The ogg wasteland

19 February, 2007

Mark‘s linked to David Pashley’s ogg player roundup. For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking into this recently too, except I had some additional restrictions which, given the players David puts on show, leaves me with only one choice (which was the one I’d previously selected in my own research): the Samsung YP-U2 (1GB for £61 or 2GB for, er, £58).

My additional restrictions were:

rechargeable internal battery
must not need cable to connect to PC

The player I’d be replacing is the Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB which I’d give three stars for general alright-ness.

Whether I can actually justify spending ~£60 on a new player which will only give me a minor playing upgrade (only a few tens of tracks in my 20GB compressed-format music collection are in ogg) and some usability benefits (no more lugging a mini-USB cable and spare batteries around) is yet to be seen.

In fact, looking back, I’ve been wanting this player since June 2006. This is reasonably depressing – does this really mean there have been no new decent ogg-capable players for at least eight months?

See other posts tagged with mp3 mp3 ogg and other posts made in February 2007.

Comments

alf

20 February, 2007 at 10:00

If you used Amarok and an iPod nano, you could set it to automatically transcode Oggs to MP3 before transferring them 😉

Phil Wilson

20 February, 2007 at 13:37

I spit on your so-called iPod Ninny!

04 March, 2007 at 00:38

Hah…

My ridiculous-looking 20gb Archos, which must be half a decade old, finally began to exhibit the burnt-out solder power leak of doom. I too have been looking into replacement options. Though I’ve been looking for something hard-disk based, I share your incredulity. I’d thought that by now there’d be tens of possible players, many of which would offer Ogg as an option. Not only is this emphatically not the case, but on top of the lack of Ogg or Flac-ness, there’s insult heaped onto injury by the bizarre urge most manufacturers share to require the use of ridiculous proprietary indexing software.

Why? Why?? Just treat it as an USB mass storage device!

Sadly, I think my options are limited to: another Archos, a Cowon iAudio, or some bizarre el cheapo Chinese no-name brand. Disappointed 🙁

mzuehlke

08 March, 2007 at 10:37

Did you consider the YP-U1 model ?

Comparison here.

I’m very satisfied with this one for over a year and it’s quite cheap these days.

Phil Wilson

08 March, 2007 at 12:05

I deliberately didn’t consider anything which didn’t seem to be made any more.

I’ll have a closer look though, thanks for the pointer!