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iRiver Adds Ogg To Audio Player Firmware
Sesse writes "iRiver has just released firmware updates for its iFP-300T and iFP-500T flash memory-based audio player series. According to a news story on their site, this update includes features 'supporting the Ogg file format', so it looks like iRiver
can finally be added to the quickly growing list of
Vorbis-capable
hardware!"
a) AA batteries :) I may be a loon, but I get annoyeder and annoyeder at custom-shape li-ion and other batteries that I can't replace cheaply. (Even though they're great technology and often admirably suited to certain tasks.) I want to be able (if necessary) to stick in AAs from the corner store and (generally) to stick in rechargeables.
:) -- unless the new iPods can play oggs out of the box, which they won't ;)
b) hard drives. Yes, a hard drive can hold a lot more than a CD, and I'm not generally going to be carrying 30 CDs of Ogg Vorbis files around, but I still like the flexibility of being able to swap disks in order to swap music, rather than needing to hook up to the mothership (PC with my music) whenever I want to add more on. Also, I don't want to have to face the dilemma of removing old favorites to make room on the hard disk. There's a place for the hard-drive players (and the Karma looks great, I'm quite tempted by it) but I'd rather have a CD-based player for now.
b') Cost -- those iRiver CD-based players are in a friendlier price range than anything with a hard drive
c) Need picture of sister to better evaluate your offer.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Please note that iRiver has actually had a multimedia player capable of playing OGG Vorbis files for quite some time now. I refer to their iHP-120, their 20GB hard drive player. Nevertheless, it's nice to see OGG Vorbis support on their flash devices as well now.
"mp4" is here allready, as a matter of fact. However, any audio encapsulated in an MPEG-4 file that employs a bitrate higher than 64kbps is most commonly going to be MPEG-2 AAC encoded audio, and MPEG-2 AAC is nothing new. There are some fancier stuff for the lower bitrate audio streams in the MPEG-4 standard, but if you're like me, you tend to encode your music files at bitrates above 64kbps. For more information regarding MP4 (MPEG-4), see this FAQ from the Motion Picture Experts Group.
I can't believe people ask this question over and over again
...
Apple's Ipod uses dedicated MP3 decoder and controller chip from PortalPlayer
You can read all about the innards at: Inside The Apple Ipod Design Triumph
I'm not even an Ipod fan and I know this
Sunny Dubey
Does Winamp 2(.81 and above, iirc) not come with ogg support as standard?
Here you can see a list of all the devices they want to implement Ogg support for sooner or later. For some of the devices, it's never going to happen because of hardware limitations.
:-)
As someone else here already said, the iMP-400 and iMP-550 (IIRC) will get Ogg support in January. I'm certainly looking forward to it. As soon as they release the firmware, I'm going to buy one of those devices, I guess.
It looks like some things didn't really go as planned, with the iFP-300 support coming so quickly. But hey, isn't that good?
That doesn't mean they can't support other formats. They implemented AAC without any insurmountable problems. And the iPodLinux project got an ogg decoder running on it (albiet not quite in realtime, but close enough that it's pretty obvious it could be done with some optimisation work).
here is my conclusion: you are full of shit. the iRiver is the best hardware out there. you buy one, you won't go back. i don't give a hard fuck what os you prefer, what liking you have as far as format for listening... this thing outperforms the ipod any day of the week. they don't use a house brand polymer compound battery in their hard drive players like the ipod... their flash players have a day's worth of battery life. i've NEVER had a problem with their customer service. the usability is fantastic. It's more durable than an ipod- i've run over my IFP390t with my fucking bike- it still works. the speakers are FANTASTIC compared to the ipod. you can keep your ipod and your ignorance... i've tried both products. you're stuck in your insignificant world of shit. enjoy it.
The Rio Karma works well with GNU/Linux, but you have to install the actual Sun JDK (I guess Blackdown would probably work too, I don't use Java at all so I don't really know) to use it because the Java version of the software uses a few methods which haven't be implemented in GNU Classpath yet. You just bring it up on the network, set a network password, point your browser towards it, download the "Rio Manager Lite" software, unzip, and run.
I'm thinking about getting one once GNU Classpath has better support for Swing (it almost works...on the other hand, the software is non-free and I only run free software). My brother got one a few days ago which is why I tried to run the software on my box because the Windows box doesn't have enough disk space to rip his music so I just synced my music onto his player; he has a lot of the same albums anyway. I ended up connecting the thing via USB to the Windows box and mounting my music directory via Samba and then transfering it...it was slow. 802.11b network through a USB network interface (and the Karma was on the same bus so I ended up getting like 5Mb/s). Hell, I woke up this morning at about one and it still wasn't done (I set it up at eleven last night). People with faster networks and USB2 should have a better experience (my box has USB2 and firewire, but the Windows box is old and lacks such things...mine only has them because I have like five PCI cards that do various things like SCSI, ATA133, etc. because I am a weirdo and upgrade everything except for the processor).
I have a Neuros which kind of sucks, but it was the first portable to support Vorbis and I said I'd buy the first player that did so I did (unlike a lot of other people who were like "the interface blah blah"...if you say you are going to do something, DO IT). The FM broadcast and recording features are the only reasons I won't be getting a Karma to replace it anytime soon (my old headunit had a line-in, but the headunit that came in my Camaro when I upgraded to it from a Bronco II didn't). I like to record lectures occasionally too. The Neuros is a standard mass storage device but it has a simple db on it (you can grab the sync manager, positron, from Xiph). The company doesn't look terribly healthy right now but they are supposedly trying real hard to get USB 2 and 1.8" HD units out. I'll believe it when I see it.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
This probably should have been linked in the article: http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=35 5&page=1&mode=Total&strque=&field= 1
Also: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/30/006226.shtml
Correct, these are not expandable.
iRiver is great about releasing new firmware though, and it is very easy to upgrade. They release 2 different firmware actually, one which requires Windows software to interact with, the other of which makes the device appears as a USB Mass Storage Device (UMS). If you use the UMS firmware it will work perfectly in Linux, Mac, etc.
(Note: This new firmware that supports ogg is only released in manager format, not UMS. The UMS version is coming soon according to the site. Also, with the new firmware you have to choose between having OGG/MP3 support and MP3/WMA/AAC support.
CD->OGG->MP3->OGG is probably not going to sound as good as the mp3s you currently have.
Albuquerque PC
(a) You're confusing AC-3 with AAC. Two totally different beasts. DVDs use AC-3, while the iPod uses AAC.
(b) The 'l33t' audiophiles were using AAC long before Apple decided to add support to the iPod. Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as popular as MP3, or even Vorbis, but there was some demand. Actually, my RioVolt's (circa 1999 or so?) instruction manual has an entry about AAC in the glossary, heh.
(c) Though the rest of your post may be fairly correct (especially the part about why they'll go with MP3), i really don't think you can argue quality with Vorbis. Vorbis is awesome, but it's not usually as good as MP3 at higher bit rates. (And especially really high bit rates.) :/
I have no experience with the iRiver 180T, but I have a very hard time believing the earphones are the best in the market.
The etymotic earphones that I use, which as far as I know are the best sounding earbud headphones in the world, cost (for the headphones alone) almost three times as much as the iRiver mp3 player. If iRiver can sell better headphones than the etymotics for 1/3 the price, and throw in an mp3 player along for free, then I'd be very interested in buying one.
The notion that actual individuals would do the encoding, in a non-commercial environment, and only be encoding audio, really never occured to anyone until people started doing it, and even then those people who started doing it were usually (so usually it drowned out the others) doing so illegally - making MP3s of music they'd bought copies of to distribute to others via IRC, and then Napster, so even at that time it wasn't seen as an application that would take off.
If Fraunhoffer had seen the potential in the early nineties, I suspect they'd have directed the market a little more than they ended up doing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Flash typically has greater than 10k rewrite cycles, unlimited reads. Seems like a greater than 20 year lifetime even if one were to rewrite his flash once every day.