Hi,

I want to buy a portable digital music player. I want to play my ogg songs on this player, and I would like interact with Linux.

Do you people have any good expirience with this? I did a search in amazon for ogg and had this result:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ex...Mozilla-search

The first samsung player seems nice, 5gb and the prices isn' t that hi. When I read the reviews things aren' t as nice as you could think.

Also from tuxmobil.org, I got this link:
http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

There are a lot of alternatives in both cases and I don' t know witch would be the best. So I hope that frome the experience of some people in the forum I can make tha right decision

I actually have the Samsung YH-920, and its not a bad ogg player. Its about the same size as the IPOD, Is detected as a hard drive in both linux and windows, and its pretty simple to add music. The easiest way to do it is to just copy music files into the System/Music directory on the player and then run samsung's software to build the library. Its quick and its easy.

I've had an MPIO HD300 for a good sixth months or so now I guess. It's easy to use, has good sound and plays vorbis. Connects via usb2 as an external hard drive. Very easy to get music, or data, onto. You may want to look at that if it's in your budget.

I was wondering where you bought your MPIO HD300? I've been agonizing over what player to buy for ogg support in linux, and so far I think I might go with this player. It looks like it's impossible to find it anywhere besides the MPIO website though.
Also, how is the battery performance?
Thanks.

It was from some online retailer, and to be honest, I no longer remember who it was. I did a froogle search, and just went with the cheapest site that didn't look dodgy. It was a while ago now mind, and let's face it, it's not the most well known brand so there's every chance no one's stocking it.

try www.mp3players.co.uk and www.advancedmp3players.co.uk
as that's where I originally found it - but it was easy to find when I bought it.

Well, I notice from the "related searches" it mentions the Rio Karma - which is what I opted for.

Why? Because not only does it support oggs, but also the somewhat rarer FLAC, which, if you check, the only one(s) on the list that do that, are the iAudio ones (the expensive ones), which I would have paid, if I hadn't been able to get hold of a Rio Karma.

Seeing as how digital technology is supposed to be "an improvement", IMO that compressed formats are a waste of time. It seems that in most cases, they're just an excuse for "big business" to sell devices with high markup, that play poor/reduced quality sound.

Sure, at the moment, I can't recall how to get music onto the device, but thats because it worked fine with SuSE 9.3 and the lite version of the "Rio Music Manager" which you can get as a java app, but now I use gentoo, I'm having to learn how to do stuff manually again.

regards

John

There's nothing really 'manual' involved, just redownload Rio Music Manager Lite (it's distributed as a jar file, there's no compiling involved to get it working with Gentoo) or try some of the reverse engineered libraries/ programs (USB is not supported in Linux with the Karma).

Although I wasn't impressed by the fact that one small drop and the scroll wheel in the corner broke [1] - I very quickly replaced this with a different player altogether (it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis, but the larger hard drive and very long battery life are a trade off I'm prepared to make).

[1] Not to mention that I spent a further £20 buying the Technohm case and for the postage to get it over to the UK so as to give some protection - ended up being used for less than two weeks! IIRC, it's currently lost somewhere on my desk...

I wasn't sure if I had to have the device mounted and/or make sure that the system itself was aware of the IP address that I allocated, as well as the app.

It seems to be transfering the info at the moment i.e. the ethernet connection lights on the cradle are indicating both connection and data transfer so I was going to try to rescan the collection after the app says that it's transfered all the tracks. Though thats taking a while i.e. in reference to your comment about the USB not being supported under linux. Not that that really matters, as my system is getting rather elderly and doesn't have USB2.

If the karma breaks, I'll just bang comet for a refund, and then go for one of the Cowon iAudio 30 gig X5L models (which are getting cheaper all the time). Because I just want it to support FLAC. Failing that, I'd end up having to get a minidisc player - I have no interest in compressed (inferior) formats.

Afterall, this technology thing is supposed to be about improving on existing stuff - IMO, mp3 is like stepping back to when I was a kid and it was all tape.

regards

John

Sorry, but minidiscs *do* use inferior, compressed formats - Sony minidiscs use ATRAC, others use their own but fully interoperable codecs.

Do they ??? Didn't know that. So thats that idea out of the window then.

S'pose that I'm lucky, because my benevolent employer (NOT!) is due to be replacing our fleet in the next week with nice shiney Volvos (oh, I should say, 44 tonne artics (31 of them - lots of £££££'s), not cars), which will have CD players instead of tape units (no DAB damn!). If I'm really lucky, they might even have an "audio in" facility on the front - which would be good, so I can plug the Karma in directly (or an iAudio device if the Karma breaks).

Still, it seems such a drag, that the vast majority of "media player" device manufacturer, are opting for (IMO) substandard formats - It's not as if memory/hdd size is really an issue these days - well OK maybe with solid state devices, but not really for hdd players.

Makes me wonder if the majority of "punters" are "mug's"! accepting what is effectively rubbish forced on them by the vested interests!

Otherwise I s'pose I'll just have to make the "best of a bad job"!