Hello! I registerd here ages ago, lurked around, but never had the need to post. I'm just your regular audio geek with a strong "my music collection format and encoder tunings are superior to yours" tendency. Naturally this translates in a preference for Vorbis

My problem is this: It's my mother's birthday soon and she wants an MP3 player that holds a good chunk of music, which means 4 gig or more. The best deal i've found so far is the Creative MuVo2, it's not very expensive (about €150,-), and seems to have decent specs and reviews.

But it doesn't support Vorbis.

I've looked at http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers, but was unable to find a player with similar specs and a similar pricepoint that was actually available.
Are vorbis compatible players in the lower harddisk segment simply non-existant, or have i overlooked something? Please don't tell me there's no alternative but to use MP3! (one joke about wma and i will flame you to death, you have been warned)

P.S.
I was vaguely expecting a "Recommended hardware players" sticky thread or something, i recalled some threads discussing this, but couldn't find any. Maybe it's an idea to create one and coordinate everyone's search for the best player?

great contenders for me would be Rio Carbon 5GB and iPod mini 4GB/6GB

never used the rio , but it's getting rave reviews. and the ipod mini my father and brother both own, I really like it. Although I would be a bit weary of the 2G as many of them have VBR-playback problems as someone else on this board stated.

Thanks for your suggestions, i had looked at the Rio Carbon before, neither seem to support Vorbis though unless i missed something.

If vorbis is not an option i plan to encode everything as Lame 3.96 -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 which seems to give a good filesize/quality tradeoff for a portable player. So proper VBR support is important.

EDIT: Rio seems to be very poorly available in The Netherlands (and the Carbon costs €209,-), and they seem to have dropped Vorbis support for it.

yeah vorbis support is getting harder to find, especially on single-digit GB dap's.

even iriver with their 20gb h320 supported vorbis, but not their 4/6gb h10

.so vorbis wise, my opinion is sort of no opinion. sorry.

Is the Rio Karma an option? Buy.com I found this price was the best and had tons of other options too. I don't know why they wouldn't ship it to the Netherlands? AND if you do a search for "online coupons" you may find out you can cut another 10% off. I was able to get this Karma for $178.00 AFTER shipping costs. Beware tho, this unit ships with "RIO" earbuds, NOT the Sennheiser earbuds that most other packages do. (I think this is why the price-break?)

Earbuds are not relevant.

buy.com doesn't seem to accept customers outside of the USA sadly, but that link makes me somewhat hopeful. My local pricewatch doesnt find it for less than €283,-, other resources (forums, etc) mention it as a good but expensive device, though. How the hell do buy.com get it so cheap? It's almost worth flying to America for!

When I was searching for the best prices I found that Amazon was a close second place, you might try there?Amazon.com...$210.00 with free shipping.

microdirect.co.uk are currently selling the karma for £146 (€214), living in the uk im not sure if they will ship to the Netherlands though.

That's actually not a bad idea, but the page in the wiki serves it's purpose quite well ;-D. Our wiki could use some expanding.




Are you sure? I also think you should look into the MPIO HD200. That's a 5 GB HD player that supports Vorbis. My friend has an MPIO HD300 which works like a charm for a him very cool player. His is much larger 20 GB though.

MPIO HD200 costs €229,95, way too expensive for a 5 gig player. Amazon.com won't ship electronics outside the USA, Amazon.co.uk is about as expensive as microdirect, it's beyond my budget.

I could ask a kind american to order the Karma at buy.com and send it to me. Would need to avoid import tax somehow though (20% VAT!) Ebay is another alternative, although buy.com is still cheaper.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

Well, IMO, your mother won't notice, if the files on her player are .ogg or .mp3, so you may get yourself a player that don't actually do much, but just serves it's purpose and suits your mother well. Consider her own comfort, too.

Edit: Basically, she wants an MP3, not Vorbis player. Since MP3 still can be absolutely transparent to most people, I don't get the whole idea of getting an expensive jukebox.

Very true, i would have gone for the MP3-only Creative MuVo2 if it wasn't for the useful recommendations i got in this thread, however Vorbis will stuff 50% more music on the player, and is still improving whereas MP3 is not progressing at a very significant rate.

But yeah, there is a bit of idealism and geek factor involved, but there's nothing wrong with that, is there?

PS:
Isn't that a young Karl Marx in your avatar?

Search for the iAudio G3 or i5. Supports Vorbis from q0-q10 (or is it q1-q10?). iRiver flash players also provide limited Vorbis support (q2-q8 I think) but they're more costly.

My mistake. I recommended flash players. But 2 GB iAudio G3s and i5s are out.

As long as it doesn't interfere with your mother's comfort, wishes, etc.


LOL.
That's Évariste Galois (1811-1832), a famous French mathematician who died very young.

Definitely get her an iPod mini

Hmm, i wasn't too far off, here's the young Marx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:39km1.jpg

iPod mini doesn't seem to hold that much value over the MuVo2, i've always considered Apple overpriced (but never dealt with it much), and iTunes support is not important at all.

However, the Mini is indeed a good choice for this situation, since it is extremely user friendly.

I don't suppose the MuVo2 is user unfriendly in any way, the reviews were happy about it. I don't see how the iPod mini would justify the €30 price difference in addition to having 20% less capacity. Is AAC support important when you don't use iTunes? Does it support HE-AAC?

Have a look at http://www.mp3players.co.uk/. They send to Europe - see here.

They also do the Rio Karma for £164 pounds which is €241 (with a direct conversion using http://www.xe.com/).

It's a good site to show you what's available and then you can go off and research the products that take your fancy.

The price difference is mainly based on two things: it plays AAC (which is definitely a plus), and it is Apple (with all the known attributes, which is a doubtful plus for me).

AFAIK, HE-AAC (aka AAC + SBR) is significant only in extremely low to low bitrate range. It still sounds rather crappy, I'd say, so why bother using it on a device with 4 gigabyte capacity?
LC-AAC still sounds very good, sometimes even better than Vorbis, as different tests say [no TOS#8 violation!], so you may consider using it instead.

But if you don't really need AAC playback, you still have handy and fully functional MP3 device.

Well, decide for yourself.

Hmm.. i think i'll try and get the Karma on buy.com and have someone send it here, and if that's not possible i'll probably stick with the original MuVo2 unless i can get a better deal on the iPod mini, it's just above the budget at it's current price point.

Does AAC still have headroom and the prospect of better encoders in the future the way Vorbis does? Or is that question flamebait?

Well, Nero AAC (which is considered the best AAC encoder for now) evolves waaay faster than Vorbis (mostly because there are paid specialists working on it, not just lonely enthusiasts), and it will clearly become superior in a couple of months if something special (like Vorbis II or aoTuV beta 5/6/7) won't happen.
iTunes AAC goes on par with Nero's, AFAIK.
However, I'm still with Vorbis.

Off-topic, but I don't think that Nero AAC is considered as the best AAC encoder. It appeared as inferior to Apple's encoder on the two previous collective tests. Latest releases (Nero AAC v.~3) were never collectively tested. Individual tests were performed since, but like mine there are too limited (to a bitrate range, to a musical genre, or to a limited set of sample).


In my opinion, AAC/Vorbis/WMA9Pro support is something I'm ready to pay for. Not too much of course, but it will significantly increase the capacity of the player.

Well, Garf said something ~ a month ago, that AAC improved greatly since 2.9…
Dunno for sure, really. :\
Still, the present encoder can't be significantly inferior to Apple's one.

Apple has just released the biggest update to its encoder as well in QT 7.

The MuVo2 arrived in the mail today. I like it, it's incredible how small it is, the DAC is good, low impedance headphones don't seem to suffer, and the Lame 3.96 -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 encoded MP3's sound very good for their bitrate. Only the playtime seems to increment in a jumpy fashion with them, but that's a minor issue.

The 2 line screen is small, but very readable, and displays all unicode i've thrown at it so far. Downsides are the very poor headphones that came with it (but they won't be used anyway), and the buttons, which are quite fiddly. Not for people with thick fingers.

And with 5 gig at €150,-, it's definitely worth the money. Big big shame it doesn't support vorbis, but i don't feel like i've made the wrong choice at all.