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Portables Hardware

Beta Ogg Vorbis Firmware For The Neuros [updated] 147

Posted by timothy from the but-does-it-play-cd-rs dept.
volsung writes "It's finally here! Xiph.org has made a beta release of firmware with Ogg Vorbis support for the Neuros portable music player. You can grab the firmware from the Neurosetta site. Note that this beta release only plays Vorbis files, and may skip on very high quality files, like average bitrates above 200 kbps. Also, you'll need to head over to the positron website for instructions on how to upload Vorbis files. Big thanks go out to Monty all of his hard work, and Digital Innovations for supporting the project. (See the DI press release here.)" Update: 07/01 15:26 GMT by T : Stan Seibert writes with an update: if you'd like to get one of these players, visit open.neurosaudio.com to find them on sale.
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Beta Ogg Vorbis Firmware For The Neuros [updated] More

Beta Ogg Vorbis Firmware For The Neuros [updated]

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  • High Quality? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mirell ( 459881 ) <tryn@mirell.org> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:06AM (#6337860) Homepage Journal
    What sort of portable system are you going to play it on that over 200 Kbps would even make a difference?

    • Re:High Quality? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 3.5 stripes ( 578410 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:12AM (#6337874)
      192 Kbps mp3s sound as good as i need em to, I can't imagine needing more than that.

      I was also under the impression that Ogg Vorbis encoded ones sounded better at slightly lower bitrates. Should be a non-issue IMHO.

      What a convoluted way to say I agree.

      • 192 Kbps mp3s sound as good as i need em to, I can't imagine needing more than that. -- 3.5 stripes

        "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, chairman and founder of Microsoft

        "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, former chairman of IBM

        There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, former president, former chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation

        Yep, prophets all... <grin>

      • Live music (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Hatta ( 162192 )
        If you listen to a lot of live music, you need high quality compression. Live music sources often have a lot of crowd noise. Compressing the crowd noise means you can't compress the music as well. Lossy stereo coupling can add artifacts when there's a lot of noise. Also, the acoustics in a concert setting are different from a studio. From my experience q6 ogg is the minimum necessary for good sound. That's roughly 192kbps. But really, until somebody tweaks a codec for the peculiarities of live audio, lo
      • I was also under the impression that Ogg Vorbis encoded ones sounded better at slightly lower bitrates.

        I can hardly tell the difference between 48kbps Ogg Vorbis and the original uncompressed music.

    • Re:High Quality? (Score:4, Informative)

      by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:12AM (#6337875) Journal
      Especially given that the Vorbis format supports bitrate peeling [slashdot.org].

      • Re:High Quality? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:26AM (#6337900) Homepage
        Especially given that the Vorbis format supports bitrate peeling.

        The page linked from the /. page you linked [vorbis.com] states that bitrate peeling isn't implemented yet... Are you is or is you aint?

        Anyone have an update? The info is dated Nov. 7th 2002.
        • Oops, my mistake.

        • Re:High Quality? (Score:3, Informative)

          by krath ( 542732 )

          According to Ogg Traffic from April 2003 [vorbis.com] they are still working on it...

          Quoted from the above URL: "... The bottom line is that Version 1.0 files don't peel very well due to how the packets are organized."

          "... He is convinced that this can be done [peeling], but that takes time, which is something he doesn't have in excess. Of course, if somebody offered him a contract to implement bitrate peeling for money, the process could be accelerated a lot. Oh, and did I mention that donations to Xiph.org are now

          • Well, I for one have neither time nor a contract, but I'm so interested in bitrate peeling that I'm hereby willing to donate the name BitWhittler to the first program that gets off the ground and produces some working code.

            I don't think that that name has been taken by anything else, so I think I made it up. In the Intellectual Property Era, that should be worth a serious tax deduction, too, right?

            N

    • Re:High Quality? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:14AM (#6337878) Homepage
      What sort of portable system are you going to play it on that over 200 Kbps would even make a difference?

      While on the move: Not much.

      But if you plug your player into a badass n-thousand-watt PA system it just might. HIFI applications could be another example.

      I don't know about the quality of the Neuros's DA-converters though, they would have significant impact, that's for sure.

    • Re:High Quality? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:18AM (#6337887) Journal
      To be honest, you probably don't need much more than 128Kbps on a portable player. However, all of my Vorbis music is encoded at quality 8 (ABR 256Kbps). In order to use any of it I would need to peel it back to <200. It would be nice if it came with some kind of syncing utility that did this automatically.

      Anyway, I still have a small pot of money waiting for Apple to release a Vorbis compatible iPod (or an iPod SDK so someone else can do it)

      • I don't know what will come of it, but Linux runs on an iPod [sf.net], and they have Vorbis playback at 80% real time. So it should be possible.

    • Open Standard (Score:5, Insightful)

      by luzrek ( 570886 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:39AM (#6337929) Journal
      Not that everyone cares, but a major selling point for the OGG/Vorbis format is that it is an open standard (MP3 is not). Want to learn more (or about the other projects by the same people/groups) check out their website [vorbis.com].
    • My mp3's and ogg's average around 200-220 kbps. This to me is archival quality as I can almost never pick the files out from the source (occassionally I find a problem with ogg, but thats more rare every release). I use Sennheiser headphones even with my iPod so I DO hear the difference.
    • almost all of my vorbis are encoded at least -q 8 (~256kbps) because I like to be able to listen to them on my home stereo too. it's absolutely true that anything above 160 is irrelevant for a portable player, but I encode them for things besides portables...
    • Because some of us use high quality oggs to back up our CDs, and re-sampling or downsamping or converting to a different format would be a PITA to put onto a portable.

  • Wonderful (Score:1, Redundant)

    by salimma ( 115327 ) *
    I've been planning to buy a portable audio player for a while now - for those rare moments in the gym - and this should be the clincher.

    Hope it's available in the UK...

  • beta functionality (Score:5, Informative)

    by pytheron ( 443963 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:19AM (#6337889) Homepage
    According to neurosaudio, this beta firmware upgrade will disable mp3 playback support. You can have one, but not the other. Looks like it would be better to wait until the beta stage has been passed before upgrading your firmware, since this will be resolved in later releases.

  • Sanity Check (Score:5, Funny)

    by thelandp ( 632129 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:22AM (#6337894)
    Beta Ogg Vorbis Firmware For The Neuros
    Is it just me, or does it seem a bit wierd the fact that we understand what this sentence means...

  • This is great. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:32AM (#6337916)
    Ogg Vorbis truly is a superior format. In some circles, it has already gained an enormous amount of mindshare. I did end-to-end tests on my PC comparing MP3 and Ogg files, and I found out that Ogg files were smaller, and of higher quality, than MP3 files that were equivalently-encoded from the same WAV file. As much as 20% of your disk space can be saved by using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3. Also, Ogg Vorbis is free from dodgy commercial patents and general legal cloudiness. The quality of Ogg Vorbis is beyond question. Ogg Vorbis is taking over in South Africa. Several people I've talked to have been moaning about the lack of car Ogg Vorbis players, stating that the current MP3 front-loaders are no longer sufficient, and that they would rather have Ogg Vorbis players in their cars. Whether manufacturers take note of this or not isn't even the question. The question is: WHEN is it going to happen? Pretty soon, I'd say.
    • and I found out that Ogg files were smaller, and of higher quality, than MP3 files that were equivalently-encoded from the same WAV file

      Um... what are you talking about? Vorbis files are as small as you make them. You would assume that if they were "equivalently-encoded", they would be approximately the same bit rate (and thus roughly the same average file size). Quality is another story, but to say that the Ogg files were of a higher quality, you would almost invariably assume that that means it's small

    • I did end-to-end tests on my PC comparing MP3 and Ogg files, and I found out that Ogg files were smaller, and of higher quality, than MP3 files that were equivalently-encoded from the same WAV file.

      An Ogg Vorbis file encoded at 64kbps sounds exactly like an MP3 encoded at 128kpbs. Now thats a good point, considering the space restrictions on portable (memory and card based) devices.

      If you want to test the sound quality for yourself, heres a page where you can listen to ogg vorbis compared to mp3pro,
  • positron


    This is the home of positron, the synchronization manager for the Neuros Audio Computer. This software is primarily intended to support Linux, but will probably be portable to other POSIX systems such as OS X and the BSDs. Currently there are USB protocol issues with OS X, so please don't try it there yet.

    The above was taken from a link [xiph.org] in the above story. Now, the problem I have is that I own three of these [binarydinosaurs.co.uk], Acorn Electrons. Can I simultaneously use an Electron and Positron, or am I going to end up annihilating something?

    TIA LOL Me too!!!! etc.

    • Now, the problem I have is that I own three of these, Acorn Electrons. Can I simultaneously use an Electron and Positron, or am I going to end up annihilating something?

      I think you're safe. I too had (actually, still have) an Electron. I also had the Micro Power Positron [stairwaytohell.com] game. So far, I haven't annihilated anything (well, apart from a few alien invaders anyway).

  • Apple, now it's your turn... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ogger ( 685839 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:44AM (#6337938)
    to support Ogg Vorbis with the next release of iPod firmware.
    • to add ogg support according to the current product info [nomadworld.com]:

      Future Proof Design:
      The NOMAD II MG supports standard MP3, WMA, and WAV formats and its upgradeable technology allows new features and enhancements to be downloaded to it from NOMADWorld.com. With the NOMAD II MG, you can be on the cutting edge of MP3 music technology.

      That's right. Give me that cutting edge NOW! :)

    • Don't make me laugh. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      APPLE?!

      Go over to Apple's iPod forums and check out the humongous, multi-page petition for Ogg support. It has been growing for a long time now. And you know what? Apple does NOT care.

      I sent them many requests on their feature improvement page as well, and so did many others. The end result? AAC. Funny, I don't remember anyone asking for AAC, certainly not with a huge petition. But DRM is all the rage these days...

      I said "screw Apple" and got a Neuros. It just arrived this week, and now I see the

  • Having Vorbis support has guaranteed a sale to me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quizo69 ( 659678 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @06:51AM (#6337950) Homepage
    Since changing to Ogg Vorbis encoding early this year I've been very impressed with the space savings and quality over MP3. I have since re-encoded most of my CDs into Ogg format and thanks to the team at Neuros supporting Ogg, I plan to buy one of the 128MB units with the addon 20GB hard drive in the near future based on that feature alone.

    With its FM transmitter as well, I look forward to taking my entire 8GB of music on the road with me to listen to non-stop on long journeys.

    This is a clear example of the customer buying a product because it offers what WE want, not what corporations dictate we should have.

    Well done to Neuros Audio, for looking after the geeks, because it is our recommendations that often lead to many others buying a tech product that otherwise may not get so much exposure.
  • Yay for this. I've been waiting for this (and so have a few friends) for a long time. I don't care for the Neuros, but i'm hoping this will lead to Vorbis support for something that's not retarded, like the (now-dead) Rio or the iRiver. My RioVolt is starting to wear out on me, but i'm hanging on to it until a good Vorbis/MP3 (gotta have both) hardware solution is available. I can't really say i have a lot of high hopes for that, though. People don't really seem too interested in Vorbis, and AAC is obviousl
  • I am sorry to inform you that "Ogg Vorbis" infringes on SCO copyright. We believe it was developed on the illegal Unix system "Linux" and under our EULA it belongs to us. We plan to file suit immediately.

  • Availability in Europe? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jrepin ( 667425 )
    Is this great product available in Europe? Or any other portable player that has support for excellent Ogg Vorbis?

    • Re:Availability in Europe? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by u38cg ( 607297 ) <calum@callingthetune.co.uk> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @07:38AM (#6338045) Homepage
      No, European rollout is supposed to be about August/September this year.

      Personally, I can't wait. I used the Creative Jukebox for about a year, but it's become so buggy it's essentially unusable any more.

      What I'd really like is a small portable stereo, w/ built-in speakers and a nice big hard-drive. It should be cheaper to make, as it wouldn't require woowoo miniatiurised batteries and amazing low-power dongles. Anyone know of something like this? I'm not after the hard drive hi-fi seperates, I want something entirely self contained.

    • i dunno if you have a need for a multi-gigabyte audioplayer, but if you get yourself a palmpilot, such as the palm Tungsten|T [palm.com]you can get a program called aeroplayer [aerodromesoftware.com] for that which plays mp3 and ogg. the ogg part is free, but the mp3 ability expires after 14 days and costs ~US$20

      compared to a standalone audioplayer, the Tungsten is rather pricy, but keep in mind its really designed as a PDA. besides, your average audioplayer doesn't have a 320x320 color screen.

  • I put my money where my mouth is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by squarooticus ( 5092 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @07:54AM (#6338083) Homepage
    As I said long ago, I would buy the first portable player to have Ogg Vorbis support. Just 5 minutes ago, I ordered by Neuros. Sorry iRiver, you lose.

    Cheers,
    Kyle
  • iRiver [iriver.com] claimed that their players would include support for new codecs via a firmware upgrade (Ogg Vorbis was mentioned in particular). There have been several firmware upgrades, but no Vorbis support yet.

    Which is a shame, because iRiver make the sexiest MP3 portables IMHO.

    • I'd worry about them not having a HD based recorder first. [iriveramerica.com] "Sexy" though they may be, having to swap flash cards, CDs, or data disks is annoying.
    • Frontier Labs have likewise stated that they will be supporting Ogg very soon. The Neuros looks nice but it doesnt fulfil ALL of what I need
      a). Uses normal AA rechargeable batteries
      b). Compact Flash, so I can interchange with digital camera and have sizes the order of 500Mb

      it does the first part, but not the second - but congrats on supporting Ogg
  • First to make a PositronGTK (you'd need a better name) gets a collective round of beer!

    Even better, make a PositronFS using LUFS so it's possible to just drag and drop files in and out of it (don't use kio or gnome-vfs though), with automounting etc.

    Finally, integrate it with RhythmBox/XMMS/JuK/whatever. Hopefully Neuros owners won't be stuck with the command line UI for long.

    Now I just have to ponder whether I can really afford one....

  • That thing is cool as hell. I personally don't have any real use for it, but I still have this urge to buy about 40 of them and then just roll around in them.

    My dad is travelling and living out of his car right now and writing a book. He could really make use of a lot of the features of this thing.

  • Maybe wait for USB2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Trebonius ( 29177 ) * on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @09:43AM (#6338681) Homepage
    I love my Neuros dearly. It's a part of the family now. It sits at the dinner table and has its own bedroom.

    But it's a bit slow. At around 2 gigs per hour, it takes 10 hours to fill all 20 gigs. Those of you itching to buy one might do better to wait a couple months for the release of the USB2 HD backpack. Those of us who bought early will be recieving a free (or nearly free) upgrade to USB2, but I don't think that applies if you buy one right now.
    It might, though. You should ask. Those guys are great.

  • PHB, Market Analysts and Decision Makers take note (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here is a good example of why an Ogg Vorbis player just isn't hip with the people who sell portable digital audio players:

    When a portable player appears in an article on Slashdot, an onslaught of comments from SlashDrones ensue. "If the *insert player name* only had Ogg Vorbis...".

    Well, here's your Ogg Vorbis player. Yes, it's beta, but so wasn't the Neuros when it was first sold. I can report that the Neuros is a solid player now, though it's not perfect, it's close. They have taken some of the love t
    • As an active member of the live music community, I get a lot of losslessly compressed audio in these formats. With its 20gb backpack the neuros would be ideal for me. Yes, I could compress to ogg now. This is almost good enough. But live music does not compress very well. q6 ogg is the minimum for acceptable quality. Crowd noise detracts from the signal, lossy stereo coupling can cause noticible artifacts when there's noise on each channel that's not correlated. Plus, it takes me about 20 minutes to en

  • That's all well and good ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <<kt.celce> <ta> <eb>> on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @10:00AM (#6338784) Homepage Journal
    ... but I'm not buying a portable music player until it plays ogg files ...
    • ... and I'm not buying another portable music player until it plays and records ogg files (which my current device can do with mp3). Last time I looked at this project there is no goal of getting an encoder to work. So I'll just wait and save my money for a hard drive based pocket computer which has no limitations (hopefully within a year or two, someone will make something interesting).

  • Does it record OGG? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On the website it says:

    'Recording to MP3 format from internal microphone, FM tuner, and line input'

    So will this upgrade make it possible to record to OGG?
  • In spite of my earlier words of caution, [slashdot.org] I got overexcited and instead of thinking about baseball (the 'topes [albuquerquebaseball.com] have been such losers), I prematurely ordered my Neuros a few days ago. (With the unveiled threat that if it ain't playing Vorbis files by the end of the 90-day trial, I'm going to send it back.) According to the tracking, my Neuros arrived in my town this morning and is on the truck for delivery. So I'm gonna get my Neuros on the same day that the firmware (well, the beta) is released. Perfect.

  • By the way... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Emmettfish ( 573105 ) on Tuesday July 01, 2003 @11:16AM (#6339330) Homepage
    open.neurosaudio.com [neurosaudio.com] has more relevant information, and a discount code for Open Source folks.

    Emmett

  • Sorry to say, any multi-gig portable player just cannot cut it without USB2.0 What reasonable person will wait ten hours to upload or backup his music?

    That being said, Archos' [archos.com] AV320 [archos.com] (capable of playing DIVX, XVID, MP3 as well as recording MPEG4 video and MP3, w/USB2 and FW) really kills everything in the category. I've had mine for about 3 weeks now, and its insane. Combined with a TV-capture card (WinTV) I can record shows to DivX and watch them while eating lunch, traveling home, taking a ****.

    Point b

  • I just think it's wonderful to see a company and a free software project working together so closely and actually coming up with the goods. Neuros might not be getting my money just yet (I'm broke), but they do have my respect for their work on free software. The FM transmitter really is the seller for me. I know that the their are some mini-jack to transmitter adapters available that are sold for the ipod, but this just doesn't match the internal transmitter. Also the FM RDS is neat (station/song auto disp
  • Sorry Neuros, time waits for no man. I have discovered (courtesy of other /.'s) that iPod can work on linux with a little work. Not only is the iPod the best music player out there, but the Neuros USB 1 connection can't touch firewire.

    Yeah yeah, I know USB 2 is coming, but when?

  • There isn't much hardware that plays Vorbis, but there's more than people think. For example, there are already car-based Vorbis players, PDAs, and DVD players. Please be nice to the Wiki:

    http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware [xiph.org]

  • NSM doesn't recognize ogg files. Positron, the Linux manager is the only way to move your files over for now.

    Windows loses.

  • I'm gonna be buying one of these in the next week unless some other product jumps to the fore - and even then...

    Plus, the neuros looks sexy.

    Granted, it's got that slow connection thing going on - but as I have less than 20 gigs of mp3's total, it's not too troublesome for me.

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