or something.
Breakfast served all day!
I have an old empeg. No longer made, but they still find time to make refinemenats toit. They are a bunch of linux geeks like the rest of us. Since Tremor (the fixed-point Ogg decoder) came out, there's not been any reason to not have Ogg. They've got a tight code base too, and if they can find the time, the old empeg people might get the capability to play Ogg, which is something I've been requesting a while. But these discontunued products are last on the priority list. The 3.0 alpha code plays on the player, and when it goes beta, we (empeg owners) might just get Ogg...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Well, I wouldn't go that far... but if a company's website functions poorly it does reflect negatively on the company and its products.
I know I am definiately less likely to purchase something if can't easily access information on their products.
The answer to this question is irrelevant. The real question is "Is Ogg Vorbis gaining consumer acceptance?" It doesn't matter if the music industry thinks Ogg Vorbis is good, as long as consumers aren't using it. And the answer to the question is a definite no. How many people talk about ogg sharing, the same way they talk about mp3 sharing? How many casual music downloaders have heard of Ogg Vorbis, let alone know what it is? As long as these numbers are low, products for playing ogg files will fail, and the industries acceptance of Ogg Vorbis won't matter, until consumers play ogg's instead of mp3's, and know that they are using ogg's.
Does anybody actually have any WMA files? That contain music? That they actually listen to? I don't even know where i would get a program that rips CD's to WMA. Why does everything always include support for WMA when nobody really uses it?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Maybe it's just me, and maybe I'm an idiot (there's always a good chance of that), but does using an Ethernet connection make any sense? Most computers used by typical home users only have one Ethernet port, and that's usually already used by their cable/DSL modem. Meanwhile, there are plenty of empty and/or shareable USB & Firewire ports available...
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Now if only the battery would last longer than 2.5 minutes
15 hours in fact - c'mon, it's a very small gadget and hard disks suck current! A certain other well known player only manages 8 hours.
Rob
-- Freddie Starr ate my empeg
Ok, you got me there, but it's still going to be a feature that most geeks consider when they look at the Rio players, which makes it a Good Thing(tm) for them to do.
What's the point of using Ogg Vorbis when there is AAC+? AAC+ is better than Vorbis at all bitrates. Vorbis is not even good past 128kbps unless you're using the unofficial GT3b1 tuning. If you're going to spend so much money on a multimedia player, I don't think it would break the bank to buy Nero or Quicktime for AAC encoding. Vorbis doesn't even seem to be in development anymore, while AAC is being developed by many other companies.
Vorbis can't compete.
According to several articles I have read, such as the one on gizmodo.com, the Rio Karma will have USB 2.0 as its native interface; it will also come with a dock that will plug into an Ethernet network.
If you can just use standard file server protocols (NFS or SMB, I don't care) to put files on the Karma, I will buy one. If you have to run some modified jukebox app to move the files, so it can wrap your files in DRM junk, I won't buy one.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The consumer has already come to think of "mp3" as short for compressed digital music. This doesn't mean that Vorbis doesn't have a chance, though. Once the industry has accepted it, consumers will use it, even if they don't realize that their "mp3"s aren't actually mp3 at all. People will download and play Ogg files without knowing the technical details. People already don't know the difference between avi, wmv, and mpg, and really don't know that there are tons of different sorts of mpegs; there's no reason audio won't be the same, with nobody understanding or caring what format they're using, so long as it works, and always calling it "mp3" regardless of what it is.
MP3 is just another word in most people's vocabularies now. It's similar to "Kleenex vs. tissue" or "Q-Tip vs. cotton swab". When people say to go download an MP3, they really mean download some music in miscellanious format.
;)
I would sooner take an ogg than an mp3 anyday though
I always transcode to WMA when transferring files to my 64MB Nomad II MG. Since it only supports MP3, WAV and WMA, the best quality at low bitrate of those three is WMA. Of course my originals are in FLAC or OGG. So basically I'm saying that WMA is generally there because it has better low bitrate performance than MP3. Of course OGG blows all that away so they probably included it 'by tradition' in the karma player.
As to encoding to WMA, it's very common if you're using windows. Most major rip/encode programs will let you encode to it if you look through the options. I just use WinAMP's WMA output plugin myself.
Careful with this one. The response to this one is fairly obvious. A program that rips CD's to WMA? It's called Media Player. After updating to MP9 (desire to have everything up-to-date is still too hard to resist, even though I rarely use it; and, yes, I realize I'm using Windows XP), upon my first use it asked if I wanted to convert all of my MP3's to WMA. The first time I put in a CD, it asked if I wanted to always have Media Player rip the CD to WMA files automatically. (Both of which I declined.) Because these are default settings, the average click-yes/ok-to-everything-user is bound to start having a collection of WMA files (or at least those who actually purchase CD's and don't just download all their music). Because MP3's were around first, people recognize what they are. If given a choice by a program (Rip to MP3 or WMA or even OGG for that matter), they recognize MP3 and will select it, which is why it's still the defacto standard. WMA is starting to dent that, though. If my memory is correct, it helps that you can't rip to MP3 directly. If you want MP3's, it links you to a site with plug-ins for purchase that can handle the MP3 format. As you might guess, most people aren't looking to pay for the software to listen to their encoded music.
Don't blame them. If the hard drive manufacturers got it right in the first place it would all be so much easier. But hard drive manufacturers use the 1GB = 1x10^9 definition to start with.
Maybe they should re-market the Karmas as 18.62GB and 37.25GB units respectively. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
And that wouldn't exactly make price comparisons with any other manufacturers easy - Apple, Creative and Neuros all use the drive manufacturers definitions too. Why should Rio be expected to get it right at the expense of sales?
At least they are being honest and letting people know that the definition isn't strictly correct. I bet that Apple etc. don't.
The answer to this question is irrelevant. The real question is "Is Ogg Vorbis gaining consumer acceptance?" It doesn't matter if the music industry thinks Ogg Vorbis is good, as long as consumers aren't using it.
You would think that is how it should work but (un?)fortunately it doesn't. If a ogg is going to be accepted by the consumer that means the industry has to support it first because they control the vast majority of the infrastructure used to play music. Consumers other than us geeks aren't going to use ogg unless the big media players allow you to play it and rip to it and it becomes available in download services. I can say I never even heard of ACC until the Apple Music Store. Industry leads and the consumers may or may not choose to follow, that's how it works.
I stole this Sig
The label of being "hackable" makes the device more desirable for a lot of us.
"Hackable"
A definite good thing in this forum, where the difference between a hacker and a cracker is appreciated. And someone who deliberately makes hardware that is flexible is appreciated, not scorned.
But in the world at large, hackable is regarded as a negative attribute, something that allows vague unknown bad people to do bad things to MyComputer.
It's sad that there is such a large gap in understanding what "hackable" means between the inside expert press and the world at large.
Someone with a loud voice ought to educate the masses with some kind of analogy to cars with locked hoods being unhackable.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Peter
>Anybody else think this way, or am I in the minority?
Well, I see your point but your criticism of this device as overpriced may be undeserved because you're considering using it only in a limited way, and it's capable of much more than playing an hour or two of music. For the applications you've described, a $100 device may be more appropriate, but this item is targeted at a different audience. We're talking about 40 GIGS of storage -- approximately 400 CD's worth of music (12 tracks each), or approx. 250 hours of sound!
Imagine it as the center of your music listening experience -- a device you take with and plug into a home/office stereo or car audio system, or simply listen to it as a portable device. Plus, of course, it's a portable hard drive for moving data from one system to another.
Marketing folks must hate putting "Ogg Vorbis" on things.
Do we need this one every time?
Names do not matter. If they did, MP3 and MS-DOS would hardly have caught on. At least you can sort-of pronounce Ogg Vorbis, rather than having to spell it.
The answer to this question is irrelevant.
No it's not. The manufacturers are the ones who (I think) will be mostly responsible for introducing Ogg to the masses. The reason is that the money they don't have to pay to Fraunhofer for the MP3 license goes right in their pockets. If they can sell a $200 music player that does everything in Ogg rather than MP3, they can save themselves $4 a pop (or whatever) on every unit sold. Do you think Diamond would be putting Vorbis playback in this new unit if it wasn't free?
Of course, this player does MP3 too, so they are paying anyway. But in a year or so I think we may start seeing Vorbis-only players.
Why? It can play FLAC, which is lossless.
Josh
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
The current 15GB iPod is able to use USB 2.0 with an adapter cable and also has a line out in the dock.
You also forgot the most important aspect of a portable music player... how it sounds. The iPod has been well-regarded by audiophiles and produces very clean signals. In fact, it drives my Sennheiser HD580s extremely well without an external headphone amp.
Personally, the Karma looks very promising, but I'll wait until the reviews are in and I have an opportunity to hear one before replacing my iPod with one.
"Apple's iPod reeks of great design and simplicity. By the looks of it, that device doesn't."
Except that it's ligher, cheaper, smaller, plays OGG/FLAC, and has ethernet built in. Oh, and it's compatible with Linux too.
Now, I agree that outselling the iPod is an unrealistic goal. But that has to do with the fact that the iPod has become a very strong brand, not the design of the device.
Remember, Rio is a well known brand too.
Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on cancer research over the last few decades and still no broadly useful cures are on the horizon. (Although better treatments have been devised which increase life expectancy of cancer sufferers). Many cancer deaths could be avoided very cost effectivly by lifestyle changes such as not smoking and having a healthy diet. If you really care about pain and suffering of millions, much money allocated to cancer research could probably be better spent on other programs targetting other conditions such as AIDS, malnutrition and whooping cough.
A small donation to cancer research is unlikely to make much of a difference to one's quality of life, given the millions already spent by governments and private foundations.
A donation to the Xiph foundation does not look good in comparison to a donation to a more altruistic cause like cancer research. However, a donation to the Xiph foundation is probably more cost effective than buying a product that contains an mp3 or MS codec paying a hidden license fee.
Ideally, of course, you'd give to both causes, as well as reducing world hunger, curing AIDS, and whatever other good causes you can think of. However, if you don't have that much money, you have to prioritize based on where you think your money would do the most good. Personally, I'd give the money to feeding the poor, or somewhere else where it'd have an immediate tangible effect, and then donate my time to Xiph. However, just because there are potentially nobler causes doesn't mean you have to give every spare cent to them, or that you can't put your money where you see a greater benefit. A dollar for Xiph will do much more good than a dollar for the Boy Scouts, the Republican Party, Slashdot, or any of a number of other causes people give to quite readily.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.