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?"

Comments

Car Audio

[The Snowman]

How about a head unit for my truck's sound system that plays Ogg? I have yet to find one, anyone have a link?

Re:how about ogg software for a wintel machine??

[eddy]

The decoder is included with winamp (at least the standard and full versions). They might have added it to the lite version too recently thereby making the "plugin" pointless? (Peter's plugin is out there, if you really want it)

Besides, everyone who was using the Winamp "classic" is using foobar2000 now anyhow :-)

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

A perhaps important thing to mention is the Rio Karma has FLAC support if you don't want the size of WAV files but want music compressed in a lossless fashion. Does anyone know offhand if the iRiver does? I'm trying to make a decision on one of the two but I haven't found anything regarding it on the iRiver (but all the recording features are fairly interesting).

Look at Neuros

[DoofusOfDeath]

They're kind of a funny company. They're very open source / Linux friendly, and seem to be very into their user community. It's basically like the kind of coolness I'd want to exhibit if I started a tech company.

That being said, I'm a little concerned about their solvency, and their technology is getting old.

BUT, the good news is they're having a clearance sale right now. I just ordered a 128 MB Neuros for $99, and I'm really looking forward to getting it.

From what I can tell, their Ogg support is perfectly usable, and there are two open source programs on Sourceforge for managing its songs. You can even flash its BIOS using a Linux host - you don't need to boot up into Windows to do it.

So my basic take: For $99, it was worth taking a slightly less polished product, so that I could support an OSS / Linux-friendly company.

Re:Rio Karma

[eddy]

I'd never go for "Multi Platform JAVA Interface" unless it was something 'extra' you didn't have to use, and the device could be used as a normal USB Storage device also.

Uh, no.

[magnum3065]

For information on MP3 patent licensing see: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

Licensing for the decoder runs $0.75 per unit or a one time fee of $50,000. Nowhere close to your $0.5 - $1 million figure. Plus in order to save this money they would have to completely drop MP3 playback from the player, rather than supporting both it and Ogg Vorbis. Despite the fact that I use Vorbis when I rip my CDs, I still have many MP3s I've downloaded from emusic.com that I'd like to be able to play without converting them.

Re:Oog Vorbis, a user's account

[ergo98]

I don't think your "Linux user's are shoeless beggars" angle is going to win you many friends here (there are a lot of people using Linux because it's the only platform currently fully supporting the Athlon 64FX, for example -- it isn't the financial dregs that use Linux). Then again, you did get moderated up heavily...

There aren't many ogg players quite simply because technologically mp3 is adequate for the marketplace (that is the majority of people). As mp3 got the first mover advantage both from a tool and market perspective, any contender to the thrown will require either a concerted effort by all vendors (a large "multilateral force"), or it'll have to be so superior that there is a very clear choice. Ogg doesn't fit the bill -- it is superior, but only marginally, and most end-users couldn't care less about licensing or patent issues.

As an example, overwhelmingly the compression format used on the Windows platform is ZIP, and on the UNIX platform it's GZIP. In either case there are a large number of superior solutions (such as BZIP2), yet ZIP/GZIP is adequate, so it entrenches (people would rather not deal with compatibility issues if they send a file to someone and then have to tutor them on getting a utility, using it, etc). The Qwerty keyboard is notoriously inefficient, yet again it is entrenched and most of us continue on it because we don't want "compatibility issues" when we need to type on other people's keyboards. There are examples abound.

Re:The Neuros is not bad.

[Yort]

That and, of course, the Linux sync situation is rather good with positron or the Java NDBM.

Honestly, I'm surprised the Linux geeks don't hail this more than they do. A lot of the Neuros stuff is open, such that a completely independent project like the NDBM is possible. So if I, the loyal Slashdot geek, don't like a particular feature of the sync manager, or wish there was a particular super-cool option like playlist rating - do it!

No need to whine to the company and hope, blessed hope, that they hear your pitiful cry and find a big enough business case to pay attention to it. Just do it yourself.

Do any other portable media projects have this? Ogg or otherwise?

Troy, who's still wishing for a PDA+20/40GB hard drive...

Big Math?

[BigBlockMopar]

However (and maybe this is because the Vorbis files emphasize the high frequencies; I'm not sure) the MP3s sound "flat", somehow.

My understanding of the sound quality difference between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is that MP3 uses a full Fourier transform (sine, cosine and constant) on the audio, while Ogg Vorbis uses wavelets and does a cosine transform only.

Discontinuities between blocks sent to the sine transform would cause the Gibbs effect; these would be heard as a garbled low-amplitude reverberation of the high frequency components and transients in the audio. This is consistent with the effects of low bitrate compression; at higher bitrates, there would presumably be more terms used in both the sine and cosine transforms, so the amplitude of the compression artifacts would become smaller and therefore inaudible.

Cosine transforms, on the other hand, don't have problems with discontinuities, so there'd be an immediate increase in sound quality, at a given bitrate. Transients (attack on cymbals or the rattle of the chain across the membrane of a snare drum, for example) would be handled by wavelet functions - there's probably some sort of mechanism in the code which sees the sharp attack or decay as fast risetimes or falltimes, ignores processing it by cosine transform, and uses wavelets instead.

But I don't know for sure. For one thing, I am *not* a programmer. I can make "Hello, World" and compile my own kernel, but you really don't want me poring over the source for libvorbis.

Try your mobile phone...

[fellow]

If you own a SonyEricsson P800 or soon P900, try Leif Wilden's excellent Oggplay ( http://www.geocities.com/p800tools/ ) It's also available for Nokia's Series60 phones (7650, 3650, N-Gage) though as far as I can tell it only supports 16kHz playback for now. It's an excellent choice for the upcoming Siemens SX1 though where it supports the full 44.1kHz. And it's open source as well ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbianoggplay/ )

iRiver

[marsonist]

I'm surprised that the iRiver line of products hasn't gotten more attention here. Their iHP120 is a 20GB harddrive based player that comes out of the box with OGG Vorbis support. It's predecessor, the iHP100, is a 10GB unit which recently received a firmware upgrade giving it Vorbis capabilities.

Both players are almost identical in features and capabilities and have received rave reviews from Cnet (Granted, Cnet doesn't carry a lot of weight in these forums, but it was the only review I could find on short notice)

I have the iHP100 with the latest firmware and couldn't be more pleased. The battery lasts the advertised 16 hours, The sound quality is outstanding, the included in-line remote control is the best I have ever seen. iRiver also makes flash based players that either do, or will in the near future, support ogg. If you are looking for quality Ogg vorbis players I suggest you really look at the iRiver product line.

Don't forget the battery!

[Analysis Paralysis]

The Neuros battery is non-replaceable and is supposed to have a lifetime of 11/2-2 years according to their FAQ. So expect to have to send the unit back to them for a battery change (they quote a replacement charge up to $12 but this seems far too low for a new battery - it may simply be a handling charge).

Given the recent fuss over the iPod's $200 battery replacement charge, this should be worth checking out before purchase.

Re:don't forget Zaurus

[serial frame]

I'm sticking with the Sharp 2.38 ROM for now, until my shiny 256MB SD card comes in. And then I'll be running straight towards OZ 3.2. I was using theKompany.rom for awhile, but having to install the extra packages only leaves me with 16MB of space for precious media, rather than 32MB with the stock ROM, which has all of those packages in place to begin with. Plus, it lacks IPv6 support, in which case, I'll see what happens when I steal OZ's kernel and IPv6 userland utilities. (The non-Sharp-2.3x ROMs are great and all, but they tend to assume everyone has an extravagant amount of insertable storage space.)

Speaking of battery life, I thought I may add that I was able to get about 5 hours of warwalking in, using a quick little hack I wrote to provide information via the LEDs, a-la Geiger counter. This is with a run-of-the-mill Linksys WCF12.

Anyhow, tonight, I shall put the Z under the ultimate stress test: I'll be timing how long the Z lasts playing ~192kbps Oggs via NFS over wifi on the other side of the house, with LCD and backlight on. However, regardless of the results, I'm still convinced that the Z is the ultimate mobile tool; and just so happens to be a pretty bitchin' conduit for multimedia, too.

All-in-one device

[rwa2]

I have to admit that I'm not enough of a music fan to consider blowing over $100 on something that just plays music. But it would be cool to have it all with me everywhere I go. So far, I haven't seen any integrated small device that does it all, so I've found it cheapest to build everything around a laptop and lug around all the components in the bag:

• $1400 Dell laptop w/ NVidia 3D card, WiFi, bluetooth, IrDA, USB2.0, Firewire
• $150 Garmin GPS, plugs into serial port
• $80 tri-band GSM/GPRS phone w/ bluetooth & IrDA. Right now I just use dialup, but eventually I'll add $20 a month for unlimited GPRS service (~120kbps?) from T-Mobile. I figure I'll get much more use out of this than their WiFi access, since I don't spend all that much time in Starbucks & airports.
• $150 Quickcam Pro 4000 or whatever for laptops. Haven't bought this yet either, since I already have a normal digital camera ($200), as well as a firewire DV camcorder ($450).

So all this equipment fits in a bag together and pretty much lets me do whatever I need to do when I go somewhere, just about anywhere:

• Check email / Slashdot from anywhere around the world with GSM/GPRS/WiFi coverage.
• Find out where the hell I am, tell me where I'm going, and how to get to a good restaurant when I'm there
• Take pictures & movies of what I'm doing. Haven't worked out video conferencing yet (no one to video conference to) but it's on the list.
• oh yeah, play music / movies, both from my entire personal collection, or streaming from the internet
• Have all of my Personal Organizer info with me, as well as work
• ...and if I'm not having enough fun where I am, I can play games.

I'd love it if someone made a small pocket device with all that functionality (PDA, GPS, GSM/GPRS, WiFi, good quality photo & movie camera, music player, & >20GB storage), but I just haven't seen it yet - only in bits and pieces. Until then, I'll likely just continue lugging my backpack around :P

Re:Oog Vorbis, a user's account

[Dwonis]

Bytes work as power of two.
1KB = 2^10bytes namely 1024...
1MB=2^20 and so on....

Nope. Not since 1998.

Re:they pay their employees...

[jafuser]

The 3D virtual world I spend all my free time in, Second Life, lets users upload sound clips in WAV format, then the server converts it to Ogg format for streaming audio back to the nearby users whenever the sound file is requested to be played (usually by scripted objects).