Rio Announces Networked Ogg Vorbis Player

Alexander writes "Rio has announced several players, among them the Karma 20GB Ogg Vorbis music player, which also sports Ethernet as the preferred connection method. Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptance?" There's more information on the new Rio line-up via an article at The Register.

40GB, too!

[Arthaed]

And don't forget that according to this [digitalnetworksna.com] link, there is also going to be a 40GB for around $499!

Rio Car

[SuperQ]

The software that runs on the thing is based on the software used in the Empeg linux player.. the Karma runs linux, and has a usb2 hub, not a client.. lots of hack potential.

Obligatory Slashdot reference..

[magsymp]

I'd be happy with 20GB of Karma!!!

(I think I just soiled myself).

Re:first post!

[tuffy]

Of course, Ogg is good for Sonic|BLUE since they don't have to liscense an MPEG decoder for each player they sell, correct?

All their players still have mp3 support, so some sort of MPEG decoding license is necessary. But the Vorbis support costs them nothing extra in licensing.

Re:Rio Car

[pdh11]

Unlike some previous Empeg/Rio products, the Karma does not run Linux. It runs Ecos, the popular open-source embedded OS. The firmware isn't designed to be modified like the Rio Central or car-player was.

(It always used to gall me slightly that the Rio Central and car-player were described as "hackable", with the implication that people customising them were outwitting us in some way, whereas in fact we put a good deal of effort into making them geek-customisable...)

Peter

ipod size comparison

[morcheeba]

RioKarma 20:
20G 2.7 x 3.0 x 0.90 = 7.29 inch^3 5.5oz

ipod specs [apple.com]
10G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.62 = 6.10 inch^3 5.6oz
15G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.62 = 6.10 inch^3 5.6oz
30G 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.73 = 7.18 inch^3 6.2oz

So it's pretty comprable size-wise and breaks from the pcmcia 1.8" hard drive mold (0.20" x 2.13" x 3.37") [synchrotech.com] that defines the ipod.

A good MP3 player is more than technical gimmickry

[__aamkky7574]

This is great, just as long as Rio improve their build quality and service. I've had two Rio Volts; the first started pausing for no apparent reason. The second works, but is plagued by minor tics, a battery case that never stays shut, huge startup times, jumps in sound and skipping even when playing MP3s.

After the third remote control broke, and I tried to buy a new one from Rio itself (rather than Amazon, where I bought it) it turned out that not only would they not ship items from their e-store, they would even accept a non-US credit card it (when I tried to buy and have it sent to a US friend to send on to me). Needless to say, I'm not impressed by a company quite happy to take foreigner's money while giving them a shoddy service.

P.

Drat!

[bytesmythe]

Trying to find a music player that does what I want is annoying. The closest I've seen so far is the Neuros [neurosaudio.com], actually.

The problem with the Karma here is it doesn't appear to have a radio tuner, unlike the Neuros. The Neuros also:

• Broadcasts on a locally unused FM frequency so you can transmit it to a nearby radio.
• Record and encode MP3s from any source (internal radio tuner or line-in). [I have been told that recording to OGG is a possible future firmware update.]
• The syncing software is being ported to linux.
• If they come out with a higher capacity, you just get a new storage "backpack". No need to buy an entirely new unit.

The main thing the Neuros doesn't have that I would like is a line-out, but oh well. It does nearly everything else I'd want.

Re:Ethernet connection method, long overdue?

[tomstdenis]

insightful?

Um, neither usb or firewire are rated for the distances of ethernet [cat5]. I think *that* is the point. E.g. your computer in one room and the home stereo + tv + stuff in another.

Plus you can get 30ft of cat5 for about as much as 6ft of usb retail [sick!]. :-)

Tom

Re:The RIO people are really cool.

[phrenzy]

The 3.0 alpha code plays on the player, and when it goes beta, we (empeg owners) might just get Ogg..

You bet - Karma builds from the same codebase as the car player (although it runs eCos not Linux due to code size and lack of an MMU).

3.0 already plays Ogg, and will get released when we're done with our seven (count em) new products. It's been a bit hectic around here lately!

Rob
(formerly of empeg, now Rio)

Re:Competition rocks

[tuffy]

who cares about low bitrates, i want my cd-quality.

Then encode to FLAC, which this new player also supports. FLAC is CD quality (completely lossless) at half the space and is a completely open format.

Re:Powerful tools include cross-fader...

[phrenzy]

Does this mean we *finally* have a portable mp3 player (non-cd based) that can play back gapless recordings?

It plays gapless anyway, unless your encoder has inserted masses of blank frames (which you can trim with various utilities).

The cross fader is for radio style mixes, which works particularly well if you're on random playback from your entire music collection. The last few seconds of the current track will cross fade into the first few seconds of the next track - I leave this switched on most of the time now. You would turn it off for continuous mixes though.

Rob

Re:Sounds good...

[grennis]

Does anybody actually have any WMA files?

Yes

That contain music?

Yes

That they actually listen to?

I have my whole 300 CD music collection ripped to WMA. (You can just turn off DRM).

I don't even know where i would get a program that rips CD's to WMA.

That is a silly thing to say... its called Windows Media Player (duh)

Why does everything always include support for WMA when nobody really uses it?

With WMP 9: Better compression, better audio quality, and, like you said, universal and total support. I guess when you say "nobody" you mean "nobody except the 95% of users out there running Windows"

Re:Finally

[pdh11]

Maybe someone can hack it so that you could use a wireless USB NIC on the USB2 port.

Use an Ethernet-to-wireless bridge (e.g. WET11) on the Ethernet port. No hacking required.

Peter

iRiver OGG update

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, iRiver gave this update on Vorbis support earlier this week: here [iriver.com]

Re:Competition rocks

[pdh11]

If this new Karma player can handle all the Vorbis quality rates and FLAC - out of the box - I'll be picking one up.

We tested Karma with Vorbis bitrates up to 256Kbits/s VBR. Anyone using Vorbis at higher bitrates than that should IMO be using Flac.

Peter

iRiver too

[GarfBond]

Visiting the site in Mozilla breaks (firebird nightly and moz1.4), but Opera 7.11 on Win seems to work just fine, for those of you refusing to hit up IE.

For what it's worth, iRiver (the same people who make the original RioVolt line and the current SlimX and flashplayer things you find at Bestbuy) just made a news release detailing their Ogg efforts. http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=34 7 [iriver.com]

Essentially what they're saying is that Tremor is too big for their embedded devices (read: CD players and flash players). I suppose this can be an excusable claim, depending on the device. However, I'm really disappointed their hard drive doesn't include Ogg support, as a hard drive is a bigger and heaver item, and it shouldn't hurt too much for them to include Ogg support on the ROM.

ThinkPad

[HermanAB]

an old Thinkpad makes a great networked Ogg Vorbis player and second hand it costs less than this toy, but it is a wee lil'bit bigger...

Re:Finally

[upplepop]

You might be interested in the Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter [amazon.com]. It uses 802.11b to distribute audio and images to your television. It includes a remote control used to control an GUI on your television.

Re:Competition rocks

[pdh11]

And, as long as I'm pestering a Rio employee, how is the ethernet support going to work?

You plug it in. If there's a DHCP server, it DHCPs, otherwise it autonets (UPnP-styley). Then it announces itself over SSDP multicast. If you're using Windows XP Home (or anything else that talks SSDP -- it's a completely open standard) an icon pops up in Network Neighbourhood. If you're using other sorts of Windows, an icon pops up in our own transfer software. Otherwise, you just point a web browser at it: there's a web server in it which will serve you a completely cross-platform Java applet to do your transfers.

I don't know whether we'll be actively helping the open-source community to implement the Ethernet protocol this time, but it certainly wouldn't be rocket science to reverse-engineer it.

Peter

Re:Ogg Vorbis Power Consumption?

[cbiffle]

In a word, no.

I play both regularly on my iPaq (200mhz ARM). Using the libmad decoder for MP3 and Nicholas Pitre's integerized Ogg library (NOT tremor), I see about 10% utilization for MP3, and 8-10% for Ogg. (I say 8-10 as conservative padding. In practice, believe it or no, Vorbis always hangs lower.)

Keep in mind that the libvorbis libraries most folks use are a reference implementation. Once Vorbis is properly optimized, it's really quite light on the resources. These guys are probably using tremor, which I personally haven't tried, but I've heard people say it's even lighter than the Pitre decoder.

Re:This is great, now I need Kenwood to catch on!

[Josh Coalson]

The majority of my music listening time is spent between work and my commute. Listening to Ogg Vorbis files at work is easy, but once Kenwood (or another equally good car stereo manufacturer) gets on the Ogg bandwagon, I'll be more than happy to re-encode all my CDs to Ogg instead of MP3. Until I have a car CD player, I can't switch.

Kenwood makes the MusicKeg, a rebranded Phatbox, which plays FLAC and I believe you can get firmware from PhatNoise to play Vorbis also. They are still working on optimizations to Tremor to play the highest quality levels smoothly.

Josh

Re:Ogg Vorbis Power Consumption?

[pdh11]

These guys are probably using tremor

Yup. It works out about the same CPU usage as MP3 for normal (64-128) bitrates, but seems to scale with bitrate a lot more than MP3 does; by the time you get to 256Kbits/s, Vorbis is really hard work.

Peter

Re:source code?

[pdh11]

Is Rio required by the Ogg Vorbis license agreement to release the microcode they used to implement this protocol?

No, it's BSD-licensed.

It would be interesting to see what kind of optimizations they used such as special DSP instructions.

Actually we use the Tremor (integerised) Vorbis library almost completely stock -- it already came with optimisations for ARM. The only thing we've really had to take a hitting thing to is its memory allocation.

Peter

iPod comparison

[mnemonic_]

Here's a specification comparison with an equivalently priced (both at $399) iPod... info from dapreview [dapreview.com], an excellent respository of specs of hdd audio players which reported on the Karma aka "Pearl" months ago.

iPod
Capacity: 15GB
Weight: 5.6 ounces
Formats: MP3 AAC AIFF WAV
Interfaces: Firewire 400
Battery Life: "Over 8 hours"
Extras: Games, Contacts, Calendar, Alarm, Sleep Timer, Clock, "20 equalizer settings"
LCD: 160x128 backlit

Karma
Capacity: 20GB
Weight: 5.5 ounces
Formats: MP3 WMA OGG FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec making WAV not needed)
Interfaces: USB 2 and Ethernet
Battery Life: 15 hours
Extras: Dynamic playlists, Dual RCA Line-Outs, 5 band equalizer
LCD: 160x128 backlit

Seems like if you want purely a music player that is conveniently-sized, supports OGG and has 25% more capacity than the iPod for the same price, the Karma is the way to go. The iPod's perks are tempting though, if you want more than just a music player.

Re:To flog a dead horse....

[pdh11]

So is that actually usb 1.0 or 1.1 renamed as usb 2.0 (usb full speed) or usb high speed incorrectly labelled as usb 2.0?

Without necessarily wishing to express an opinion on the nitwits who thought that that renaming was a good idea, Karma supports the 480Mbits/s variety of USB, or, as I'm tempted to call it, proper USB2. (That is, the wire speed is 480Mbits/s; you don't get the whole 60Mbytes/s in practice as that's more than the head rate of the winchester.)

Peter

Re:Ethernet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been following the design and subsequent release of the Karma, and I'm quite happy to say that it is indeed 100mbit. I have no idea why they don't mention that one their website. That feature alone is a big selling point for me.

-Johnny