doctorfrog on 3/4/2007 at 22:05

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OGG is open source, freely usable, high quality and has many things going for it, but one major issue: Nobody cares about OGG.

By the time anyone gets around to caring about OGG enough to make a lustable player for it, dirt cheap portable drive space will be so exponentially huge that lossless codecs will rule us all with their iron fists.

Aja on 3/4/2007 at 22:29

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I started using Ogg because it was the only codec I could find that would consistently play without gaps between tracks.

User123abc on 4/4/2007 at 06:32

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Hey, what a coincidence. I love this player, I have all 40 gig totally full, running on rockbox with extra patches, with an unpgraded battery, and I even openned it up and put a cool skin in there (Gustav Klimt : )). I guess it's the same reason people feel compelled to pimp out their cars. Oh and it plays Zelda too.

By the way, there's a version of rockbox for ipods. So yeah, I guess they do play OGG.

I'm not sure how the music industry could possibly survive without an all-encompassing drm scheme (ie get rid of that cd rip loophole). I don't care much about the arguments for and against the value of music companies and piracy. Honestly, if I have a choice of paying even a penny for something, or getting it free with virtually no reprecussions, I'd be an idiot not to do the latter.

Now personally I have no morals, especially in this situation when there's nobody to impress. I do have empathy though, and I guess that's one thing that would drive people away from piracy. For instance, I felt for the STALKER guys and I bought the game instead of opening that really attractive torrent file. And I really like that site, magnatune, because of their slogan: "we're not evil!"

I guess it's a good move on Apple's part, to really try and get that feel of transparency and friendliness, and appeal to people's sense of... kindness and pity, I guess. That's hardly much, though. Maybe the smartest part of that move is to offer the files for high quality, as ultimately that's what would make logical consumers prefer to pay. With installation issues and variable quality, being a pirate can be pretty stressful. Personally I'd be willing to pay for the luxury of having guaranteed to work high quality stuff. But even then, I don't think the problem would stop growing as it gets easier to pirate shit.

I think that this system should eventually reach some point of radical change, maybe with new technologies allowing for super effective policing of P2P and the internet (maybe Microsoft will sneak something like that in their next OS), or maybe with some rethinking of the way we look at intellectual property, copyright law, and public goods (idealogically very appealing, but economically not very likely), or maybe just with music companies going under and with artists starving as they very well should.

Kolya on 4/4/2007 at 07:09

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What? Me want!!
And yeah I opened it for a personalized skin too. :)

I didn't know rockbox was available for ipods. Well the point was that iriver supports Ogg and a few other codecs out of the box.

*goes off to download Zelda*

Matthew on 4/4/2007 at 11:25

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As I understand it, a few people at MIT held an open day-kinda thing where they'd put it on your iPod. They were disappointed, apparently, to find out that many people had bought an iPod especially for the occasion.