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Neuros Audio Firmware Goes Open Source
PDA_Monkey writes "The Neuros Audio team has just released the Firmware code for the Neuros Digital Audio Computer as Open Source! Along with the release comes a message regarding Open Source from Joe Born, President of Neuros Audio, LLC, asking the community of developers to help fully realize the vision of the digital audio computer by aiding in the process to create a GCC target to the TI DSP used in the Neuros and in developing a program loader."
ThinkGeek started carrying the Neuros in the last few days.
They'll also be releasing hardware documentation soon...
:)
This is really a great company that truly does listen to its customers. This wouldn't have happened if they didn't.
European radio (even frequency) support is coming soon, too!
Hallo, My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process. Prepare to die!
some neat stuff:
Playtime: 10 hours when fully charged
Frequency response: 20 to 20,000Hz
FM Broadcasting:
Transmission Strength: 250 microV/M-2 at 3m
Maximum range: 20 feet
and it can record audio as MP3 or wav.
All for a sane price of $449.99
Hopefully this will be lower by the winter gift giving season ( or summer, if you stand upsidedown).
A Neuros user is already working on getting the TI DSP supported in LCC http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.a sp?TOPIC_ID=3655&whichpage=5
There has already been talk on the Neuros forums that FLAC will be supported relatively quickly by the userbase writing the codec for it.
Very exciting times...
This is great news. Hopefully we'll start to see more and more companies start to do this. It's a great step forward for consumers' rights, as a company is actually acknowledging that their customers own the devices they buy rather than insisting that they're simply 'licensing' them.
...that thing is HUGE! ...why would anyone want to carry that around?
You go ahead and buy your iPod and your iTrip, and I'll be happily spending my saved $150 elsewhere. Oh yeah, and I'll also get regular firmware updates for free, and a guaranteed hardware upgrade path for a reasonable amount of money (not "You'll just have to buy the new one").
My Neuros, and the excellent customer support both through Neuros Audio LLC and the user forums, blow away anything you got...
Joe Born said they need a gcc target for the processor. Does a project for developing this target already exist?
I scanned the forums briefly and didn't see anything on the subject.
According to their website, Neuros doesn't ship to Canada, and apparently ThinkGeek doesn't ship this product to Canada either... a bit strange I think, maybe there's some restrictions on the device or Neuros just isn't letting them sell it here. Either way, I've sent Neuros an email asking how I can get one here. Looks like a great player, and I'm pretty excited about the open development platform.
This sounds very cool and would make me buy one of these over any other MP3 player. Where can I buy one in Europe (specifically UK)?
I love mine, I use it frequently as both a USB HD, pocket FM radio/MP3 player (ok I got big pockets), and car jukebox. The recent gain boost for the radio broadcast feature has brought life back to my almost unuseable MiFi feature (FM broadcast) now I can broadcast my mp3s and oggs over a weak signal in the full city FM-dial.
The developers truly do listen to the owners. Due to consumer request there are plans in the works for radio like-tivo support in the firmware. Things like that are over the heads of the big-boys, and probably would kill a major player with big name.
Here's to the indi-linux makers.
A user looked at the possibility of adding a GCC target and was overwhelmed by the amount of work it would require. Not saying it won't/can't be done, but he moved on to writing a target for LCC.
a sp?TOPIC_ID=3655&whichpage=3
You can read about it here: http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.
This is great, as it provides an opportunity for my favourite codec (musepack) to be supported by a hardware device at last. Musepack (aka mpc) is idea for this - it's based on mp2, so is simple to decode (read: less power) and works better at bitrates > 128kbps than any other codec you can mention, and this has been proved by many double-blind tests. I'm looking forward to support for this, and when it happens i'll be one of the first to order one.
Does this work on the Neuros II?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I have been waiting, doubting, comparing etc to buy an mp3 player for AGES. I have just placed an order for the Neuros, let this be a proof that open sourcing can indeed boost your business
There is a slightly older TI DSP (predecessor to this one IIRC) that has a GCC chain already. According to one of the people in the forums, it isn't compatable though.
I just purchased my 30 GB Neuros II last week from American Techpushers (J and R has it cheaper, but they were OOS until just yesterday). Yes, the backpack makes it a bit big, but the built-in capabilities of the unit offset this. OGG support, FM transmitter, Linux support with NDBM, etc. make this a unit for the serious geek.
I got my Neuros a few months ago and it has been a pretty good ride. Right off the bat it became clear to me what every Neuros owner says: Digital Innovations (the Neuros mfg.) listens to their customers. Almost immediately after I got my neuros, they came out with firmware 2.0 which added the ability to browse the contents fo the player while listening to music as well as enhancing the cache mechanism and thereby dramatically increasing battery life. Since then they have continued to answer customer demands, usually starting with the most popular and vocal ones. I have lately become pretty frustrated with how slow DI is to address some features. Support for the Audible is the first thing that comes to mind, that feature has been waiting for probably more than a year. Also, when they impliment new features, it usually takes a really long time for them to really make them work in a useable way -- it seems that they fix it in a quick and dirty fashion and then move on until they see that people are still complaining about it. These things frustrate me, but when I think about it I realize how great it is to be frustrated with a company for being slow about adding huge new features and useability to their product. Think about it -- if I owned and IPod, I would now have to worry about this because Apple would never consider doing so much for me after I have already given them all the money I will give them. It was also somewhat frustrating when I dropped my neuros and had to get a new standard laptop hard drive on pricewatch to replace the one I broke -- until I realized that if I owned an IPod, I would be buying a whole new unit for me mistake.
Now that the firmware is open, I sincerely hope that every Free Software fanatic out there will buy one. This will mean first that lots of coders will itches to scratch and will start enhancing the neuros firmware and giving valuable input to DI on their future hardware revisions; and second that DI will make more money and perhaps be able to hire more people to make their product better! The free software community needs to show DI that it pays to give the community access to your product.
Buy a Neuros. The 20GB USB 1.1 version is $200 and has all the goodies, and you won't care about how slow USB 1.1 is once all your music is on it. Then get on to Bugzilla (that's right, they have an open BTS) and file some bugs to tell them what you want, get on to their lame web forums and tell them what you want, and download the firmware source and send them some really great patches.
-Jared