Thinking of buying an MP3 player...suggestions for one that works on linux?

[aveline]

I am going back to school in september I hope & I want an mp3 player for the long bus ride. I run ubuntu on a laptop and hopefully wil also run it as dualboot on my desktop *last attempt fubared alot of stuff sigh...so no joy yet*.

I was going to search the forums for this but wasn't sure how to phrase it so I would not get just stuff related to mp3's or software players. Ideas for a good one to buy or pointers to websites for info would be appreciated. I'm looking on toms hardware atm and found some reviews there for stuff but more info is always appreciated.

Ty
aveline

[panickedthumb]

hard drive or flash memory?

Linux support for the iPod is, from what I understand, quite good. My Creative Nomad Zen works amazingly. Other than that, get one that can work as a usb hard drive. That way you know you can just copy mp3s over like that.

[gray-squirrel]

There are CD players which can play MP3s as well. The nicest thing about that is that you can burn your MP3s to a CD, and play them on computers as well as those CD players.

[byen]

I gotta say.. I wanted to find this out too... there is one more Q that i have... I have tons of mp3s and dont care about sharing my songs... what about the itunes (with i pods)... i cant share em with my buddies can i? i mean... is it easy enough to get through the patent suff?

[Chuckaluphagus]

I have an Archos Gmini 400, it works as an external USB hard drive on Linux, Windows and Mac OS machines; you just copy files onto the drive, no additional software is needed. 20 GB hard drive, very good color screen, gets about 12 hours of battery life playing MP3s and five playing video (DivX and Xvid only). It's a few millimeters larger than an iPod, weighs about the same. Build quality is excellent. I love mine, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Amazon has it here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002U0JPE/qid=1122672796/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1/002-8174876-6968012?v=glance&s=pc&n=507846

If you don't care about the color screen, there is a cheaper model in the Gmini line, the XS 200; stil 20 GB, somewhere in size between an iPod and an iPod mini, only does music:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002U0JP4/qid=1122672796/sr=8-5/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_5/002-8174876-6968012?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

[isTHEr3mOr3]

I've got a Creative Muvo V200 512 MB. Works great, automaticly recognized by Ubuntu. Fast transfer, long battery life and quite cheap.

My blog : only linux (http://tlinux.blogspot.com)

[poofyhairguy]

Any one that acts like a hard drive in Windows (aka you add songs to it by dragging and dropping in a file manager rather than using a special Windows program). Most of these brah "doesn't need drivers" or something like that.

One exception is the iPod. I really like GTKPod, the GNU iPod software. More than that evil that is iTunes (my most hated program EVER).

[matthew]

I have this one: http://www.my3ia.com/english/cp/m3015.htm and it works quite well. It was really inexpensive. THe site says it only works on Windows and MacOS, but that really means that their software only works on those OS's. You don't need their software to load/remove songs from the player as it mounts as if it was a flash drive.

[Kvark]

I'm also looking at mp3 players and have some questions to throw into the mix here.

Definately don't want to be stuck with the mp3 format. Which players support other formats?

Playlists and such is very important for me. Which players got the best tools for organizing the music?

[Chuckaluphagus]

I'm also looking at mp3 players and have some questions to throw into the mix here.

Definately don't want to be stuck with the mp3 format. Which players support other formats?

Playlists and such is very important for me. Which players got the best tools for organizing the music?

Archos players allow you to browse by directory, playlist, genre, year, etc. Also have an excellent file manager that allows you to make up and save playlists on the fly. Works better than you'd expect on a small screen. No support for audio other than MP3 and WMA, though.

Almost any player except the iPods will support WMA, but if you have objections to MP3 you likely have similar objections to WMA.

iPods support AAC and Apple Lossless; Sony players support AAC as well.

iRiver players support Ogg Vorbis, as do Rio players. If you're looking for lossless codec support that isn't from Apple, the only one I know of is the Rio Karma, which supports FLAC. Also supposed to be a pretty good music player, although the design is non-standard.

[GavinX]

I suggest that you get a player that can also play OGG files. Trust me, you won't regret it in the long run. OGG is the open source equivalent of MP3, but in my experience, it is much better. If I were you, I'd get something which also has FM radio. The flexibility which you will have will be amazing.

[aveline]

I honestly don't care about oggs or mp3s. I have mp3's and they work for now. If ogg takes over, fine I'll convert my stuff. That said I was looking at a rio that has a 5gb hdd I think & accepts sd/mm cards iirc.

What I want in a player is that I be able to xfer songs easily, usb or firewires fine (FW preferred just for speed) I guess. I want it to be able to record voices so I can tape lectures. If it records the format will have to be compatible (ogg,mp3) with players I can get freely available in xp or ubuntu I guess. I assume I can just playback recordings directly on the device itself too.

I don't want a cd player, too bulky. I don't know the diff tween a hdd one & flash drive or rather I don't know which is better/faster/easier to use. I'm in canada so whatever I buy has to be easily available here too.

thx for the answers so far :)

aveline

[skatedawe]

I think you should buy a flash version.

Because its more often that you won't need any drives when you carry it too friends etc.

[NoTiG]

I honestly don't care about oggs or mp3s. I have mp3's and they work for now. If ogg takes over, fine I'll convert my stuff. That said I was looking at a rio that has a 5gb hdd I think & accepts sd/mm cards iirc.



Well i guess it depends if your getting your songs from p2p or from your own cd's. If you simply burn your own music from your own cd's then you wont have to "wait" for ogg... you can do it today! And why not since its a superior codec?

[Kvark]

Archos players allow you to browse by directory, playlist, genre, year, etc. Also have an excellent file manager that allows you to make up and save playlists on the fly. Works better than you'd expect on a small screen. No support for audio other than MP3 and WMA, though.

Almost any player except the iPods will support WMA, but if you have objections to MP3 you likely have similar objections to WMA.

iPods support AAC and Apple Lossless; Sony players support AAC as well.

iRiver players support Ogg Vorbis, as do Rio players. If you're looking for lossless codec support that isn't from Apple, the only one I know of is the Rio Karma, which supports FLAC. Also supposed to be a pretty good music player, although the design is non-standard.
Interesting overview of file format support. Guess I'll try to find out what iRiver and Rio has for music organization. Hope it's something similar to what you describe for archos.

I don't want a cd player, too bulky. I don't know the diff tween a hdd one & flash drive or rather I don't know which is better/faster/easier to use. I'm in canada so whatever I buy has to be easily available here too.
The ones with hdd are bigger with bigger storage space.
The others are smaller with smaller storage space.

It depends mostly on which kind of size is most important to you. In one end of the spectra you got iPod Photo (60GB, 181g, 6.1x10.4x1.9cm). In the other end you got mobiBLU DAH-1500 (256MB , 20g, 2.4x2.4x2.4cm).

[BWF89]

iRiver players support Ogg Vorbis, as do Rio players. If you're looking for lossless codec support that isn't from Apple, the only one I know of is the Rio Karma, which supports FLAC. Also supposed to be a pretty good music player, although the design is non-standard.
Does that mean that the iPod will play Ogg files?

Because Ogg > MP3. I used Audacity to convert an MP3 file into an Ogg file and the Ogg format was a few hundred KB smaller than the Mp3 file. So if I get an iPod I'm converting all my songs to Ogg. Plus Ogg is open source so you win both ways.

[egon spengler]

Does that mean that the iPod will play Ogg files?

Because Ogg > MP3. I used Audacity to convert an MP3 file into an Ogg file and the Ogg format was a few hundred KB smaller than the Mp3 file. So if I get an iPod I'm converting all my songs to Ogg. Plus Ogg is open source so you win both ways.

what you need to remember is that both ogg and mp3 compress the audio data and so converting one to the other should always produce a smaller file because you are recompressing the compressed file. it's like zipping a rar basically

[Brunellus]

I have an iRiver H340. I heartily recommend it. Extended comments follow:


40 GB (which I haven't yet filled...accent on "yet," because, now that I have a new computer, the rippage of my vast CD collection can continue). It reads mp3 and ogg, has *two* headphone jacks (this is neat for when I want to share it with my brother--he just plugs into the second line-out), an internal microphone, a voice recorder that encodes to three different mp3 bitrates, a line-in for an external mic or other audio source, a brilliant colour display, excellent battery life (easily eight or nine hours?), and a fairly decent FM tuner (which I mainly use for listening to the morning news on NPR on the bus to work, and listening to Nats games on the bus home from work). The kicker: it mounts as a USB mass storage device in Windows, Linux, and presumably OSX (although I haven't tried it there yet).

It's kind of neat. plug it into your ubuntu box and you have a 40 gig removeable hdd at /dev/sda[$whatever]!

It won't generate on-the-fly playlists, but it will use winamp .m3u playlists. If you have generated these on XMMS, you will need to find a script that replaces / with \ in the filepaths expressed in the playlist. It will index by id3 metadata, but beware--this functionality means VERY long boot-up times, and possibly a big battery drain. As a result, the latest firmware ships with this option disabled by default, but available to the user. File management is best achieved by good directory structure: /root/Music/artistname/albumname/trackno-trackname.ogg.

There's a lot of bad press about the H340's UI. I will admit that it isn't as slick as the iPod, but I didn't have any trouble using it at all. The form factor is slightly clunky, as well--twice the thickness of an iPod of similar data density. Where the iPod is about the same size as a pack of smokes, the iRiver is about the same size as a casette Walkman--which isn't bad at all.

Most of my collection is ripped from my CDs. (A fair number of those are indie/local music CDs, so it's not like they're all over the p2p networks....) I encode to ogg vorbis at an average bitrate of 192 kbps. The quality is great for the filesizes you get--way ahead of mp3 at the same bitrate. I hold out hope that a firmware update will permit the H340 to read FLAC, soon.

I have found the H340 to be perfect for my needs. Bear in mind that my music collection is largely CD-based and ripped from CDs I actually own. Overall, I recommend the iRiver to linux users. Among the HDD-based media players out there, it stands out--it has a comprehensive featureset and is not designed to be a part of a vendor's overall lock-in strategy. Only the Neuros players--whose specifications are now open-sourced--outdo it in terms of friendliness to free software.

[panickedthumb]

Does that mean that the iPod will play Ogg files?

Because Ogg > MP3. I used Audacity to convert an MP3 file into an Ogg file and the Ogg format was a few hundred KB smaller than the Mp3 file. So if I get an iPod I'm converting all my songs to Ogg. Plus Ogg is open source so you win both ways.
No, it won't, unless you use a hack or two, which is very possible.

[Brunellus]

No, it won't, unless you use a hack or two, which is very possible.
the iPod Linux project is trying to get the iPod (running a mu-linux kernel) to decode ogg. Unfortunately, the last time I checked on that project, it wasn't nearly stable, and ogg decoding was not real-time. apparently, the processor on the ipod can't handle decoding ogg.

[wmcbrine]

what you need to remember is that both ogg and mp3 compress the audio data and so converting one to the other should always produce a smaller file because you are recompressing the compressed file. it's like zipping a rar basically
Not so. To translate an MP3 to an Ogg, you first have to decompress it to (essentially) a WAV -- even if this step is not visible. MP3 and Ogg are specialized compression schemes that only work on the raw sound data.

What is true, though, is that each is a form of lossy compression, so if you recompress from one to the other, you're losing quality. This is a very bad idea, especially to gain only "a few hundred K".

Ogg should sound better than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, but only if you're starting from the original CD or WAV in each case. "Equivalent bitrates" means nearly identical sizes, but there may be slight variations, especially in variable bitrate mode. But in theory, you could specify a lower bitrate for Ogg than you do for MP3, and get the same quality.

Personally, I've never used Ogg. I still use MP3, because it's supported by all my hardware players (three DVD players, a portable CD player, a car stereo, and now an iPod), and I know it will be supported by any other player I encounter in the future. For me, giving up that compatibility is not worth the minor increase in compression offered by the later formats; nor, despite my devotion to Free Software, are the ideological issues sufficiently compelling. (My MP3 software may or may not be patent-violating, but it's still GPL'ed.)

BTW, I've used gtkpod for almost everything I've loaded on my iPod (and grip to rip), but when the iPod crashed (due to a mix of user error of gtkpod bug), I had to use a Mac to reinitialize it. YMMV.

[kumakun]

So, all the converstion of mp3 to ogg aside, did anyone have a good suggestion about a decent player that handles ogg?

/K

[Chuckaluphagus]

So, all the converstion of mp3 to ogg aside, did anyone have a good suggestion about a decent player that handles ogg?

/K

Brunelles suggested the iRiver H340; it plays MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. It also works as a standard USB hard drive under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, you can just drag and drop media on and off. I have a friend with one, she's very happy with it. I considered one myself before going with my Archos Gmini 400 (which doesn't support Ogg but does support Xvid).

If the H340 is too pricy for you, it looks like all of the iRiver H1x0 and H3x0 series players support Ogg Vorbis as well, and some of those are cheaper.

[Kvark]

Brunelles suggested the iRiver H340; it plays MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. It also works as a standard USB hard drive under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, you can just drag and drop media on and off. I have a friend with one, she's very happy with it. I considered one myself before going with my Archos Gmini 400 (which doesn't support Ogg but does support Xvid).

If the H340 is too pricy for you, it looks like all of the iRiver H1x0 and H3x0 series players support Ogg Vorbis as well, and some of those are cheaper.
In addition to that most players from iRiver can play ogg. Most iAudio players also seems to play ogg and some other brands has one or two odd ones that plays it too.

PS. Whats up with all the i[Name]??? Have everyone become iPod wannabes?

[Brunellus]

In addition to that most players from iRiver can play ogg. Most iAudio players also seems to play ogg and some other brands has one or two odd ones that plays it too.

PS. Whats up with all the i[Name]??? Have everyone become iPod wannabes?
Be advised, however, that I ran into some difficulties obtaining an iRiver H340. I had originally intended to get an H320, but all my local retailers were sold-out and not expecting any more shipments. Online was almost the same. Fortunately, I was able to look around and get an H340 at a reasonable price.

The i[NAME] phenomenon is amusing. I have to hand it to Apple and their marketing departments for capturing the high ground of consumer consciousness. The iPod is sleek, sexy, and hell, famous people use it--can't be beat. The iRiver H340 is arguably far more flexible, extensible, and capable...but you don't see beautiful people using them. Alas.

If course the i[NAME] phenomenon has spawned a great deal of satire, some humorous, some bitter (http://www.notinourname.net/graphics/iraqspoof-subway-lg.jpg)

[Lord Illidan]

My mp3 player, a Creative Zen Micro works with my Kubuntu installation perfectly. It is smaller than my Nokia 6600 and can carry 5 gigs of music..more than enough for me..

[paul cooke]

I am going back to school in september I hope & I want an mp3 player for the long bus ride. I run ubuntu on a laptop and hopefully wil also run it as dualboot on my desktop *last attempt fubared alot of stuff sigh...so no joy yet*.[snipped]
Ty
aveline

I bought my daughter a rio cali 128 (sport) (http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/item_main_Rio.asp?model=257) last month for her post exams present... It has a built in FM tuner and takes SD or MMC cards as expansion memory... (got her a 1GB SD card as well...)

Works perfectly in Linux, just plug the USB cable in, turn it on and after a few seconds, it appears as two removeable drives... (One for the player's internal memory, and one for the SD card if installed) she just drags and drops the files onto the icons... easy peasy, unlike the windows software that came with it...

[Alibloke]

Does anyone have an iRiver H10 yet? Can anyone confirm that iRiver have done a deal with Microshaft and it is incompatible with Linux now?

I'm looking for a 5-6Gb player that does ogg and (hopefully) FLAC that's nice and small. I would even settle for a small form factor player that just does mp3 as long as it's not DRM'ed up the **** or incompatible with Linux.

[rubinstein]

I have a Samsung Yepp YP-MT, 1 GB capacity. It's a flash player, you can also use it as a generic USB storage device. I just have to connect it to the computer and nautilus will display a new window where you can drag and drop the files you want to play. It plays MP3, OGG Vorbis and this Microsoft format I can't remember right now.
So far I'm pretty satisfied with it. It plays about 40 hours with one AA battery.

[Hamman]

I own a iRiver H120 and I just drag-n'-drop my files to it, works real nice. Soon I'll be running and OpenSource firmware on it to, thanks to Rockbox (www.rockbox.org)

[Alibloke]

I own a iRiver H120 and I just drag-n'-drop my files to it, works real nice. Soon I'll be running and OpenSource firmware on it to, thanks to Rockbox (www.rockbox.org)

Open source firmware? I like that idea. Apart from the iPod and Rockbox are there any other projects out there I can have a look at?

[Alibloke]

Just found this little number:

http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=569&display=specification

Looks like it fits the bill, 5Gb, ogg and linux support!

[Brunellus]

Open source firmware? I like that idea. Apart from the iPod and Rockbox are there any other projects out there I can have a look at?
Can't wait to see if the RockBox project makes it onto iRiver H3xx players.

[SKLP]

iPods work great. Except there is no Vorbis support.

[jeremy]

Has anone actually tried the Rio Karma? It looks great (specs) but I want to be sure that it will be seen as an external HD.

[Brunellus]

Has anone actually tried the Rio Karma? It looks great (specs) but I want to be sure that it will be seen as an external HD.

The Karma had a lot going for it--gapless playback, FLAC support out of the box--but it has the following shortcomings:

1) It doesn't mount as USB Mass Storage. File transfers are handled by a bit of Java software which, while portable, is sub-optimal. Worse, for Linux users, the only transfer-mode is (apparently) via the ethernet connection on the unit's dock--no USB connectivity. Foo.

2) Persistent reports of hard-drive issues. Google the Karma and hard drive problems, and all you read are reports of failures resulting from the heads sticking to the platters, causing the units to freeze up. The best 'fix' for this is forcibly bitch-slapping the player into submission, which is not the sign of a healthy relationship between user and device.

I really wanted a Karma, but those two things were deal-breakers. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that Rio will come out with a Karma2 anytime soon (the rumors of such a device seem to be just that--rumors).

I got an iRiver H340, and have not regretted it one iota.

[nrayever]

i got a rio forge 512mb internal memory + 1gb in sd card and rayovac 15 minutes rechargeable aaa battery . it's a nice mp3 player, small, practical, sport type, wma (sucks) and mp3 file support, fm radio, fm radio recorderand in a nice blue color!!

it's mounted as usb memories, because it considers 512mb and 1gb as separete units. :D really sugested!!

but while reading on this post. i got a doubt. someone says that rio players supports ogg files. may i ask which rio model is it?? because forge only plays mp3 and wma(sucks!!).

[drizek]

nm

[calvinpriest]

I have a Rio Forge, which works great as a USB mass storage device.

The only downside, however, is I can't find any way to order the songs on the device. They just play in the order they're copied on. I assume that the usb-mass-storage-route always has this limitation...

Does anyone know of a way around this?

[Lovechild]

The iAudio X5, I seriously lust that one - Ogg Vorbis support and a damn sexy design.

[Malphas]

Yeah, I second the iAudio X5. One of the very few players that supports FLAC too.

[xequence]

I heard very good things about iRiver. If I buy a new one, it will probably be that.

DONT EVER GET A SONY MP3 PLAYER. They are totally windows only. I have one.

[Franko30]

Hi,

I just read the German LinuxUser 12/2005. They have a special on Linux compatible Ogg (and MP3) players.

The most important thing is that you should stay away from players with the Microsft 'playsforsure' label. This- according to the magazine - most certainly means that the device will not work under Linux. For instance the iRiver T10+T20+T30 seem to cause problems. Please visit www.playsforsure.com to find the players you don't want to buy. :-(

LinuxUser 12/2005 tested 8 Players:

Trekstor: i.Beat Organix + i.Beat 300
Maxfield: Max-Diablo + Max-Movie + Max-Diamond
Cowon: iAudio X5 + iAudio M5 + iAudio G3
They also wanted to test some Samsung Players - but they arrived too late.

All players work as external harddiscs under Linux. And all of the above (except the Trekstor i.Beat Organix and Cowon G3) support firmware updates using Linux. The Cowon X5 and M5 also support FLAC and are the fastest concerning data transfer! All Maxfield players and the i.Beat 300 don't support id3 tags for Ogg Vorbis files... The Cowon X5 is now also available with 60GB harddisc.

Sound quality: An important feature, often forgotten...
LinuxUser says that the best Flash Memory Players sound a lot worse than the worst tested Harddisc Player. :-(

That said, they recommend the Cowon X5 and M5 as having the best sound quality (especially when plugging them onto your home audio system using decent speakers). The best sounding Flash Memory Players seem to be the Max-Movie and the Cowon G3.

Personally I recommend to throw away any headphone delivered with a player and user a Koss Porta Pro or Sporta Pro - those two sound as good as any expensive (and much bigger) Sennheiser or AKG equipment...

My two cents concerning the Archos AV400 100 GB I own:

This one can only be mounted read-only in Ubuntu 5.04 and 5.10, no matter what I tried (even putting entries in fstab and other stuff). After re-formatting the whole thing (FAT32) in Ubuntu it gets mounted read-write when plugging it in. Unfortunately, the player now only works on a Windows 200 machine - but not in Windows XP. The disc manager (correct term? I use a German Win XP) declares the file system as 'FAT32 - unknown'... And, the funny thing is, that now I'm stuck with this, as Win 2K and XP only format 32 GB of my 100 GB as FAT32 and I don't have access to an old Win 98 machine.

To write replies to this problem, please use this thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=103472

Cheers

Franko30

[steevc]

I use my Palm as my player. It's not ideal, but saves me from having to carry another gadget. The Aeroplayer software does MP3, OGG and some other formats.

I use OGG for similar reasons to why I use Linux. It's an open standard and free to use. I've heard it can result in shorter battery life than MP3 due to extra CPU load, but I can live with that.

I don't think MP3 will lose it's dominance any time soon. It has become a word like Hoover and Sellotape. Most people don't realise there are other formats. I expect most players use standard chips which support MP3/WMA. Even though OGG has no licencing fees there is not a lot of incentive for manufacturers to include it as it won't sell them many more units.

If I ever buy a dedicated player it will have to handle OGG to meet my principles and let me play my existing collection.