[advocacy] [Fwd: Ogg Vorbis support in iRiver portable players]

[Moritz Grimm]

Hi,

<p>here's my short and relatively fruitless conversation with iRiver. Good
news are that Vorbis support is still somewhere on their roadmap, and
that they answered in the first place.

Feel free to use my mail in part and/or modified form for your own
advocating, just don't use it verbatim (as you can see I wrote it for
iRiver :) ). I find my mail pretty good actually, but it might have
typos, odd grammar and a clumsy way to say things - improvements
welcome. :]

Oh, before I forget - if I happened to spread wrong information,
*please* correct me.

<p>Moritz


<strong>attached mail follows:</strong><hr noshade>


Dear Mortiz

Thank you for your email.

iRiver has planning to support Ogg Vorbis in the future with firmware
upgrade, however, the schedule is not finalized yet. Please kindly wait.

Please kindly visit our website www.iriver.com for more details.
If you have any enquiry, please feel free to contact me.
Best regards
Small

-----Original Message-----
From: Moritz Grimm [mailto:gtgbr at gmx.net]
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 7:58 AM
To: cs at iriver.com
Subject: Ogg Vorbis support in iRiver portable players

<p><p>Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

<p>a few months ago, when SlimX was new and on the front pages of your web
sites, I was happy to see Ogg Vorbis [http://www.vorbis.com] being
mentioned among the formats-that-will-be-supported-in-the-future.
Unfortunately, I can't find anything mentioning Ogg Vorbis support
anymore. This is sad - especially since Vorbis 1.0 has been released and
specifications for the format are available.
[http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/docs.html]

For me, a portable player that doesn't support Ogg Vorbis is completely
uninteresting, for several reasons.

All my music is in Vorbis format, and reencoding to other formats
(especially those who are technically inferior to Vorbis, such as MP3
and AAC) makes things even worse than encoding source material directly
as MP3, for example. I do not have the time or the diskspace to maintain
two identical music bases just to have an MP3 around when I need it.

Ogg Vorbis sounds better. MP3 is not worth talking about in terms of
sound quality, but Vorbis beats also WMA and AAC easily.
[http://ff123.net/64test/testplan.html (the results are here:
http://ff123.net/64test/results.html)] In this test, where I also
participated, mp3PRO "won", but Vorbis scored much better than the other
proprietary CODECs like WMA and AAC (i literally hate the latter for its
brutal mangling of music).

Ogg Vorbis is free. While userland tools like oggenc and ogg123 are GPL
licensed, the specifications, libraries and reference implementations
(e.g. decoder_example.c) are BSD licensed. This means that you can
support Ogg Vorbis without having to pay any royalties or licensing
fees, and you also don't have to open up your own codebase. Ogg Vorbis
doesn't use any patented technology.

Ogg Vorbis is hard to implement in hardware, because it highly depends
on floating point arithmetics. But it has been done already: The
Xiph.org Foundation has a proprietary integerized decoder called
"Tremor", that can be licensed for comparatively very little money. By
saving the in-house developement efforts and automatically getting
support from Xiph for Tremor by licensing it, this could be a great
bargain for you. It was never that cheap to support a competive CODEC.

Your customers will appreciate the freedom, the quality, and the many
Vorbis users (me included), who only wait for Vorbis support to buy a
portable player will love it. There are already numerous easy-to-use
tools to make .ogg files, such as OggDrop for Windows
[http://www.vorbis.com/download_win.psp] or CD rippers like CDex
[http://www.cdex.n3.net/], so even those who aren't tech-savvy can use
it without any troubles.

I really hope you reconsider and put Vorbis support back on your
roadmap, or if it's still there, let people like me know when to expect
it. From my point of view, the first hardware manufacturer, who creates
a reasonable player with .ogg playback support, gets my money. Even my
friends, who find my advocating attempts sometimes annoying, think
similar. ;)

It would be great to hear from you soon.

<p>Sincerely,

Moritz Grimm

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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