At what cost would people purchase a device to play OGG/MP3/WAV/AU? It would be flash card based, have a color display, and a headphone minijack. Base system would come with a 340mb microdrive. It would be fully upgradeable as new codecs are released.

-mudguy

i think lots of people are intereted in such a thing that can play ogg :-)) (i am)

but why a color display? its not very usefull for an *audio* player...
why a microdrive?? almost as expensive as memory cards but so battery drainer!!

the best choice IMHO would be the same products used for MP3 :
- HDD based like Ipod or the new tompson gigabeat OR
- CD based like the iriver slimx OR
- memory based

so everyone can choose beetween HD capacity, little cost and easy use (CD based), or reduced size (memory based)

i would buy any of those thing if they support OGG, at any cost!!! (hem... almost any)

jimi

I'd be happy to fork out for an ogg device that had good storage and battery life. I don't need anything more than a basic LCD display.... Of course, it would have to not be too expensive compared to a plain old Audio cd discman, because while having a larger selection of music in the player is good, I can carry some cds with me if it saves me a lot of money.
It also has to compare ok with a laptop. When there are some second hand laptops around for a little over $AUD1000 that would suit my purposes, a player has to be about half that to be worth considering. I mean, a laptop is SO much more useful.
I guess I'd pay around $AUD400-500 for a well designed and useful player.

For me it would depend on what kind of power and sound it had.

I checked out a whole bunch of cd based and flash based mp3 devices and they were all both expensive and underpowered.

11mw amps do not cut it with a good pair of headphones. Something like 40mw dual mono, clean power, and fuck the battery time. NiMH is cheap these days.

For such a device I could clip on my belt I would pay $300 U.S.

And it would have to have a useful eq so that some kind of reasonable HRTF curve could be devised. Otherwise what's the point?

There are far too many crap players out there... A "dream machine" for me at the moment would be a small AAC/MP4 player which uses small DVD discs instead of flash memory or normal CD-R media...

(340MB is not enough... Not even 700MB on a MP3 CD player is enough... That's why there are only two viable medias... Using 2.5" harddrives or using small DVD discs...)

Check out www.iriver.com , my friend has the IMP-350 SlimX and it sounds pretty good to listen to. It plays mp3, wma and cd's. They say "At this time, the IMP-350 does not support Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3Pro. Our Research and Development is taking these codecs under consideration to support in the future." It is firmware upgradeable by burning the update onto a cd and playing it. They have already released a few upgrades.

There is also a new palyer called the iDP-100. "The iDP-100 exhibits superior sound quality while supporting Multi-Codec formats such as MP3, QDX, and AAC."

Frankly, I would *love* to see a simple, standalone, NON-PORTABLE, non-battery-operated device, that would play back vorbis data discs. (Standard CDRS!)

Or, perhaps a dvd standalone with vorbis playback capability, much like the mp3-capable ones.

Over the past year I have grown quite fond of playing back mp3s burned onto standard cdrs, but frankly, I have dumped ALL my mp3s for .oggs. In other words, I'm a hard-core Ogger at this point. It has been simply wonderful being able to play back the (now discarded) mp3s through my home stereo system (or headphones) using my simple hand-held remote control for navigation. (I use a Sanyo standalone dvd player). I DO hope dvd player manufacturers will see the light and incorporate ogg vorbis playback.

CDR data disc are easy to make. They are cheap. They are durable. They are all over the place. They hold a truckload of .ogg files. You don't need expensive flash memory, batteries, or an interface to transfer the oggs from your computer to the device, which if you drop on the floor, you could be out $$$.

It's a *no-brainer* people! A cdr ogg-disc playback machine for your home stereo!

My 2c worth.