[Advocate Play Ogg] Cowon's can be set for MTP OR MSC and work on Linux.

[Jon T]

Bob,

 

I am writing this in response to your posting that is listed below my response.

Thank you so much for your comments.

I especially want to thank you for your remarks

"I can appreciate how they are born out of trying to inject a bit of
humour into an often incredibly frustrating situation where one is often
fighting a long uphill battle against some very powerful and entrenched
interests."

What you are saying is so true, especially if one is aware how the market works and

understand the propaganda that Microsoft/Apple do in their marketing and forcing other companies 

and online and paper magazines to write what they want them to write, as well as have retail stores

sell only what they want them to sell.  This is not some conspiracy thing, all companies, by law, have one

job, to make profits for their stockholders. Problems in the open market system occurs when the markets

get totally dominated by the monopolistic control of the market. Then innovation dies, customer oriented

marketing, support  and development dies. Then the monopolies/oligopolies also wind up controlling all of

the distribution channels as well. It makes it impossible to compete. 

Microsoft/Apple play dirty because they can !!

 

PLEASE be reassured the Cowon users have a choice, and make their own setting

on whether to use MTP or MSC. MSC would be the one for Unix users, as well as the mode that I

use.

On my cute little IAudio U3, the same two transfer modes are there, but what is MSC on the D2 is called

UMB on my IAudio U3.

 

If someone wanted a portable audio player that has great quality, but not all of the features and file capacity

and battery capacity (20 hours), of the the IAudio U7 and the D2, the IAudio U3, like the one I have still plays

great and supports FLAC (Free Loseless Audio Codec) and not to mention
MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV format.

The U3 was the first portable player in the world to ever support FLAC.

A new IAudio U3 with 4gbs of internal flash sells at Amazon currently for $103.00. 2gbs of flash

will seel for about $85.

 

There are plenty of Linux users that are active on the best place for support and ideas,

the iAudiophile.net forums. http://iaudiophile.net/forums/ .

 

I have the Cowon D2 that has 8gbs of internal flash and since it has a SD slot, I also have a 8gb SDHC card in it as well.

I personally would NOT get a portable player that has a hard drive in it. I think Flash memory is extremely reliable and there are

no parts to break.

The file transfers with a PC extremely fast.

 

Since the D2 supports Flash, people are starting to create some custom Flash apps, installing and sharing them with others.

 

There is a forum on the Cowon.com site, but I think the Audiophile forum has more activity and certainly more technical people who are

doing all sorts of things and sharing them. For example, I just downloaded some better looking Fonts that a member created and shared.

 

To make sure that you understand what you are getting, don't be afraid to post a pre-sale tech support email to Cowon or a post on the

iAudiophile forums.

 

I have to tell you, the bottom line for me is the quality of the audio and the flexbility to play Divx videos and plug in either my SDHC card

or my D2 to my stand alone DVD player or directly to a TV. Of course the support for Ogg and Flac is al essential.

 

I think that some people get stuck on little teenie auxillary issues that really are about the users becoming flexible with a new device.

 

I would like to hear about other players that support Ogg as well.

 

Don't forget to send correspondance to the people like Creative, Samsung, etc and ask them if they support Ogg (FLAC as well is nice).

Then if they answer no, it is always good to say, "That's too bad, why don't you support it.". I going to have to purchase a Cowon then, or whatever

other portable player supports open source codecs.

 

Funny thing is that I have seen some peole who created some firmware to add to the Ipods to allow for Ogg playing. I have NO idea if it works

or not. I would recommend supporting only those companies that are more customer oriented and have the Ogg decoders, native to the product.

 

Jon 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:06:30 -0400
From: Bob Chandler <address@hidden>
Subject: [Advocate Play Ogg] ogg players & "nicknames"
To: address@hidden
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain

Jon,

I appreciated your advice on the Cowon players.  Right now I only have
one portable audio player that will play oggs...a small 512 MB Samsung
Yepp.   And unfortunately I misplaced the USB cable that works with it
and the "end" that fits into the player has an oddball number of pins
and I've found it hard to replace!   So I'm temporarily "stuck" with a
player that has some old Linux podcasts on it that I've already heard.

My other players are just cheap "no name" audio players.  I had heard
that some of the "no name" players will sometimes play oggs...but so far
no luck!

If I'm going to spend some "serious" money on an audio player, I want
one that supports ogg "out of the box".

The other "barrier" I've run into with some of the newer players (not
directly ogg-related) is that they make use of the Microsoft
"MTP" (Media Transfer Protocol) which has only limited support at this
time on GNU/Linux using "libmtp".   I first ran into this a few months
ago trying to get a friend's "Creative Zen" player to "talk" to a
GNU/Linux machine. 

Apparently some of the newer Cowon players (D2 and newer) are using it
according to the Wikipedia entry on the MTP protocol.   Are you using
your "D2" with Windows or with GNU/Linux?   If with GNU/Linux I'd
appreciate learning about your experiences.

I personally don't have a problem with the "nicknames" for the large
monolithic corporations that for too long have dominated the software
industry ;) 

I can appreciate how they are born out of trying to inject a bit of
humour into an often incredibly frustrating situation where one is often
fighting a long uphill battle against some very powerful and entrenched
interests.

However I can also see that when trying to get new people to look at
alternatives, they might feel that one is "bashing" the decisions that
they have made in the past and they might be turned off by the "in
group" humour.

Sometimes I have to bite my tongue (or bite my keyboard fingers ;) ) to
avoid using the "nicknames" for the big software conglomerates these
days.

Cheers,

Bob