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.

Give to xiph if you use these.

[Thinkit3]

Cynics are numerous and void of ideas. Ignore them. I hope Rio is giving to Xiph for using Ogg (I hear Xiph takes contracts to develop for a particular hardware), but anyone getting one of these should be donating. If Rio says they are giving a portion of the proceeds to Xiph, I'd be even more likely to buy from them.

Competition rocks

[squarooticus]

Even though Digital Innovations got my money for being the first out of the gate with Neuros [neurosaudio.com] support for Ogg Vorbis, competition is always a good thing, and having more players that support Vorbis means lower prices and less potential for lock-in or obsolescence.

Ogg Vorbis destroys MP3 in terms of quality, and is competitive with all of the newer proprietary codecs (e.g., AAC, MP3Pro, WMA) at high bitrates while providing much better performance than those at low bitrates (e.g., sub-64kbps).

Don't let the intelligentsia decide whether Vorbis is the right codec for you or not: the free market will decide this question, and as a result of this development, that market just got more interesting.

Powerful tools include cross-fader...

[jalano]

"Powerful tools include cross-fader..."

Does this mean we *finally* have a portable mp3 player (non-cd based) that can play back gapless recordings? This is one of the few features that has held me back from buying an iPod.

Re:Finally

[Anil]

Maybe someone can hack it so that you could use a wireless USB NIC on the USB2 port. I guess it depends on if the device has a usable USB output port or a crazy one that takes a customized USB converter cable (haven't seen enough pictures to tell).

Re:Ethernet connection method, long overdue?

[josquin00]

I probably should RTFA more carefully, but I wonder if you can use this as a networked music server/file share, or if it only synchronizes to one machine? As someone who does freelance tech work, it'd be nice (read: fulfill my geek desires) to carry my toolset and my music all on one device.

FLAC Support Too

[asv108]

From the Rio Homepage

Powerful tools include cross-fader, 5-band parametric equalizer, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support, and a huge, backlit display capable of visualizations, animated menus, and 16 shades of gray.

Now this is a reason to celebrate! I can get rid of my audiotron and my portable for one system that supports OGG and FLAC. FLAC support is huge for the thousands of people who download [etree.org] and share [furthurnet.com] legal lossless music.

Now that we finally have an ogg media player

[__aavhli5779]

How about we finally get ogg support in digital video players, too?

More and more video is being encoded as OGM (Ogg Media Stream) which usually involves xvid-encoded video and ogg-encoded audio; I can attest that the quality is superb but there is one clear downfall: at this moment, no DVD player or portable media device can play the format, thus requiring you to watch such encoded video on your computer.

I look at this development as good progress towards finally getting something that supports both ogg and xvid out of the box.

Palm devices play Oggs

[Steev]

I have been listening to ogg vorbis files for months now using my Palm Zire 71 [palm.com] and Aeroplayer [aerodrome.us]. I got myself a 256 Meg SD card and I was off to the races.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptan

[bogado]

This makes me remember, in the early days of the internet when the people with internet access were lucky and most geeks used BBS system. The clueless people here in brasil would call any image of gif. There were BBS with a gif download dir, usualy filled with porn jpegs.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptan

[Yort]

The consumer has already come to think of "mp3" as short for compressed digital music.

Exactly. If the industry supports it, it stands a good chance to get used because people don't really care for the most part. All they care about is that when they click on the link, it plays in their player of choice. Or that if they look up download a Dave Matthews Band song from Kazaa, it plays in their portable player.

Now that many of the major PC-players and portable players are supporting Ogg, it won't matter if a site/person/whoever is offering something in MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg - to the end user, if it works, it's great.

And hey, if this song over here with the .ogg (as if they ever see 3-letter extensions in Windoze) sounds better than the one with .mp3, I'll go with that one. And if I can fit 35 songs from this place that has "Oggs" compared to 30 from this other place onto my 128MB player...

I picked up a Neuros and am loving it. Still needs some work, but they seem to be pretty connected to their user community, which is nice.

Re:Competition rocks

[phrenzy]

With all respect to the cool Xiph guys, porting Tremor to an embedded platform was a complete bitch. Well, a semi bitch at least. It's clear that the format was not designed with small architectures in mind (some of the comments in the source seem to confirm this). A few questionable design choices have definitely set this format back in terms of CE adoption.

There's no problem that can't be overcome in time though.

Rob

Re:40GB, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad it doesn't read ID3 tags. Does it scroll the iso9660 filename across the screen? I'm sure that's informative.

source code?

[Doppler00]

I think the least a company who implements the Ogg Vorbis protocol should do is donate some small percentage of profits from each sale to xiph.org to support continued development. Not that they have to (do to it being patent and royalty free) but it would be a nice gesture.

Is Rio required by the Ogg Vorbis license agreement to release the microcode they used to implement this protocol? It would be interesting to see what kind of optimizations they used such as special DSP instructions.

Re:FLAC Support Too

[greg_barton]

Now this is a reason to celebrate!

I totally agree. I discovered FLAC about a month ago.

I'm now in the process of re-ripping my entire CD collection.

Even vs. MP3 at 320bps there's a huge difference.

I can hear harmonics I couldn't hear before. I can hear the singer breathing. I can hear the clicking of loose piano keys.

It makes the music come alive.

I ain't never going back. :)

Re:Is Ogg Vorbis finally gaining industry acceptan

[zerocool^]

as long as consumers aren't using it. And the answer to the question is a definite no

it's being picked up, more so than you'd think.

Historically, formats like this start out underground (witness mp3 on IRC back in the day, or divx 3 years ago). But, reading places like the Divx forums, people are really starting to take notice of oggs. It's becomming integrated into the current view of compressed music.

Just give it a little bit. It'll be popular.

Re:SCREW Rio

[altman]

Download rio music manager 1.90 from www.rioaudio.com - and delete all your old drivers (ideally, the registry keys too). RMM 1.90 does work with 2k/XP and is rather a lot more stable than the old software, as this stuff was written from scratch for the S-series players - but we also added support for legacy players though it doesn't get shouted about much. It'll do WMA transfers no problem too.

No reason not to provide source, etc? Licensing agreements and a $5k toolchain are probably enough of a disincentive for source release for the old Rio players.

The 600 came from the US development office, which is no more. The UK office (ex-empeg) now does all the rio stuff; there was also a lot of turmoil surrounding sonicblue going away, so these two combine into the old stuff being slightly more orphaned than might otherwise be the case - but try getting support for a (say) 2 year old parallel port scanner; same deal...

Re:Unicode?

[pdh11]

Does anybody know ANY portable player that is able to show UTF-8 encoded filenames and/or tags?

Karma keeps all track information in UTF-8, and the transfer software fully understands UTF-8 and UTF-16 tags. Unfortunately the very first release of the Karma firmware won't have Unicode fonts, but we're currently intending to offer a subsequent free upgrade including glyphs for Cyrillic, Greek and Kanji. The Rio Nitrus (the 1.5Gb micro-hard-disk player which we've also just announced) has UTF-8 support including Cyrillic, Greek and Kanji from the word go.

Peter