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Portables Media Music Hardware

iRiver Announces A New Ogg/MP3 Player 231

Posted by timothy from the anticipation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CD Freaks and Mobile mag are reporting that iRiver has unveiled a new Ogg-capable mp3 player. Featuring 20 GB of HD space and USB 2.0 connectivity, the iHP-120 might just be the answer to the question all us Apple-fearing geeks have been asking... Although the new product has yet to show up on their website, the older model iHP-100 is similar in design but with half the storage space (10gb). New software will be released in October to update it and other players from iRiver with ogg compatibility as well."
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iRiver Announces A New Ogg/MP3 Player More

iRiver Announces A New Ogg/MP3 Player

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  • Not necessarily a godsend (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ignorant Aardvark ( 632408 ) <cydeweys.gmail@com> on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:04PM (#7091031) Homepage Journal
    The awesome thing about the iPod is that is a huge chunk of mobile storage that happens to have a nice LCD navigation screen and the capability to play mp3s. If this new Ogg/Mp3 Player is castrated by the industry, i.e. you can only store and delete, not download from it, then it won't stand a chance at replacing the iPod. I hate when dumb copyright-protection schemes get in the way of a good product, but it's happened before, and I'm afraid to say, it will likely happen again.
    • There is only copyright protection if you use their iRiver managner software if you use it like a removable drive there is no protection

    • Re:Not necessarily a godsend (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sven The Space Monke ( 669560 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @02:49AM (#7091663)
      Crippled functionality is not something to worry about with iRiver. Their design philosophy seems to be "end user experience = GOD, screw what the RIAA wants". Every flash/hard drive based player they have works as a USB drive. This one also has built-in mp3 recording off analog/optical audio in (with bit rates up to 320kbps). iRiver also has a great menu system rivaling the iPod (preference is up to the user, though). Their North American site seems to be ./'ed, but European site is working fine [irivernordic.com]. Has all the same info about the same products. It's about time these guys start to get the recognition the deserve - I've been in love with them for over a year. I just wish I could afford one of these, but alas, I am but a lowly student.

  • Nice timing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by c_oflynn ( 649487 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:04PM (#7091032)
    I love the timing on the topic right before this: "Few Takers For RIAA's 'Clean Slate'".

    • No wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @12:02AM (#7091228) Homepage
      Look at the cost of filling up these HD-based players with legally purchased music, say 20gb of AAC from iTMS (bad example for this player, but anyway). I'm quite sure that some of the biggest purchasers of legal music are also some of the biggest pirates - simply because they have a profound interest for music, but not that kind of money, even if they are willing to pay for music. Rank in order from biggest to smallest offender:

      1. Person downloading 20gb of pirated music, 0gb legal.
      2. Person downloading 15gb of pirated music, 5gb legal.
      3. Person downloading 10gb of pirated music, 0gb legal.

      Legally, it's 1-2-3. Morally, I'd disagree with that order. And I doubt #2 is willing to sign any "amnesty", even if he's a good customer of the recording companies. In fact, by any standard I see among my friends, I'd say he'd be a premium customer. Only the RIAA play it blind - they only see what's being pirated, and so they are just as likely to drive him into the ground as the other two.

      The RIAA can dream about their magic customer #4, that never pirates anything and purchases everything legally. Judging by friends, family, class mates, co-workers and people I meet on the Internet, they'll be very few. Even old dogs seem to be learning new tricks. Strike down all but those and you'll also strike down the majority of the market. And the market doesn't like being treated like criminals - even if they by the letter of the law are.

      Kjella

      P.S. Regrading the use of the word criminal, since the US has defined "sharing for getting other works in return" as commercial gain, I think most sharing would fall under criminal statutes, not civil. The difference lies more in evidence, compuer logs don't establish who was in front of the machine. While it's probably enough for a civil case, I doubt it'd hold in a criminal case...
      • I own an Archos Jukebox Recorder, 20GB or storage. 13GB of music on it (high quality VBR). All of it from CD's I own [1]. Most of them were bought while I was in college, which I paid for myself (part time job during the school year, full time on summers). My music collection was purchased almost exclusively via cdconnection.com, usually 8+ discs at a time (I'd save my money up, buy a bunch of CDs and repeat).

        Don't know how representative that is, but there it is.

        [1] Just ran `find /mnt/archos1/ -name "01
      • Errmmm I'm only half way through ripping my CD collection to Vorbis and I'm at 30gb+ already. Downloaded mp3s add up to something like 0.5gb (and half of those I've ended up buying on CD). So maybe I'm the elusive #4, whatever, I need a bigger hard disk :)

  • Creepy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mrpuffypants ( 444598 ) * <mrpuffypants@gmailTIGER.com minus cat> on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:04PM (#7091038)
    If you 'fear' Apple then you've got a lot more problems than just finding an Ogg-enabled music player....

  • Firmware update? (Score:3, Funny)

    by MORTAR_COMBAT! ( 589963 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:06PM (#7091050)
    The mobile mag article said the Ogg capability was through a recent firmware update. I wonder if will be available for the older model as well?

  • FLAC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrseigen ( 518390 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:07PM (#7091051) Homepage Journal
    Well, the Diamond/Rio ogg player that was on here earlier also had FLAC support. Would be nice for more portable players to have that now that the disks are getting huge.

    • Re:FLAC (Score:2, Funny)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 )
      audiophiles.....

      Where exactly do you use a *portable* player that is accoustically sound anyways? The bus? The subway? The streets?

      Simply...must...be....a...drop...buzzword....lee t. ..slashdot....poster!

      Next you will be going on about the airbags on the new JTF fighters....

      Tom
      • The best use for FLAC one a portable device that I know of is for musicians to make informal recordings of their concerts. I know tons of people, myself included, that like to record concerts that they do, mostly for educational purposes - you can really learn a lot from listening to a recording you've made! Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are stuck with minidisc recorders, and I need not go over the problems with them on THIS forum.

        A good hard disk recorder with a good amount of storage, lossle
      • Nothing to see here folks. As of the recent Alpha Release v3.0 [empeg.com] my 60 Gb Empeg Car Player [empeg.com] now supports Ogg Vorbis format.
      • I'm in the process of ripping my entire CD collection to my media computer I'm building. I'm using FLAC for my home listening...but, for car or gym, I'll move them to mp3 since those are such a poor listening environment.
    • Audiophiles would probably prefer MPC support; it works at bitrates more suited to portables (usually lower than an -aps MP3) while preserving quality (for that warm fuzzy feeling). It's fast to encode too, making it suitable for on-the-fly transcoding.

  • rio karma too (Score:5, Informative)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) * <asv@@@ivoss...com> on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:07PM (#7091055) Homepage Journal
    As mentioned before on /., the Rio Karma [digitalnetworksna.com] is another hard drive based player with MP3, WMA, OGG, and FLAC support. I like the Karma because its smaller than the ipod, doesn't look like an ipod clone, and it has an ethernet port too. The karma will come in 20 and 40GB versions.
    • The Karma has a high-speed USB 2.0 port onboard. It also has a docking station that uses Ethernet. So, the Karma itself doesn't have an Ethernet port, but can be made to work with Ethernet using the docking station.

      If I can just copy my Ogg files over using standard networking (NFS, SMB, heck, even FTP) I will buy one of these. If I have to run some special jukebox thing that does a secret DRM handshake, I'll pass.

      steveha
      • You do have to use an app, but there's no DRM. What it does have is an http server which will serve up a java applet to do the file transfer, so you don't need any client software install. Still, lots of users on the forums are asking for real file transfer, so it's a possibility. If nothing else, the wire format is supposed to be very easy to reverse engineer.
        • Thanks for the info! I would like to be able to use it as a very small file server, plug and go, but as long as I can put my tunes on it from my Linux desktop, I guess I could live with needing to run a special app.

          steveha

    • Re:rio karma too (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GreenKiwi ( 221281 )
      FLAC?!?!? WTF for?

      I'm sorry, none of these portable plays have significantly good analog stages to make lossless output worth anything. Maybe one will come out with a good digital output, but that still will need to have an external DAC.

      Plus, using a lossless format really hampers the amount of music that you can store on such a device.

      20gb of MP3 = 15000+ hours of music (200+ CDs avg 50min/cd)
      20gb of lossless = 4000 hours of music (80+ CDs avg 50min/cd)

      Why not transcode your music from your lossless
      • Well, since the whole fucking reason for downloading a show in FLAC or SHN is because you want LOSSLESS compression as you don't want to lose any resolution in the audio, your argument is worthless. It's like somebody trying to buy a backhoe and you suggesting "Why not use a shovel? They're smaller." Because it doesn't do the same thing! If you want to record the exact soundwave produced by a singer on a high note, and play exactly that back into your ear, then lossless compression is your only choice.
        • Lossless recordings for live shows has nothing to do with quality. If you'd read any of the FAQs available online (for example, here [etree.org]), you'd discover that the reason to use lossless codecs is because, in the trading process, an audio file may go through multiple generations before reaching a given individual. For example, a concert may be recorded, compressed, then burned to a CD which is mailed to someone, which is then ripped, re-compressed, etc, etc. Yes, this is a somewhat contrived example, I know,
        • . It's like somebody trying to buy a backhoe and you suggesting "Why not use a shovel? They're smaller." Because it doesn't do the same thing! If you want to record the exact soundwave produced by a singer on a high note, and play exactly that back into your ear, then lossless compression is your only choice.

          No, using your analogy, it's like saying, "hey, I need to dig a hole in the garden to plant the seeds for my corn. I think that I'll use my backhoe." When the hole that you need to make could be jus
      • There is one good reason to have a lossless audio format available: when the lossy encoding that you have your listenable audio in isn't supported. Then, you either suffer the pain of transcoding or go with a lossless format.

        For example, suppose I want to listen to all the presentations given at linux.conf.au 2003 [linux.org.au]. Now, on the CD they're all in Speex format.

        This format, I'll note, isn't terribly well supported by hardware players. Also, although some of those presentations are a bit long, I doubt that
      • FLAC?!?!? WTF for?

        As for those people who will comment that they get their concert bootlegs as FLAC or SHNs, and they don't want to change them? Why not? MP3s are so small? You'll be able to carry 2-3 times as many concerts with you.

        I currently have about 400Gigs of flac/shn's and that is growing. I also have a very highspeed connection at work. I also have a car. I also have a nice home stereo.

        With a device like this, I can store my new flacs, listen to them on my way home from work, transfer them

  • Only WIN98SE/ME/2000/XP? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yanestra ( 526590 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:07PM (#7091058) Journal
    Sorry, I'm a FreeBSD-on-desktop user (yes, there are some), and I'm surprised to see they only support Winodze.

    Or, maybe, this time again, it means some of us will need to do some reverse-engineering of one more of those primitive tools all these player manufacturers supply...

    • Really gets on my nerves when such gadgets don't simply act as a standard USB storage device... I mean, all you want to do is upload your music... I'm having the same kind of trouble with my digital camera (canon powershot A70). gphoto2 is not there yet, and I can only deal with it corectly using Canon's proprietary windows software. OK, if I want extra functionality, then such a software is OK. But for merely uploading/downloading data?

      That also kind of reminds me of this drive bay internal USB 6-in-1 car
      • I agree. But as for the PowerShot, My G3 seems fully supported. I'd doubt the A70 is very different.
      • I'll just add a note that my fiance's 2.2MP PowerShot S220 does work fine with gphoto2 for me, albeit not as a USB Mass Storage Device, which is admittedly simpler. Anyway, gphoto2 isn't that hard to use once you get it working and I think KDE's kio_slave kamera or camera works with it.
        -N

    • Re:Only WIN98SE/ME/2000/XP? (Score:3, Informative)

      by CvD ( 94050 )
      I believe that most of iRiver's products which use USB use the USB mass storage protocol, so there's no problem then is there? I think they also have their own proprietory protocol which has about double the speed or so. But you are not required to use this. So yeah, iRiver products are FreeBSD compatible (assuming FreeBSD has USB mass storage supported).

      Cheers,

      Costyn.

  • More details... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Spikeman56 ( 543509 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:08PM (#7091063) Homepage
    This is kinda old news... it was announced like a week ago and it is on the website last time I checked... Anyway iRiver announced that they will be supporting OGG on their other players... imp-250/350, and ifp-3XX - selective format support either mp3&wma and mp3&ogg imp-400/550, and ifp-5XX - All in one format support for MP3, WMA, and OGG iHP-1XX - All in one format support for MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG PLayers ogg are not supported on... iMP-50/100/150 and iFP-1XX ~spikeman56

  • That's nice and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:09PM (#7091072) Homepage
    but how's the GUI? It can have all the cool features and abilities, but if usability sucks, you might as well not bother. It's amazing how many companies get this wrong.
    • The GUI is excellent. I have an iMP-400, and I am very happy with it. The GUI works fine for me. It takes a little getting used to the buttons, but thats with every gadget. The menus are logically laid out and very legible. Its a lot better than GUIs on most mobile phones (most of which are horrid).

      So, yeah... buy an iRiver. You won't be dissapointed.

      Cheers,

      Costyn.
  • The RIAA [riaa.org] has announced it will launch a lawsuit against the Vorbis [vorbis.com] developers who created the OGG format.

    "We are shocked and awed these college kids would code something that steals from kabillionaire struggling artists and post them on the sickening little iPee's or iPods. Have you seen the name OGG. Wasn't there a ganster rap song called OGG or something. It's a disgrace." stated an RIAA Spokesdevil.

    Officials at Vorbis could not be contacted, however, another company stated they will be filing a counter

  • Excellent... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tyrdium ( 670229 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:10PM (#7091079) Homepage
    I've been considering getting a portable music player for a while, but I've had a few problems. Flash memory players are too small capacity, and cost too much per meg. Hard drive players tend to be too large, however. The only two I've seen that are good are the iPod (too expensive), and the Zen (considering it). However, since this plays .oggs, that gives it a nice big advantage over the Zen. Also, it weighs about 2/3 what the Zen weighs... Anybody have any info on the price of the iRiver? I'm also looking at the Muvo^2, but I'm not sure what the price is... I'll have to look that up...
    • If you can't afford an iPod, don't look at the currently pricier iRiver. While they will probably match the iPod price when the 20GB iRiver ships, their 10GB player is currently the price of the 20GB iPod ($399), while the 10GB iPod is $299.

      The Zen is cheaper, but also has a shitty interface.

  • What!? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I use WMA, you insensitive clods! ~_~

  • This is really (Score:5, Funny)

    by OpenSourcerer ( 515213 ) <hashim.haafiz@org> on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:12PM (#7091094) Homepage
    An ogg in the face for apple.

  • Very cool. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nucleon500 ( 628631 ) <tcfelker@example.com> on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:14PM (#7091111) Homepage
    iRiver was one of the first to work with Xiph.org, and there was something about demo boards, and some agreement, but nothing concrete for a long time. It's nice to see this come to fruition. I personally am very glad, because this is one more choice when I get a portable player for college. I have a huge Vorbis collection.

    There's a Wiki list of (hopefully) all portable Vorbis players at http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware [xiph.org]. That page has a link to some detailed information [iriver.com] from iRiver about which of their players will support Vorbis.

  • OGG File Format (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kujah ( 630784 ) on Monday September 29, 2003 @10:16PM (#7091120) Homepage
    Finally a mobile player that supports the OGG Vorbis file format! I own a creative jukebox, but I don't use it that often mainly because it doesn't support ogg files (which most of my music is now encoded as) Ever since I found out about the OGG file format i've been encoding my music to it. I sensed immediately that I got better sound quality with it - and I was right. http://ekei.com/audio/ has links to various comparisons, and in general the OGG encoder handles the mid range much better than, say, lame mp3. This is great because afaik headphones don't have the greatest highs...

  • Fear Apple? (Score:3, Funny)

    by vonFinkelstien ( 687265 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @12:26AM (#7091249)
    If you are a worshiper of Apple and have a proper fear of the Apple god, then why would you want an MP3 player that has not been touched by the hand of god?

    From Wester's 3rd New International Dictionary:
    fear 4. to have a reverential awe of (e.g., fear of God; God fearing)

    Or did you mean afraid of Apple?

  • The product web page mentions that it can do realtime mp3 encoding. Can it record to WAVs too? I would be interested in something like that.

    • Re:recording? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Chaltek ( 610920 ) *
      Yes it can record WAV files, via the optical input or external microphone jack. Check the CD-Freaks article for the official product description blurb.

      What is missing, and would be really great, is for the device too encode OGG files as well!
  • oh wait i use a mac... and love it :)
  • A new portable digital music player from iRiver is cool and all, but can it play ogg.... wait... never mind.
    • A new portable digital music player from iRiver is cool and all, but can it play ogg.... wait... never mind.

      Unfortunately the line in will only real time encode to MP3's. Rats.... I hope it does a reasonable job encoding. Getting church programs for distrubition on CD's just got simpler. The device shows up on USB like an external drive.. Nice! Archos has a competitor.

      maybe in the next upgrade they will have an OGG encoder....
  • The iRiver Nordic site [irivernordic.com] carries the specs.

  • The Nordic Site... (Score:2, Informative)

    by tgrasl ( 607606 )
    ...has got the player on it:

    http://www.irivernordic.com/products.php?pid=21

  • iPod: 61 x 104 x 15,8 mm @ 158 g
    iRiver: 60 x 105x 19 mm @ 160g

    Sooo, at last someone else figured out that 2.5" drives were NOT the way to go (Archos anyone? ;) And that LCD remote looks sweet too...

    Though, from the picture, the navigation menu looks horrible. What is this "/root/030314/" stuff anyway? Am I supposed to type "pwd && ls" each time I want to see an album, or what?
    Maybe they're trying to appeal to geeks here (or they don't want to bother writing software), but hey, the Archos had
    • The LCD remote is a pretty standard feature in iRiver products (from what I can tell anyway), and is VERY handy. Allows you to keep the bulky part of the player packed away in your backpack (or luggage, or carryone) while being able to actually use the unit. Also keeps the main part of the unit smaller for when portability is more important than having an lcd screen.

      As for the navigation system, if it works anything like the cd-based iRiver mp350 (an EXCELLENT cd based mp3 player; I *love* mine), the stu
  • I just bought an iriver 395t a couple weeks ago, and I love it. It's their top of the line flash player, and as far as I know the only one out there that actually comes with 512mb of memory installed. It has a pretty damn good FM tuner, can record (and encode) at up to 320kbit, and is about the size of a pack of gum.

    Anyway, back to my original point... iriver releases firmware updates on a fairly regular basis, so it's probably only a matter of time before all of their players will have ogg support.
  • iHP-120 [irivernordic.com]


    "Supports Windows 98/ME/2000/XP & Mac iHP-120, works under the biggest OS environments."


    The UI looks clunky and I'd want a *NIX driver but it's good to see ogg/vorbis finally get into HW products.

    • That site also says (translating from Swedish):

      "The player appears as an external harddisk in Explorer on your PC. No installation is required."

      This probably means that it uses the USB mass storage protocol, which the Linux kernel supports. Since other comments have implied that you play songs by just selecting the folder where you placed them, that would imply it should work just fine under Linux at least.
  • Nice, but I really want a solid-state device so that it uses less battery power and is resistant to dropping. Does anybody know one? 128mb is plenty.
    • I have a nomad IIc. It has builtin 64mb of memory, and I added a 128mb smart media card. Along with the notmad explorer from red chair software [redchairsoftware.com] It has been a great MP3 player. the 192MB gives me more than enough music to last through the day. The thing is small (but not so small it's hard to use), light, I've dropped it plenty and had no problems. I use rechargeable NiMH batteries in it. It lasts about 5 days (2 hours a day of use on average) on one battery. With the cost of the extra software, the M
  • Yeah. I own one since the first day they were available here.. Key feaures:
    • standard USB storage class device, no proprietary crap like Apple or Creative - plug in to any computer with USB, works fine with Linux
    • you can browse the contents of the drive hierarchically, subdirs and all, no database crap like Creative Nomad Zen (though you can browse through your mp3 files via a database based on ID3 tags, too)
    • you can use it to transfer files from one computer to another
    • HQ Li-Pol battery, 16 hours runtime
    • n
  • iRiver made an announcement [iriver.com] a few days ago about what devices past and future will be supported. Most aside from the lowest-model devices (i.e. 100-series) will be supported, but those with only 8Mbit flash will either support MP3/OGG or WMA/MP3, but not both. The newest devices out on the market will have 16Mbit flash, and so should support plenty of formats including Ogg. The one I'm most looking forward to is the iFP-500 [iriver.com], their 256M to 1GB (w00t!) solid state player. Ogg support, up to 1GB flash. Very

  • Neuros flameout (Score:3, Informative)

    by nightsweat ( 604367 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @10:12AM (#7093619)
    Make damn sure it supports .ogg out of the box. I spent $400 on a Neuros back in June and sure, it can play ogg files, but it can't sort them, create playlists, read playlists that reference ogg files, and NSM (the primary package for synching in Windows) does not support ogg yet.

    They plan to support ogg in NSM in "September" but there hasn't been a release yet and I doubt they will release in the next 15 hours. Support's coming, I'm sure, but so is Christmas and if iRiver delivers, Santa will deliver a lot of their players to my friends this holiday.

  • The Neuros [neurosaudio.com] players support WAV, MP3, WMA and OGG. One of them has a 20GB drive. They all work with Linux (actually, with anything that will support Java and USB). FM tuner, microphone, stereo recording via line in, an FM transmitter to listen on a radio.

    Neuros has posted a social contract [neurosaudio.com] that decries DRM and supports Free Software via the BSD license.

    Yeah, it has some drawbacks - the big one being that it's still a USB 1.1 device. Also, you can't get one outside of North America because it seems th

  • Surely they're using a dedicated MP3 decoding chip for playing MP3s... how are they going to add OGG support to older players with just a software update? Surely it's not some sort of reconfigurable FPGA at that price... anyone know how?

    --D

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