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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.
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.
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
Peter
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.
"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.