I, as well as many others, have been interested in the forthcoming e.Digital Odyessey 1000 mp3 player (20GB): Product Link. One of my concerns in buying a new player is whether or not it will support new, better formats than mp3 and wma (if that can be considered a format ). I've also been looking at the 1GB, microdrive-based MXP 100 w/ voice navigation. I sent a nice e-mail over to e.Digital as to inquire about including Ogg support in future firmware updates fro the MXP 100, and mentioned the fact that Ogg Tremor (the fixed-point decoder) has been released. Here's what they had to say:

"Dear Angelo,

Thank you for contacting e.Digital.

We are happy that you have expressed interest in our products. The MXP 100 is not compatible with Ogg Vorbis. We have no plans to use Ogg Vorbis with our players. For more information regarding the MXP 100 please contact our sales department at sales@edig.com. "

I've contacted many a sales department about Ogg support and until now have never heard a manufacturer straight-out say that they have "no plans for Ogg". Other companies like iRiver at least said that they were "considering the possibility". Is this a bad sign, and should I get the player anyway when it comes out? I was hoping for Ogg support as to someday (upon better tuning of the encoder) be able to encode music at bitrates lower than --aps with the same quality.

I would reply like:

"Dear e.Digital,

Thank you very much for being honest.

I'm happy to inform you that other brand manufacturers are already supporting the patent Free Ogg Vorbis format and i'm going to buy their products instead.

The "Tremor" decoder library, an integer-only, fully Ogg Vorbis compliant software decoder library is now available under a totally free BSD-like free software license.

For more information regarding the Ogg Vorbis format contact the The Ogg Vorbis CODEC project and its current Hardware Support


BTW Building your own standalone player: Maybe you can use the new FlexATX very small form factor case, with the cheapest duron/celeron motherboard with everything integrated, and the smallest memory module you can find nowdays, a single 3 1/2" Hard Disk (cheaper than 2 1/2") and maybe even an optional CDrom drive for the whole purpose of becoming the audio jukebox. A properly installed Free software operating system and audio playing software, a keyboard, or other control devices (such as pc game pad and optional monitor (maybe one of those small 9" inch mono VGA monitor) and you are done

Ok, maybe its not that cheap but look at the flexibility All your favorite formats supported, easy storage update, posibly lan updates (who said you can't plug a lan card)? etc.