[juneau-lug] Ogg friendly (mostly) MP3 player

From: <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:44:59 -0400
 

Since I don't have the luxury of carrying my laptop around with me= to play
oggs (specially the 17" lugger) I've been looking for an ogg = friendly
musicplayer.  I had a small one, but at only 512MB it is a b= it dated, and
my son has taken possession of it anyway.

By looking at= the back of the packages, all I ever see is mp3 and wma
support listed.&nb= sp; When I was overseas last it wasn't difficult to find
one that had ogg s= upported listed on the package so I was sort of
surprisedto find that it w= as so difficult two years later.

Turns out that the geographical chan= ge is one of the main reasons ogg
players are hard to find.  The physi= cal devices are the same across the
world, but US firmware tends to not pla= y oggs and be more friendly to MS
DRM formats.  Lawyer imposed changes= , I guess.

So I picked up a Samsung T9 MP3 player, mainly because it = was on sale. 
Theincluded firmware did not recognise ogg vorbis files= , and was an MTP
format device instead of UMS (USB Mass Storage) so was not= Linux friendly.

The fix was to grab the latest firmware from www.sam= sung.com/sg -- their
Singapore site and dump it into the /data directory on= the device.  You'll
either need a newish distribution with MTP suppor= t, or use Windows to do
this.  Once the firmware files are on the devi= ce, power cycle it and it
updates itself.  The international version o= f the firmware both activates
the UMS interface so plain jane Linux automat= ically sees the device, and
activates ogg vorbis support.

There are s= ome caveats to the ogg support.  The firmware does not
recogniseogg v= orbis tags, so the player shows all of the songs as unknown
artist, unknown= album, and the title is simply the filename.  To browse ogg
files, th= e player has a file browser function.  Since all of my oggs are
organi= zed by artist and album, this is not a problem for me.  However is
you= just dump all of your files into one directory unsorted, it could be an
is= sue.

Also not all bitrates are supported.  I had some Joe Satria= ni oggs that I
used very high bitrates on as an experiment.  They soun= d great on a PC,
buton the Samsung they won't play.  The T9 just disp= lays a message stating
the the file type is not supported.  So if you = update the firmware and it
still won't play oggs, check the bitrate.  = The default settings for
something like kaudiocreator work just fine, so I = guess this would only be
a problem if you were hand-rolling oggs with oggen= c set to a high bitrate.
I guess this could also apply to MP3's with = high bitrates, but I never
encode them so don't have any to try out.


If you prefer MP3 format, updating the firmware gives you the ability= to
transfer files with your Linux machine using native UMS drivers.


And please remember, only rip CD's you own.  Don't go saying aar= gh! or
aye,matey! unless it's talk like a pirate day (Sep 19).  And m= ake sure
yourMP3 encoder, if you use one, has had it's patent fees paid so= mewhere
along the line.  Or just don't use the format since ogg is fre= e. :)


James 
= 
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[juneau-lug] Ogg friendly (mostly) MP3 player

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