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Thoughts on the New Crop of Ogg Aware Players?
Steve Andre' asks: " Given the approaching season, I'm wondering if many have used and have opinions about the new Ogg Vorbis capable portable players out there. What I'd like to find is at least a CD/MP3/Ogg capable player which sounds good and doesn't do 'odd' things. What's it like out there? Can I finally roast my Ogg files and take them with me for a walk?"
The empeg does, using the latest alpha release of the version 3 player software.
It's no longer in production, although it's still well supported and you can find them for sale quite often on the empeg forum.
-- Gary F.
Last time OV was mentioned on /. (the last beta, presumably) I download the same encoder and xmms plugin for playback. I encoded a couple of CDs and tried it out. Here's what I found:
First, the sample encoder is MUCH easier to use than what I've already been using (GRip). I don't know if that's because my current method is so terrible or because the new one is so great.
Second, the resulting files were about 10% smaller. Others may say "so what, hard drives are cheap", but:
1) I only have 4.5 GB and don't have the extra cash to buy larger.
2) Larger hard drives make a 10% savings even MORE worthwhile. Consider: If I saved 10% of a 4 GB drive, that's 40 MB--room for maybe 10 additional songs or about one CD. But if I saved 10% of a 400 GB drive, that's an extra 4 GB--enough for 100 CD's.
Third, the sound quality was "equivalent". That is, I couldn't tell the difference, BUT I'm not an expert and my sound equipment is FAR from top of the line (just some computer speakers plugged into an AWE32).
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
you might wanna check out the Neuros player.
small flowers crack concrete
here. Check the thread/archives, there's more.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
There are 3 that are fairly well-known
1. Neuros, though I'm wondering how commited they are to their player. Ogg support is still in beta.
2. iRiver iHP-120, which I personally think is the best. 20Gb hard drive, built-in mic, ogg playing, et cetera. Great player.
3. Rio Karma. It has a bit less features than the iRiver, but it seems pretty nice overall.
My Zaurus plays them quite nicely, though only 2 hours per charge.
There are links to reviews from the Xiph Wiki also.
The coolest by far appears to be the iFP-500 series, which has been release internationally (a while ago) but not released in the US yet. So impatient me went out and asked Santa for a Squeezebox.
Beware, some Best Buy CD systems that claim "mp3" can't play mp3 CDs. You have to use your computer to decode the mp3 and send it to the boom box via USB cable (i.e. the boombox is a glorified speaker system for your computer).
Of course a lot of DVD players can handle mp3 . . . I'm told that Best Buy has some kind of stake in the music industry and that they are trying to suppress mp3 hardware.
I use a Palm Tungsten T3, and use AeroPlayer as an audio player. It supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MIDI, etc. Very high sound quality. There are other similar music players available for PalmOS, so shop around before settling on a particular one.
:)
The Tungsten T3 has been widely criticised for poor battery life. My experience has been that I get about 6-7 hours of MP3/Ogg playing time before I get the first low-battery warning. That's pretty equivalent to what you get on an iPod, which won't play Ogg files. Plus the Palm gives you hard buttons, where the iPod has that weird touch-sensitive spinny thing. I have a personal preference for hard buttons, so that was a real winner for me. Other models of Palms have better battery life, and one can increase battery life further by underclocking the CPU, so one can certainly do better than the numbers I've mentioned above. But this was good enough for me.
Also, the Palm is, of course, a PDA. Bonus, from my point of view, since I needed one.
Cons, of course, are that the Palm's music needs to be placed on a flash card, which means that you're limited to the size of flash cards (I've seen them with capacities up to 512meg, but nothing close to even the low-end iPod's 10gig), the file writing rate of flash cards (very slow).. and so on.
I tend to fit a bit over two hours of music into 128 meg of space, or more if encoded at a lower bitrate -- I have some old mono radio shows which weigh in at about 6 megabytes for a one hour show, for example. So your 512 meg flash card (or two 256 meg flash cards) will last you for well over a full charge of your battery. So when I recharge at night, I also queue up the music that I'll be listening to the next day.
Works for me!
There's an integer-only version of Ogg Vorbis as well. From what I have heard AAC and Ogg Vorbis are basically equivalent in terms of filesize, quality, and encoding algorithm.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
Rio Karma 20 is the One ;-)
...
...
.ogg yet ...
20 GB
Ogg Vorbis
Multi Platform JAVA Interface
USB 2.0
I'm owner of the first iPod model. Had to replace the battery 1 1/2 year after ther purchase. The new iPod's get smaller, the battery capacity gets shorter and to be honest I like mechanical parts like the scroll wheel. Furthermore they made a stupid cradle, so I don't have a direct IEEE1394 connector anymore
To make it short I would not buy a new iPod model, I'd buy the Rio Karma. I actually did some research after my battery was gone, but replacing the battery was $80 - thats a lot cheaper - and I have not converted my songs to
Not really. 30 gig Mk2 units are going in the 500 to 600 dollar range. That's hardly "the price of their college education" unless of course you're sending them to clown college.
-- Gary F.
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Of course, it is sort of a double edged sword with Apple. If they support a format that saves 30% more disk space than Apple then some people would buy the 20 gig model instead of the 30.
More for less on lowest end model = new customers. Also the better a product is than your competition, the more mark-up you can add. As long as you're the only one, and you can deliver the same as a 30gb mp3 player in a 20gb ogg player, why not pocket the difference yourself?
I think it's more the low market share, and few percieved advantages among consumers that is the cause.
Patents? People typically don't pay anything at all for mp3 players, and if they rip their own they often use lame, also a free download. And as every hardware player they'd consider would have to have mp3 support anyway, the licence fee is already paid. Adding ogg support doesn't bring the cost down at all until you can live with ogg-only players.
Size/quality? Most people can't tell the difference anyway, and if they do they'd up the bitrate on mp3s. Compared to the big CD->mp3 revolution, mp3->ogg is well, a nice bonus, but not much more. In particularly if you have mp3 capable hardware players, it's a no-go.
Ogg just simply doesn't have any killer features. It's a very good product, but it's one in a pack. Same with Ogg theora. There is DivX, which everybody knows. Once Theora is done, I predict a good product, but that doesn't get mainstream interest because there's already divx (or maybe the new MPEG4 AVC by then).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nice features, Ogg support has been around for a bit, it's in the company's official beta firmware with pretty good results. I still haven't played with it myself, but the forums are rather active with experiences etc.
It plays pretty much any quality ogg fine over headphones. With MyFi (the FM transmission) I hear it still has some problems with transmitting high quality some -q6 and higher oggs. I'm a regular MyFi user, so I've held off for a few more optimizations.
That and, of course, the Linux sync situation is rather good with positron or the Java NDBM.
I'm really liking the player -- they want to release the source to their Windows sync program in about a week, and they are (according to their forum posts) working on getting in some nice new features.
Zaurus is a good quality player and much more flexible than "normal" players. I use Open Zaurus the ogg tools you can get for it and CF. A 64 meg CF is cheap and loads up an hour's worth of music and a shell script or two for random play. Larger CF cards are getting cheaper all the time and a CF wifi card could eliminate the need for the clumsy transfer step. I'm sure people will make software that does all of this easier than my dinky shell script, but I like the speed of simple tools like sed and urandom. Don't forget to use the -q flag for ogg123 to silence the output and don't forget to change the power and light settings so the screen turns off but the power does not and you have a beautiful and very powerful jam box and rounds out an all free music system.
My next project for it is to get a car power adaptor and a little nicer mounting system than I already have.
Open Zaurus is a little more flexible than the software that comes with it, but you might not want to do that if you need to sync with nasty old Lookout or something. Debian Zaurus with X11 will be massivly cool when it settles down to stable.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
More music downloads (mostly MP3 though) can be found in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.
The article has a Creative Commons license. Please copy and distribute it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Whats this ogg thing? Some elitest-i-hate-the-matinstream-so-i-use-linux music format or something?
Ogg Vorbis is a free and very high quality encoding tool set. It supports variable bit rate while being very easy to use. Ogg files are generally smaller than mp3 for the same level of quality.
Software freedom confers several key benefits. There are no patents or royalties on the tools so manufactures are free to use them and you don't have to pay for their licensing. You will also always be able to find software players for any platform and don't have to wory about DRM unless the plaform itself has been cripled by it. Copyright and patent problems made players like Lame and Not Lame difficult for an average computer user such as myself. Not being able to encode my own music colection to mp3 was a real bummer. Vorbis tools is a deb package that requires no compiling and just works. Between it, abcde, audacity and gnuphonograph, your sound needs are covered.
Let's go over that again, beter, cheaper, easier, less encumbered, that about covers it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's a troll because it seems to be fiction. It was posted AC, it is not specific at all, yet it still draws insindiary conclusions.
for the iMP-250, iMP-350, iMP-400, iMP-550, iFP-300 series, iFP-500 series. The iHP-100 series already supports OGG (iHP-100, iHP-115, iHP-120.) Some of the players will support either OGG or WMA at one time... the iMP-250, iMP-350, and iFP-300 series by using two different versions of the firmware (MP3 & WMA and MP3 & OGG), the rest of the ogg supporting players (iMP-400, iMP-550, iFP-500 series, and iHP-100 series) will be/are able to support the formats MP3, WMA, OGG and the iHP-100 series supports WAV as well at one time using only one version of the firmware. For more info check out iRivers website at http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=35 5&page=1&mode=Total&strque=&field= 1
~spikeman56
It's very funny that this article came out tonight. I got a Karma for "christmas" but couldn't resist opening it early. It's been sitting on my desk for a few days now, but tonight it is plugged in. I must say that I'm very delighted about my new MP3 player. Not only does it play OGG Vorbis files, but it also plays FLAC tracks too. I've never heard of a portable player that plays FLAC files(however I don't really keep track of these things). Anyway so far it's a great player. Switching between tracks is almost instant, playlist editing on the device is cool.
...
Now just when you thought this thing was cool with the FLAC and OGG support just wait. It's got a (drum roll please)
ethernet port.
WOW!!! A++++
So far the ethernet port allows you to transfer files to and from the karma with the java client, but they claim to be working on streaming and kicking off tracks. It's got RCA jacks on the dock so you can hook it to your stereo. I'm really not sure if I could have asked for a better device. Maybe if it had a line in for recording it would get the highest score. I give it a 9.9
Damn.. nothing yet..
End of line..
I just wrote a big roundup of portable music players for a computer-magazine-that-you've-heard-of. Of the 55 players I researched, three support Ogg.
iGP-100
Capacity: 1.5GB
Features: USB 2.0, FM tuner
Formats: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WMA, ASF
Manufacturer: iRiver (www.iriveramerica.com)
MSRP: $249.99
iHP-120
Capacity: 20GB
Features: USB 2.0, FM tuner, built-in microphone
Formats: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV
Manufacturer: iRiver (www.iriveramerica.com)
MSRP: $399.99
Rio Karma
Capacity: 20GB
Features: USB 2.0, docking station with RCA line out and Ethernet port
Formats: Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WMA
Manufacturer: Digital Networks (www.rioaudio.com)
MSRP: $349.99
There may be others (I missed the Neuros, apparently) but those were all I found.
how about a phatbox harddrive-based player for your car? there is probably one that is compatible with your truck's existing headunit (so you don't need to buy a new one), and you can have 20-60 gigs of music, instead of shuffling cd's. and yes it does support ogg.
this product is sold directly at audi and vw dealers so you can bet it's a pretty solid product. it's also the same as the kenwood music keg, but works with non-kenwood stereos.
i have one and i love it. i can't imagine having to deal with switching cd's to find my music ever again.
On Windows you can use Rio Music Manager, Real, or Rio Music Manager Lite (the Java app). On Linux, OS X, etc, you need to use Rio Music Manager Lite. Because the drive runs a journaling filesystem based on another Rio product, it currently is not exposed as a USB mass storage device. Samba is GPL, which the Rio engineers said precluded them from adding SMB support (it would have to be directly linked into the player binary as the Karma runs ECOS).
You can see screenshots of Rio Music Manager Lite here
When you asked about the speed, do you mean the speed of the Java app, or the speed of ethernet transfers? It's USB1 ethernet USB2. I don't recall the exact #'s offhand, but there are threads on riovolution.com that have all the details. As far as the speed of the Java app, it's hard to quantify that. If I said "it runs like any Java app", that sounds bad because of a lot of superstition. All I can say is that it's very usable and the core is based on a similar app for the Empeg that has been in development for over two years, so it's got quite a few optimizations in there.
The Karma, RMM, and RMML all support Ogg metadata both as ID3v2 tags and in Ogg comments.
It saves your place in the playlist, in the currently playing song, and even lets you create bookmarks that snapshot your current playlist and position so you can go listen to something else and come back later.
Also a CS major at a major public university where CS is the 2nd largest major, I would like to inform you that I use Ogg, and I know several people who also use Ogg, and I reccomend Ogg to all of my tech-savvy friends.
Maybe it's a different major public university...
I do agree with you, but it's not hard for companies to simply add Ogg support to players that already support mp3 and/or WMA; iRiver, for example announced some time ago (it may have been recently, I have no idea) that they are adding Ogg support to several of their players, including both their hard disk players, their mp3/WMA-CD player, and some of their memory-based players.
I should also note that it's quite a bit easier than you think to add a new format. It simply involves adapting the decoder API and codec to the player, and storing it on the flash RAM on the device. No new chip printing is required in most cases, unless it's a cheap player with non-flashable decoder storage. There are limitations to the flash RAM storage though, and iRiver, for example, works around this by providing two sets of RAMs for different formats: MP3+WMA, or MP3+Ogg. Somehow I doubt there'd be any conflict -- anyone choosing Ogg would probably shun WMAs, and people using WMA wouldn't even know what Ogg is. It works, sort of, or at least until we have newer better players which support all the codecs in existence. Give it a few years...
"!"
It's available from the Empeg BBS
You can skip directly to the Software
I recommend using the latest releaes of JEmplode with it. There's an updated Emplode in the alpha firmware package, but it's rather flakey and JEmplode seems to be quite a bit stabler (and runs on Linux).
-- Gary F.
But beware, the player is not without it's "quirks":
"Nice Idea; Poor Execution; Not Ready. Sub-1.0 release. 1 example: Plays MP3-DVDs containing upwards of 1200 songs (files). But device has only a single-line lcd readout & NO FILE BROWSE MODE. What does this mean? Say you want to listen to song #1172... 1. obtain carpal tunnel wrist brace. 2. hit up/forward on remote's jog-diall >> TIMES! (of course if you are a gambling man you could always just put it on random and take side-bets with your friends.) 3. enjoy?"
See also:Portable + MP3 DVDs = Sony MPDAP20U (no DRM)
Wrong. Vorbis does not use wavelets. It is an IMDCT-based codec like MP3, although it has much much better block shaping (one reason it allows for true "gapless" playback and mp3 in fact does not, although this can be worked around by using LAME --decode for LAME encoded files, or just cutting the silence between tracks in an output driver).
Its better quality is principally due to better residual encoding. Quality 6 is transparent for most people, though even low bitrates sound quite good. It is fairly weak on classical, but strong on techno - a discontinuity that future versions of the encoder will address, as the codec becomes more mature. It supports super-stereo formats like 5.1 and 7.1, although currently the main branch of the encoder does not actually perform channel coupling on anything other than pairs of channels, so that could be improved very considerably - it needs -q8 at the moment, really. The format can also be very rapidly "peeled", although the quality of doing so is less than encoding to that bitrate directly at the moment - future versions of the encoder - and peeling tool when developed - will address that too.
But it's here, it works, it's better than MP3, it's better than WMA by virtue of actually working and stuff (talking to users, main WMA experience is it's good, kinda metallic sounding, until the DRM screws them because they didn't realise they had licenses to back up and they lose all their music - then they switch to MP3 or OGG).
I don't care really about FLAC support in my portable - there isn't enough hard disk space. And MP3 with LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard is easily good enough for my portable (some of the rips are --alt-preset extreme too, though there's not much difference anymore). I can't ABX the difference at all. But because of the gapless support, my own rips are in Ogg Vorbis GT3b1 -q8. Lots of leeway, great high end definition, Garf's tunings are even more optimised for high bitrates, and there's no sodding gaps between the tracks. It's good.
You have to use their software, either RMM (win) or RMML (java). The karma has a built in DHCP client or you can hard code an IP. Once it has an IP, you can hit it with a web browser and actually dl the java client from the karma (however, newer versions are available online, so this is only useful in a pinch). The java client mirrors the functionality of the win client, it performs decently on my box, I have a AthlonXP 2000+ running Gentoo, kernel 2.6, JRE 1.4, and XFCE.
The karma organizes music according to it's metadata (album, artist, year, etc...). This frustrates me a little, since I like to keep some things segregated. But I can just make playlist or script some metadata changes on my files.
I highly recommend checking out the forums on riovolution.com, there's some chaff to wade through, but there is lots of great info.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Nope.
MP3, Ogg, and ACC are all use the DCT (discrete cosine transform) The only major codec that differs from these is MPC, which is a subband codec. There are no wavelet codecs in common use, but may offer some advantages in removing the "time smear" produced by transform codecs.
Virtually all of the differences between codecs is in the tuning of the psych model, the filters that decide which frequencies to retain and which ones to remove. (it is also the reason there is a HUGE difference between encoders, so when you're comparing an MP3 to an OGG, make sure you use the best encoder for each one if you're trying to compare the merits of each format) There is no simple mathematical function or scientific pricipal behind this, most of the fine tuning is done by trial and error. Because MP3 has the largest user base and has had such a long development time, its psych models are incredibly refined, and for maximum sound quality, LAME encoded MP3 is still one of the best. Of course there are also lots of nasty MP3 encoders out there like Xing (which seems to be what most p2p files are encoded on) which can't compete with Ogg at any bitrate.
Ogg and ACC are much more modern codecs, with some new coding tricks to increase efficiency, but they have only had a short development time, and the small user bases limit the amount of beta testing/bug reports/ problem samples that can be obtained to fine tune the encoders. Right now, they are much superior to MP3 at low bitrates (due to their increased coding efficiency), but for maximum sound quality, they can't match LAME encoded MP3's.
In a few years, Ogg and AAC will surpass MP3 in every way, but right now neither is totally transparent even at the highest settings for me.
That wouldn't be so bad, except the USB 2.0 hard drive promised to those that bought units before July 31 has been scrapped. And, no USB 2.0 drive at all is offered. Without one, it's difficult to recommend a Neuros above a Rio Karma or iRiver player.
I own one, but now consider it a mistake given the support - or lack thereof.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Just got my Karma yesterday.
:-) /hrf
I'd been putting of buying one of these until one appeared that
- Played Ogg Vorbis
- Had non-trivial storage capacity in a form-factor what fits my pockets.
- Had non-trivial autonomy.
- Management App that ran on Linux, or USB storage device simulation.
I must say I'm delighted so far. The cradle is plugged in to my stereo and is banging out Mussorgski (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) with excellent dynamics and clarity.
I left it on and playing when going to sleep, yesterday evening. When I woke up 6 hours later the battery indicated "half", which is about right for the predicted 15-hour playtime. Of course I don't know if the battery indicator is has been weighed for linearity.
I've played downloaded (from emusic.com) mp3's and self-ripped Oggs, so far, and they sound just great. I have them cross-faded, and ise nice classic VU-Meters for display.
After unpacking, connecting to the network (the Cradle has a 100BT connector - the device does DHCP or manual IP setting.) copying the jarball for the "Lite" versions (which is what the Java apps are called) to my laptop, and running it, nothing much worked,at first.
The app allowed me to delete the pre-stored tracks, and to copy new ones from my HD, but the player would not see them. Also, character translation didn't work very well in the app.
So In checked out software and firmware versions on the support site, and the ones on the device and CD were hopelessly outdated already.
After updating both (I had to drive to work to find a Windoze Box.. the updater is an exe file and will not work with Wine) everything was suddenly okay, and I'm now a happy Karma User.
One downside so far: The included earphones hurt my ears and don't sound too great. Both cushions spontaneously fell off as I was removing the plugs from my ears, and were lost, already.
"My Karma is Great"
For what I know from 2 days ownership, I can certainly recommend it.
I bought Karma a couple of weeks ago. I was going to Europe and wanted a player with a battery that would last longer than my typical excursion into the city.
Karma has lots of attractive features: compact shape, fairly good interface, Ogg Vorbis support, cradle that supports both USB and Ethernet, 12-14 hour battery life (from my experience), and a cool Rio DJ feature that can serve up tracks based on most/least recently played, by decade, random, etc. I abused the player pretty heavily on my trip and it has held up nicely. Granted, there were a couple of glitches when going between tracks with mode set on Random, but I expect that will be fixed in a firmware update.
The Rio Music Manager could use some work, especially in the area of playlist manipulation. But since there is an Ethernet interface, I expect someone will come up with a package that does a much better job.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it and 20G will last me a while.
-Andrei
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That depends on what you mean by "Vorbis". IIRC, the Vorbis spec (and thus, all compliant decoders) supports wavelet encoding. However, oggenc doesn't encode using wavelets yet, so users won't see the benefits of wavelet encoding quite yet.
The reason I mention this is that if you buy one of these Vorbis-capable devices now you should (theoretically) be able to reap the benefits of Vorbis files which use wavelet encoding, as soon as people start making them.
I do have a few issues - and these are minor - one being the transfer speeds (USB, dunno if it supports USB 2.0 as my machine doesn't have it and I'm too lazy to check the Karma's documentation)
The Karma is a USB 2.0 hi-speed device. You should definitely drop in a USB 2.0 card for your machine, it will greatly improve your transfer times.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc