User:Steevc
Me
Based in the UK. Got a blog at Bag of Spoons
I'd love to see open formats more widely available on consumer hardware. I'm encoding all my music in Ogg Vorbis these days. I did try FLAC, but it would need conversion for portable usage and I don't think I can hear an improvement from compressed Q6 or 7.
My Gadgets
I'm using the following software/hardware, all of which play Ogg Vorbis:
- QCD on Windows
- Amarok on Linux
- Aeroplayer on Palm
- GSPlayer on Acer n35 PDA and BenQ E72 phone
- iRiver iFP-890 256MB - retired
- Sumvision SV04-M18 2GB - unfortunately it died one day
- Samsung YP-U4 - Got a couple of these nice little players
What I want
I'm looking for a good car unit that can play Ogg Vorbis from SD card and CD. CD is less vital, support for higher bits rates (200kp/s+) is. The new PLU2 unit looks good, but I've not seen it for sale in the UK and comments I've seen say it is not very good. Latest candidates are from Acoustic Solutions and VDO, but I'd like to try them out before buying. It's hard to even find reviews that take open formats into account.
Comment
I assume that all the gadgets that play Ogg Vorbis are using chips that happen to support it. It would be interesting to see these chips compared, e.g. what bit rates they support, with details of who uses them and how successful they are in comparison to chips that only do MP3/WMA etc.
Interesting opinion on state of Ogg Vorbis at The Guardian. He doesn't see much future if the big companies don't adopt it.
Other
I see User:Saoshyant changed my mentions of Ogg -> Vorbis. This may confuse people who are new to this as their files are likely to be *.ogg. I'll use Ogg Vorbis in future.