The 'Can your portable audio device play this file?' Challenge!

simisker

simisker

simisker

Soldato
Joined
27 Oct 2002
Posts
3,540
Location
At the fulcrum of humdrum
'lo all!

I'm struggling to find a portable music player that'll play a certain type of Ogg Vorbis file. "But loads of players these days play .oggs, you numpty!" I hear you chorus. Not so, it appears, as I've had to return an otherwise perfectly decent iAudio M5L as it doesn't play most of the .oggs in my collection.

There's a reason but it's brain-crimpingly technical, so I won't go into it here. Suffice to say that my .oggs perfectly conform to the Ogg Vorbis standards and play in Winamp, Foobar, XMMS, and even in Mortplayer on my MDA Compact phone thingy - all without issue. It's just portable audio devices that won't play them [or play them really badly].

So the challenge is this: Can your portable music device play the following example file?


http://www.simisker.com/floor-0-example-libvorbis10beta4_cut.ogg


If any of you try this, could you please post your results - whether success or failure - and mention which player you used. Ta! :)

Note to Dons: I believe the provision of this 30-sec snippet of music comes under the description of 'fair use'; I couldn't find anything in the FAQ related to the posting of such files, though.
 
I was hoping you'd rise to the challenge, James, as I'd noticed your excellent review of the iStation earlier and it looked like it might be up to the task. I'm very pleased with the result. Thanks! :)

Any other contenders, or is the iStation I2 going to be the only one on my shopping list?
 
bump. im interested in this. Come on guys help him out, there must be other players that can play it. 75 vies and im the only person to reply? :(
 
Ta again, sir :)

The current findings from experience to date, by the way, are:

Plays the file normally, no loss in quality:
  • iStation I2
  • Rio Karma

Plays the file, but at noticeably reduced quality or with errors:
  • Rockbox'ed iRiver
  • Rockbox'ed iPod

Does not play the file at all:
  • iAudio M5(L)
  • iAudio G3
  • iAudio U2
  • iRiver H10

Do you [waves pointy finger at general readership] have a player that proudly purports to play OGGs? If so, give the file linked above a whirl and let's see if your player is truly Ogg Vorbis compliant, or just a half-baked bodge-job that isn't worth the ink used to print the OGG logo on it's packaging...
 
Last edited:
Iaudio U2. Doesn't play it, but for some reason, redirects only to one particular song. First it was one, whenever I tried playing it, always started that song. Then I tried changing the name to testy, and it went to anohter song, and trying to play this, just ends up playing that song :p
 
Thanks for taking the time to test this, Sudden - that's another iAudio to add to the 'not working' list above.

Looks like Cowon's incomplete decoder may run through their entire product line :(
 
Last edited:
simisker said:
Thanks for taking the time to test this, Sudden - that's another iAudio to add to the 'not working' list above.

Looks like Cowon's incomplete decoder may run through their entire product line :(
Click to expand...

Pity :(

Brilliant product otherwise, I love the player. Good thing I don't have any other songs in that format ^_^
 
Awesome, this actually completely crashes todays build of rockbox on the ipod nano :) My old build it played, just very badly. I'll submit a bug report for you.
 
simisker, can you post the technical details, either on here or by PM as they want to look into fixing it in rockbox :) Don't you just love open-source firmware :D Cheers!
 
Thanks for taking the time to try it on your H10, Stellios :)

probedb, the technical reason for the odd nature of this and most other Oggs of mine is, I'm fairly certain, down to the encoder I used originally, which used libvorbis 1.0 beta 4.

Early encoders such as this one employed a floor of type '0', as opposed to the more efficient/cheaper floor type '1' which has been used in all encoders from libvorbis 1.0 onwards, I believe.

The problem appears to be that most DAP decoders can only handle a floor of type '1'.

While floor '0' type files like mine are, it turns out, pretty rare, they still conform to the standards, as can be seen in the documention linked below:

http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/Vorbis_I_spec.pdf

which specifically states that "Floor 0 is not to be considered deprecated..."

Thanks for looking into this, probedb. A version of Rockbox that could play these files would increase my purchasing options immeasurably, as well as being a shining example of the power of open-source :)
 
I've posted the info in the bug report :) It may not get fixed straight away as it's people's free time so we'll see....but they know about it now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom