I would do all of my CD ripping into the OGG audio format, except that my mp3 player can’t handle it. In fact, previous to buying a player, I did rip a lot of CDs into OGG for listening on my computer, and now I’m kind of regretting it. OGG is great, it gives better audio quality for a given file size, it’s intelligently designed to provide upwards scalability of quality as techniques improve, and it is explicity an open source format, meaning it isn’t vulnerable to weird mood swings from Fraunenholder (who own mp3, and announced a while back that everyone who made an MP3 player – hardware or software – owed them $0.50/per, I don’t know where that went). Unfortunately, OGG development and adoptance seems to have slowed or stopped. I suspect it’s because everyone else is going through the same transition to MP3 player compatibility dependance that I am. It doesn’t matter how great the file format is if your ipod won’t play it.

Neuros appeared on my radar as the first MP3 manufacturer to approach Vorbis with the intent of making their machines OGG compatible. Since then, iRiver seem to have picked up that torch and carried it a little better – their hardware is arguably superior, or at least smaller, than Neuros’ slighty chunky if feature-rich products. I’ve just discovered that rather than backing off OGG, Neuros has taken the bold tack of going fully open source – now the code that runs their players is freely available and open for contribution and extension. Which is awesome. Presumably, people will be much more likely to write third party music management software for Nueros products. Even more exciting (although I’m not too clear about this), people could rewrite the OS of the player to their liking if the packaged one isn’t to their taste (?). That kind of openness greatly appeals to me. When I used an iRiver product I was constantly annoyed at the lack of promised firmware upgrades to fix bugs and add promised features (like playing OGG files, for examples). Now that I have an Apple product I have noticed that each new iTunes update seems like a mixed bag of wanted/unwanted additions and subtractions – mostly it’s mas flash and minos flexibility. Opening it up, giving user’s control of the products they own, wow.

Except right now they are running into some “issues”:

We recently removed the source code from OdNA as a result of being contacted by the legal departments of one of our major vendors. They believe they may have found some unauthorized code within our source code and have asked us to remove the source code while they sort it out. As you can imagine, it was never our intention to release any unauthorized source code and we went to great lengths to ensure that code was in shape for release prior to releasing it. It’s our expectation that our vendor will come to the same conclusion and we’ll repost the code shortly.

On the plus side, they sound quite calm about it, and appear resolved to forge ahead.

The removal of the source has caused frustration among our community. But as a result of the pioneering nature of what we’re doing it should be anticipated that there will be some inevitable rough spots in the road. After all, we are working with an entire supply chain that is, in many cases, totally unfamiliar (and often quite uncomfortable) with open source.

Well, good for you Neuros, in a year or two I will no doubt be looking for my next mp3 player. As happy as I am with Apple’s excellent interface the hardware itself is only average and if Neuros can add true flexibility to it’s already superior feature set (and maybe shave an inch off the player) I would definitely consider switching.