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

Oog Vorbis, a user's account

[Anonymous Coward]

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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Re:Oog Vorbis, a user's account

[Drakonian]

But you don't have the cash for the 400 GB drive.

That made me think of something. I wonder if the reason why there are so few hardware Ogg players because Ogg is mostly used by Linux users. And to some extent, Linux is often run on old hardware. More so than Windows and certainly more so than Mac. Linux is also free as in beer. Like you, maybe many Ogg users don't have the cash to pay for new hardware. So they don't have the cash/won't spend it on Ogg players either. So they don't sell, so companies don't make them.

hd based ogg

[saqq]

you might wanna check out the Neuros player.

Re:hd based ogg

[Foz]

The neuros uses a backpack hard drive though, which radically increases it's form factor.

Rio just released the Karma with Ogg support. Done by the same team that did the empeg, from what I understand. I haven't tested out a karma yet but I definitely love my empeg and if it's half as good it's much better than anything else.

-- Gary F.

Mini-review from Ross Vandegrift

[eddy]

here. Check the thread/archives, there's more.

Here's a few

[Cyph]

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.

Re:Here's a few

[KnightStalker]

I have a Neuros -- the Ogg support is very good & they are good about keeping it up to date. Xiph themselves wrote the ogg-playing firmware. It's got some other wonky stuff -- sometimes it will just refuse to work for a couple of days (but on the other hand, I haven't been very kind to it.) It will play through your car -- it has a built-in short range FM broadcaster which even sort of works, and it records from a built-in mic or a line-in jack. There are also two separate Linux managers for the database. They have a very good community forum section on their website which you can check out at http://www.neurosaudio.com/ .

There are some irritating problems... the menus aren't threaded so you have to stop playing a song to change settings or look for another song. It's only USB-1.1, so it's also kinda slow on the transfers. Both of these are slated to be fixed, but there's no word on when.

Re:Here's a few

[Adam9]

DI has been very committed to their Neuros Audio player. I have one and I love it. DI is still creating firmware updates AND continuing development on their new Neuros units.

Someone else has mentioned this before. The founder, Joe Born, responded.

This may also explain some more on the rumors.

don't forget Zaurus

[cbc1920]

My Zaurus plays them quite nicely, though only 2 hours per charge.

iRiver Has an OGG Blitz Planned for Christmas

[DeckerEgo]

Check out iRiver's announcement on it's OGG Support Plan. Most 200-level and above players should have OGG support by Christmas eve.

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.

Best Buy is shunning mp3 boombox/mini-systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be Best Buy had a good selection of CD based MP3 boombox and mini-systems. No longer. Ogg is out of the question. I think they carry one Sony boombox for about $130, and most mini-systems with mp3 start at well over $200. There are a lot of Best Buy CD systems which will play CD-Rs but only if they are straight cdda tracks.

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.

Palm

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

But don't also forget

[Kjella]

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

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.

Amen.

[twitter]

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.