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Rio Announces Networked Ogg Vorbis Player

Posted by simoniker on from the go-ogg-ogg-go dept.

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.

14 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. 40GB, too! by Arthaed · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    Unique signatures are rare.
    1. Re:40GB, too! by garcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Give to xiph if you use these. by Thinkit3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Finally by ttyp0 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is exactly what I've been waiting for. There are lots of great MP3 players out there, but most depend on USB. I want something that I can use with my stereo system, and running a 30 ft CAT5 is much easier than 30ft of USB cable. Now only if it were 802.11. I think this device will definately have me looking at Ogg.

    Anti SCO T-Shirt. $1 donated to OSI Fund on each shirt.

    1. Re:Finally by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Informative
      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

  4. Re:Rio Car by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  5. Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptance? by willll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Competition rocks by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  7. Re:Powerful tools include cross-fader... by phrenzy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  8. FLAC Support Too by asv108 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the Rio Homepage

    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.

  9. Re:Powerful tools include cross-fader... by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Have one? He is one. We build a Slashdot astroturfing bot into each unit -- that's what the Ethernet is for.

    Peter

  10. Re:Competition rocks by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  11. Re:Competition rocks by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  12. Re:source code? by pdh11 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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