Linux and Ogg compatible portable music player?

November 29, 2004 2:14 PM

Remember when AskMe was all about product recommendations? Everything old is new again. What's a good portable music player that supports ogg files and works, officially or not, with Linux?

the last timea similar question came up the Rio Karma was recommended but I read recently (lost the article) that more players with ogg support have come out.

posted by kenko to technology (8 comments total)

I've been looking at one of these for a couple of weeks now. 1.5 GB storage, built-in FM transceiver (aka, listen to your player in your car), supports OGG, USB 2.0, mass-file support (aka, no proprietary software).

There are tons and tons and tons of good players out there; sadly most of them are for Asian markets only. Luckily you can still buy them grey-market.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:38 PM on November 29, 2004

I've never tried this one, but I've heard great things about it.
posted by zelphi at 2:40 PM on November 29, 2004

The iRiver does it..
posted by some chick at 2:43 PM on November 29, 2004

I'm holding out for the Rio Karma 2, theoretically due spring 2005.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 4:04 PM on November 29, 2004

I hear the iRiver pretty much rules when it comes to everything except interface. (viva iPod!)
posted by keswick at 4:23 PM on November 29, 2004

iriver h140 here, it is pretty decent. the company is amazing about product replacement (even if it's your own damned fault the thing broke, and even if you tell them so) but they are slow and highly frustrating when it comes to fixing bugs and adding promised features to firmware upgrades.

(the only real current bug to speak of is excessive hd spinning, which I do see on occasion; the only real missing feature is gapless playback)

I am ogg-only and lunix-only (well, with the occasional use of the girlfriend's mac) and in that sense iriver does not disappoint. the interface is not amazing but it is not bad, fairly intuitive; I was never exactly impressed with ipod ui either.

if I were to buy a player right now, however, it would probably not be the iriver (esp. not the freakish color display one. which is crippled in the us version) but most likely the jetaudio/iaudio/cowon m3 (probably the insane 35 hour battery one). the drawbacks of the m3 are: the (included, bless them) docking station is required to connect to usb (and possibly to recharge as well?); no display on the player itself, only the remote (this does not bug me since that's how I use my player, but I realize some ppl like the player to have an lcd too)

iriver just seems to have this weird disconnect between its korean and non-korean divisions, which makes it damned infuriating to deal with (excepting, again, the product replacement which is ridiculously amazing)

jetaudio (cowon, whatever you want to call them) are amazing in terms of user community, they have firmware updates like you would not believe. the one thing I would absolutely love to see is mpc/mp+/musepack (whatever you want to call it) support, and honestly a company like this is much more likely to add it than iriver (hell I think the m3 either supports flac already, or will soon... which is almost as good as musepack support)
posted by dorian at 4:46 PM on November 29, 2004

My tuppence: I bought an iRiver H340 a couple of weeks back, and it's been fantastic, mostly. And the direct to mp3 recording feature has meant I can dispense with recording interviews on a scattered assortment of badly-labelled minidiscs and hissing dictaphone tapes.

That said, there are a couple of niggling things: as dorian said, the hd spinning can get annoying, particularly if recording speech. It's not a major problem, but if you want to keep decent archives, you don't want to hear the hd start up every couple of minutes in the background (and anyway, once I get a decent external mic for it, that problem ought to vanish).

Other than that - and this is only if I'm missing something colossally obvious - you need to have it plugged into a power supply in order to transfer files; it charges via the usb cable, and doesn't show up as a disk on my desktop unless it's plugged into the mains. Again, it's a minor gripe, but if you want to plug it into a friend's machine and download a bunch of files, then can you really be bothered lugging the power supply about with you?
posted by Len at 4:22 AM on November 30, 2004

Another vote for the iRiver. The H320 and H340 are about the same price (warning, self link) as the iPod.

And I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, but the iRivers act as USB Mass Storage Devices, meaning you can use it as a portable harddrive as well. Some other devices have this as well, but sometimes with the caveats. With the iPod you can't listen to music you drag and drop onto the drive.
posted by turbodog at 2:14 PM on November 30, 2004