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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!"
Does it play ogg?
one more nail in the coffin of recording artists. not that i'm suprised. take a moment to think about the poor musicians freezing out in the street while you sit around the fire sipping eggnog and listening to pirated music on your new MP3 play this christmas you smug fucks.
I wish I'd known about this only 2 or 3 hours ago, I could have picked something up for my special someone.
the IMP series (though not sure which models) is what I'm waiting for. If that wasn't promised, I'd try to find a reader in Korea who'd be willing to help me import a Samsung Yepp ogg-capable CD player.
Shame about the 96kbs floor, though -- that's far more than I need for audiobooks. Still, CDs are cheap enough I should not complain.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If Apple is so pro-open source, when are they going to add Ogg Vorbis to the iPod?
...something tells me that hot redhead has no idea what an iRiver is, much less ogg-vorbis. I bet she knows what an iPod is!
Please help metamoderate.
But producers of audio-playback devices are stuck with a problem: because the vast bulk of digital sound out there stored on PCs is in MP3 format, they have to support MP3, and both Microsoft and Apple are not helping by pushing users to their own particular patented formats, thus providing little incentive to support an open format. This causes problems: it encourages people to continue using the closed formats, and that in turn encourages manufacturers to only support the closed formats. This is wrong, seriously wrong, and serious issues of liberty - both personal and civil - are at stake here. For without an open format, the plug can be pulled.
This quagmire of open formats dying because they need to dominate the market before they can dominate the market will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that free and open music is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the open source and free software communities to create an infrastructure that will support truly free - as in liberty - music, but that if the problem of lack of commercial support for open file formats is not resolved, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how patented file formats harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on open file formats.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Yes, It's called Eggn'Ogg
Help fight continental drift.
It appears that these players only have internal flash memory. So, I'm guessing that they're not expandable?
In any case, are these Mac compatible? If they can be setup as a universal-storage USB device (?), I would think so.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Right now I am getting good use out of gnupod/gtkpod for my iPod, but would love to see more vendor support from day one for linux.
You do not have to use Linux to appreciate Vorbis;-)
Help fight continental drift.
How is 500 kbps reasonable quality? It is damn close to the maximum it can go. As an example, I just encoded a pseudo-random song (okay, it was "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence) and I only got 475 kbps anyway, using "oggenc -q 10" The WAV is 41.8 MB, the FLAC is 30.5 MB and the Ogg Vorbis is 14.1 MB (numbers truncated). I doubt that a portable player would even be able to output something with that kind of quality and not being in an quiet/acoustically perfect room, let alone using headphones/earbuds. Oh, and I use "oggenc -q 6"
Putting aside the fact that on a portable device you generally don't need really high quality files because of the listening situations you're often in...
500kbps is not 'reasonable quality' for Oggs. The encoder isn't tuned particularly well about about 200kbps, so anything higher is only giving marginal improvements and wasting a lot of space. Add to that the fact that above 160kbps Ogg becomes tricky to differentiate from the original, and certainly by 192 or thereabouts it's as close to perfect as it's likely to get.
...ogg on its face?
Tim
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.
I have an iRiver 180T and I love it. The battery life is exceptional and the earphones are the best in the market. The player does have its faults but would I buy a player from iRiver again? Absolutely. They know what they are doing, well at least their engineers do.
I'd recommend that you try the product before you bash it...basic logic dictates that you do this other wise you'd be committing a fallacy.
Your logic is flawed even if you have a Ph. D.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I bought myself a sexy iMP 350 about a year ago, and last night negotiated it's sale hoping to put the money towards a Creative Zen Xtra 30gb or MuVo2 1.5gb (anyone know somewhere in America that ships these internationally?) but now I'm having second thoughts.
I love to put alot of research into products before I buy them, and the iRiver is one of the few products I've come across with *very* few negative reviews. It makes changing to a newer player kind of unnerving, especially with the kind of dedication the Firmware developers are putting in. Actually listening to customer requests.
Incidentally, if any iRiver reps are listening, (IMO) you really need to redesign your HDD players, the features are so nice, but the design is so poor. Why an LCD on the main unit with the quality of iRiver remotes?
"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.
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?
Another company using a lower case "i" to iDentify iTself?
The first time it was iNteresting.
The second time it was iRritating
Now it's just iDiotic.
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.
AAC, WMA, and MP3 are licensed formats. Someone without a license cannot produce a coder, media in that format, or player, or if they're able to do so now, they can't rely on the fact in the future.
With CDs this didn't matter. Anyone who could physically stamp a CD could afford to pay a royalty on it, simply rolling it into the cost. Anyone producing a CD player, likewise, merely needed to roll the royalty into the cost.
Show me how you can build a free and open infrastructure for the distribution of music where anyone can at any time put their hand up and say "Ok, we're now demanding royalties on..." clients, encoders, actual music, you name it.
You can't.
And I think you know that which is why you compared saying MP3 et al "are somehow {...} less desirable than OGG" to "all open source solutions are inherently technically superior to any closed-source solution". The latter is clearly hyperbole. The former is objectively correct when discussing the patent regime but at first glance sounds a bit like the latter. If you wanted to make a fair comparison, you'd have either said:
KMSMA (WWBD?)
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
I use an i-Bead MP3/FM/Voice thingy to its full and record a lot of stuff on it (no ogg support yet though). I use it as a revision aid.
For recording voice & FM it would be great to have a decent speech encoder instead of the inefficient ADPCM WAV available. If Vorbis only goes down to 96kbps on this thing then that is not suitable for voice. In fact, Vorbis is just about OK for voice at 8kbps (I tried it) but obviously Speex would be better.
If the i-River had this facility I'd buy definitely buy it. But, as I already have an i-Bead, I'm not sure I can justify the expensive of just Vorbis.
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.