Aren't the Rio Central and the empeg very similar in hard ware?

Yes, and they're even more similar in soft ware.

I assume that if the empeg team is going to provide Ogg support because they are getting the license for free, they may be able to pursuade the bean counters to pay for Ogg on the Rio Central (because the license would be the only cost - they've already done the needed in house developement!)

Seems like this format would really kill in the portable market. Yet WMA has some of the same advantages.

As someone else pointed out, it's a chicken-and-ogg situation. Part of the idea of the Rio Central is to talk to Rio portables, so there wouldn't be much point supporting Ogg (or at least Ogg encode) until all the portables knew about it.

But we have to start somewhere, and I for one am very grateful to Emmett and Xiph for offering us the chance to start with the car player.

Peter

so, do they have the source yet??
when does the 24 hours start ticking??

We have to get a contract in place with Xiph before we get the source (to assure us that we can use it in the car player, and to assure them that we won't use it in other products within the same terms). We also have to check with our lawyers if they are currently happy with the legal status of Vorbis. Finally, we have to persuade Peter to do the work in his own time because our schedule is packed solid for the next two months at least.

Rob

this is why I've gone to FLAC ... only have to rip and tag just once. Every other encoder is just a script run away.

Are you using some front-end for FLAC? Whatever extra tagging I have done, I don't lay the blame at the foot of LAME ('course, I couldn't get --id3v2-only switch to work!) or oggenc. They seem to add the tags pretty predictably.

Grip, as a front end, works well, but it doesn't allow me to vary artist or year within a rip of a single CD. This comes in with soundtracks, compilations, and "best of" CDs where I often change one or more of these from CDDB values to either the actual artist (instead of Various Artists) and the actual year of an original recording (instead of the compilation year). This is one place where I like Mp3 Tag Studio for "post-processing".

Maybe there's one, single do-it-all tool out there that I'm overlooking and that would eliminate any fix-up editing. If I were more *patient*, I could process soundtrack/complilation tracks one track at a time in grip, editing each track as I go, and maybe avoid this. Still, I really like having MPTS around for the day that I decide to restore all of those "The"s!

I just encoded some songs in both ogg format and mp3. Ogg at 128 and mp3 at 192 and using my crappy SBLive Platinum sound card and Sony DJ headphone the ogg songs sounds better. Not a night and day difference but detectable.

Interesting! The more I think about it I am motivated to try to come up with something that would help me figure out what my ears think are better (I pass hearing tests OK, but I don't have what I consider the most discriminating ears). I may take this thought to Off-Topic or somewhere...

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Are you using some front-end for FLAC? Whatever extra tagging I have done, I don't lay the blame at the foot of LAME ('course, I couldn't get --id3v2-only switch to work!) or oggenc. They seem to add the tags pretty predictably.

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I use a little shell script to listen for a cd insert, start ripping, do a freedb.org query, encode to flac, script tells id3lib to drop the tags on the flac file. Since inevitably, there's some incontinuity in freedb and cddbdbdb, I use EasyTag to go in and do corrections on the tags in the flac files. The MP3TagStudio seems to work okay as well, on windows, as long as you tell it to ignore the file extension. Typically I just stick with EasyTag on X-windows just cuz it's a bit faster and easier for me to use on the basic operations I usually do. It does a mass correction of any field selected, which I use often for fixing genre's, years, album names, etc.

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Grip, as a front end, works well, but it doesn't allow me to vary artist or year within a rip of a single CD. This comes in with soundtracks, compilations, and "best of" CDs where I often change one or more of these from CDDB values to either the actual artist (instead of Various Artists) and the actual year of an original recording (instead of the compilation year). This is one place where I like Mp3 Tag Studio for "post-processing".

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True, but this is really a problem I see with freedb and cddb. There needs to be some finer granularity. For single artist cd's they work fine. For mutli artist CDs, I still have to go in by hand after ripping and do a little touch up. But the benefit of Flac is that I only have to touch up once ever.

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Maybe there's one, single do-it-all tool out there that I'm overlooking and that would eliminate any fix-up editing. If I were more *patient*, I could process soundtrack/complilation tracks one track at a time in grip, editing each track as I go, and maybe avoid this. Still, I really like having MPTS around for the day that I decide to restore all of those "The"s!

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I usually rip a pile of cds into flac, then when I have some time, I'll go in and edit the tags with EasyTag in one sitting. This is a lot quicker than doing it between rips it seems. Many times, especially with Madonna CDs it seems, I don't have to do anything at all.

Greg

alright, it's been a few days. Are we getting Ogg support in the next beta?

later,
ajay

alright, it's been a few days.

Hey, I'm as eager as the next person, but let's not be a PITA. Did you read Rob's last post? (about 4-5 posts up) That "clock" starts when the guys start it.

crap... sorry. I missed that post by rob and now I will contine to wait patiently like everyone else.

later,
ajay

Grip, as a front end, works well, but it doesn't allow me to vary artist or year within a rip of a single CD.


Did you click the "Multi-artist" box in the tag entry area? It will even split title tags automatically into seperate title and artist tags where they are downloaded from the FreeDB in "Songname - Artisit" format.

Hmm, year is not variable though, your stuck with disc year and not track year there.

Did you click the "Multi-artist" box in the tag entry area?

Well, Grip's multi-artist feature doesn't change the Disc Artist tag, it just adds artist infor to the track name. I have Grip configured to create music directories based on Artist/Album, so all of this music would wind up under "Various".

Yes, year, too. I just bought a used 4-CD "Beach Music Anthology" for one song ("Searching for My Love" - Bobby Moore and The Rhythm Aces, 1966). Left to it's own devices, Grip would mark every one of these 90+ songs as 1996.

So, for compilations, I'm going through the somewhat time-consuming process of editing artist/year/title and ripping/encoding in Grip one song at a time.

One not-so-great side effect of this approach to compilations is that I'm encountering "artist bloat" -- my artist view is getting crowded with one-hit wonders. I need to build more custom playlists!

Well, Grip's multi-artist feature doesn't change the Disc Artist tag, it just adds artist infor to the track name. I have Grip configured to create music directories based on Artist/Album, so all of this music would wind up under "Various".

I just double checked some of my rips i still have on my PC. Disc artist isn't changed, because there is nothing sensible you could change it too, apart from what is grabbed from the freedb.

However the important part is, with multi artist enabled, the ID3 Artist tag is set to the Track artist, the disc artist field isn't actually used, as there is no ID3v1 tag for it, the only place it is used is if you have told grip to place the MP3s in a directory structure based on the album artist name.

It does not add artist info to the track name.

I usually set the disc artist to the name of the compilation series ( i don't have any soundtracks) So grip will place compilations in a directory structure like

/Gathering/The Gathering
/Gathering/Gathering 2
/Gathering/Gathering 99

So Gathering is the disc artist, Gathering 99 is the album name, but all the songs won't have Gathering as the artist, they will have the actual artist set in their ID3 tag.

Note that you can customise allot of this, %A is the artist of the current disc, and %a is the artist of the current track. So you could probably have each track in it's own directory if you really wanted by specifing the destination directory as %a instead of %A.

That would get real complicated if you're like me and have six or seven albums from a band named The Gathering.

Heh, not really though.

The albums from the band "The Gathering" would all be under the directory "The Gathering"
The compilation albums from the annual "Gathering" event would all be under the directory "Gathering"

Well, it depends on which convention you follow, some people prefer not to specify "The" because it screws up sorting (they'd rather see The Gathering among the G's than the T's.)

There were some interesting threads about this recently, and how to get the player software to gracefully and robustly handle articles like "the." Not sure if any of those suggestions will make it into the software, but anything's possible.

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Side note: As a registered user I got this e-mail, but others may not have....he has released a new version of MP3TS that, registered or unregistered, is adware-free. Good for him.

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Hey, thats great. Appearently the guilt is more powerful than the ads. I just registered.

Gosh...do you have six or seven The Gathering albums? I only have...um, four I think...maybe five. Are the earlier ones worth getting? I understand they're quite a bit different musically/vocally.

Hmm...I've ventured off topic.

The earliest album I own is Mandylion, the first album with Anneke. But I was counting my EP's (Rollercoaster, Adrenaline/Leaves, Liberty Bell) in that number. I have the same 4 studio and 1 live albums you have. I've heard Almost a Dance and it's not bad, but it's certainly a departure from the albums with Anneke. I would like to own it eventually but it's not on my top 5 right now.

BTW there's a new album coming out in June. Very psyched for that one.

Does anybody knows whether the empeg guys and the guys from Xiph are actually trying to get together and making a contract?

Any news from this?

janosch

We've talked. Right now I'm not going to even think about chasing our lawyer for a contract - as you may be aware our legal department is just a little busy at the moment.

The development team also have the tightest and most important deadlines over the next 1-2 months that we've ever had. I would almost certainly be sacked on the spot if my boss thought I had them working on anything else

Right now this falls into the "back burner" category. In my book its way lower than other Rio Car tasks, such as releasing Beta 13.

Rob

Rob.... thanks for the Update. Beta 13 would rock, and I can't wait to find out what you guys are working on - even if it is not RioCar related. I like knowing that your team has added thier touch to other products. Hopefully you didn't get sucked into having to write that Spyware code in 30 day...

Speaking of legal issues - your company has guts - that's for sure. I can't think of another major corporation that would be better fitted for you.