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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?"
How about a head unit for my truck's sound system that plays Ogg? I have yet to find one, anyone have a link?
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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).
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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.
If Apple supported Ogg I would actually replace my current iPod to get it. I encode all my files at 384 with lame (extreme preset) and I'd love to move all my music to ogg just to save some disk space.
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.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
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!
Rio Karma 20 is the One ;-)
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.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
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
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 $99, it was worth taking a slightly less polished product, so that I could support an OSS / Linux-friendly company.
Zaurus is a good quality player and much more flexible than "normal" players. I use Open Zaurus the ogg tools you can get for it and CF. A 64 meg CF is cheap and loads up an hour's worth of music and a shell script or two for random play. Larger CF cards are getting cheaper all the time and a CF wifi card could eliminate the need for the clumsy transfer step. I'm sure people will make software that does all of this easier than my dinky shell script, but I like the speed of simple tools like sed and urandom. Don't forget to use the -q flag for ogg123 to silence the output and don't forget to change the power and light settings so the screen turns off but the power does not and you have a beautiful and very powerful jam box and rounds out an all free music system.
My next project for it is to get a car power adaptor and a little nicer mounting system than I already have.
Open Zaurus is a little more flexible than the software that comes with it, but you might not want to do that if you need to sync with nasty old Lookout or something. Debian Zaurus with X11 will be massivly cool when it settles down to stable.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I had a Neuros, I sent it back. It was huge, heavy, took forever to boot, and I was very disappointed in the FM broadcast feature's sound quality. The ability to record from FM and use soundprints to ID songs was very cool, but didn't justify the price.
I have a Rio Karma now. I love it. The form factor is excellent, the sound quality is amazing, the boot up is quick, the interface is incredibly responsive, I'm running out of adjectives, so I'll just leave it at "overall very impressive."
A huge factor for me though is the Ethernet capability of the Karma. Not only does it provide cross platform capabilities (the Neuros linux usb drivers were very immature back when I had mine), but it allows me to use my Karma as an AudioTron equivalent. I have the dock in by my stereo with a wireless bridge. A very elegant setup.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Adding support for a new format requires considerable time in the form of having not only the programming for it done, but then the considerable amount of testing before you start printing circuits. The development costs are a major investment.
I doubt they would sell 100,000 devices on OGG alone. OGG just isn't that popular. As a CS major at a major public university where CS is the 2nd largest major, I don't know of a single soul who uses OGG, even among those who use linux. And thats among college students who are by far the largest music file gatherering population.
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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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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.