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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.
Cynics are numerous and void of ideas. Ignore them. I hope Rio is giving to Xiph for using Ogg (I hear Xiph takes contracts to develop for a particular hardware), but anyone getting one of these should be donating. If Rio says they are giving a portion of the proceeds to Xiph, I'd be even more likely to buy from them.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
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.
Anti SCO T-Shirt. $1 donated to OSI Fund on each shirt.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Oh, it plays Ogg. Well, if't less then $20 I'll buy it!
Even though Digital Innovations got my money for being the first out of the gate with Neuros support for Ogg Vorbis, competition is always a good thing, and having more players that support Vorbis means lower prices and less potential for lock-in or obsolescence.
Ogg Vorbis destroys MP3 in terms of quality, and is competitive with all of the newer proprietary codecs (e.g., AAC, MP3Pro, WMA) at high bitrates while providing much better performance than those at low bitrates (e.g., sub-64kbps).
Don't let the intelligentsia decide whether Vorbis is the right codec for you or not: the free market will decide this question, and as a result of this development, that market just got more interesting.
[ home ]
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
They all look like they were designed by Mike Brady.
Slashdot review...
Karma: Excellent
Thank you.
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.
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.
Yes, it supports both WMA and MP3. FINALLY, a device that supports both WMA and MP3, in addition to Ogg Vorbis!!! (sarcasm intended)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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
Does this mean we *finally* have a portable mp3 player (non-cd based) that can play back gapless recordings? This is one of the few features that has held me back from buying an iPod.
...but someone else may donate twice what your share should have been.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
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.
Powerful tools include cross-fader, 5-band parametric equalizer, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support, and a huge, backlit display capable of visualizations, animated menus, and 16 shades of gray.
Now this is a reason to celebrate! I can get rid of my audiotron and my portable for one system that supports OGG and FLAC. FLAC support is huge for the thousands of people who download and share legal lossless music.
But does it play...oh, never mind.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Quickly! To the Stores! Or to the Online Merchant of Your Choice!
Since this is exactly what you've been calling for, I expect this thing to outsell the iPod in a week or two. I mean, Ogg Vorbis is the super format that's been the only thing keeping a legion of geeks from buying an MP3 player, right? Go hang a salami...I mean, hang Interface and Availablity, it's all about the Ogg.
Mind you, if this doesn't sell like hotcakes, well, Vorbis won't have been quite the driving market force that you'd been preaching, will it? So you might want to by 5, just in case. Don't worry, if the market's there, you'll be able to sell them on ebay, sometimes for more than you'd bought them for. If the iPod is any benchmark, that is.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
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.
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"
How about we finally get ogg support in digital video players, too?
More and more video is being encoded as OGM (Ogg Media Stream) which usually involves xvid-encoded video and ogg-encoded audio; I can attest that the quality is superb but there is one clear downfall: at this moment, no DVD player or portable media device can play the format, thus requiring you to watch such encoded video on your computer.
I look at this development as good progress towards finally getting something that supports both ogg and xvid out of the box.
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.
I have been listening to ogg vorbis files for months now using my Palm Zire 71 and Aeroplayer. I got myself a 256 Meg SD card and I was off to the races.
This makes me remember, in the early days of the internet when the people with internet access were lucky and most geeks used BBS system. The clueless people here in brasil would call any image of gif. There were BBS with a gif download dir, usualy filled with porn jpegs.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
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.
Exactly. If the industry supports it, it stands a good chance to get used because people don't really care for the most part. All they care about is that when they click on the link, it plays in their player of choice. Or that if they look up download a Dave Matthews Band song from Kazaa, it plays in their portable player.
Now that many of the major PC-players and portable players are supporting Ogg, it won't matter if a site/person/whoever is offering something in MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg - to the end user, if it works, it's great.
And hey, if this song over here with the .ogg (as if they ever see 3-letter extensions in Windoze) sounds better than the one with .mp3, I'll go with that one. And if I can fit 35 songs from this place that has "Oggs" compared to 30 from this other place onto my 128MB player...
I picked up a Neuros and am loving it. Still needs some work, but they seem to be pretty connected to their user community, which is nice.
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."
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...
>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.
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.
I think the least a company who implements the Ogg Vorbis protocol should do is donate some small percentage of profits from each sale to xiph.org to support continued development. Not that they have to (do to it being patent and royalty free) but it would be a nice gesture.
Is Rio required by the Ogg Vorbis license agreement to release the microcode they used to implement this protocol? It would be interesting to see what kind of optimizations they used such as special DSP instructions.
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
Why? It can play FLAC, which is lossless.
Josh
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
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
as long as consumers aren't using it. And the answer to the question is a definite no
it's being picked up, more so than you'd think.
Historically, formats like this start out underground (witness mp3 on IRC back in the day, or divx 3 years ago). But, reading places like the Divx forums, people are really starting to take notice of oggs. It's becomming integrated into the current view of compressed music.
Just give it a little bit. It'll be popular.
sig?
Imagine the conundrum: Slashdotter cannot be satisfied until making obligatory it-doesn't-have Ogg-support-so-I-wont-buy-it rant.... but it does have Ogg support.
All we need now is for the Microsoft is to file a brief against SCO. Have you ever seen the movie Scanners?
In my case, I care more about Xiph than cancer research.
Yeah, royalty free audio codecs are much more important than a cure for a horrible painful disease that kills millions. I'd would gladly give up years of my life (spent with friends and family) to keep programmers from having to pay for use of an audio codec. WHEN YOU ARE BURNING IN HELL, REMEMBER TO REQUEST THAT YOUR SOULS SCREAMS ARE RECORDED IN A PATENT FREE FORMAT.
Download rio music manager 1.90 from www.rioaudio.com - and delete all your old drivers (ideally, the registry keys too). RMM 1.90 does work with 2k/XP and is rather a lot more stable than the old software, as this stuff was written from scratch for the S-series players - but we also added support for legacy players though it doesn't get shouted about much. It'll do WMA transfers no problem too.
No reason not to provide source, etc? Licensing agreements and a $5k toolchain are probably enough of a disincentive for source release for the old Rio players.
The 600 came from the US development office, which is no more. The UK office (ex-empeg) now does all the rio stuff; there was also a lot of turmoil surrounding sonicblue going away, so these two combine into the old stuff being slightly more orphaned than might otherwise be the case - but try getting support for a (say) 2 year old parallel port scanner; same deal...
Karma keeps all track information in UTF-8, and the transfer software fully understands UTF-8 and UTF-16 tags. Unfortunately the very first release of the Karma firmware won't have Unicode fonts, but we're currently intending to offer a subsequent free upgrade including glyphs for Cyrillic, Greek and Kanji. The Rio Nitrus (the 1.5Gb micro-hard-disk player which we've also just announced) has UTF-8 support including Cyrillic, Greek and Kanji from the word go.
Peter