'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?

 

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...

 

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

 

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