iRiver seems to think LAME is at fault for low volume OGGs!

[Rotareneg]

Since the hack allowing <96 kbps Vorbis' to play on the 7xx/8xx players has been out I've switched to nothing but Vorbis on my 895, aoTuV B4 at 2.25 which is perfectly acceptable for me since I listen in a somehow noisy environment at work and lets me put a bit more music on it.

Due to the well known issue with these players playing back OGGs at lower volume compared to MP3s I ended up having to use Foobar2k and the vlevel DSP to help with the volume and everything works great.

However, since there isn't any legitmate reason for the OGG files to play back quieter, and that other MP3 players (iAudio for example) don't have this problem, I figured I'd have a laugh and see what iRiver's support thought about it. Here's the entire communation between me and them:

Your Question/Problem:
Email Date:07/18/2005 10:40 pm
Sent to:support@iriverame rica.com
From:<me>
Subject:iFP-895 volume when playing Ogg Vorbis files

Hello, I am having an issue with my iFP-895 when playing Ogg Vorbis files: the playback volume is significantly lower than with MP3s. I have encoded the same file to both MP3 and Ogg and transfered both to the player, when switching between the two its very obvious. The Ogg files have the correct volume when played on my computer, I used the official Ogg Vorbis encoder from www.vorbis.com to compress the music.

iriver Response: (07/31/2005 12:16)
Hello,

What software were you using to encode as MP3?

Your Response: (08/16/2005 02:25)
I used LAME 3.96.1

iriver Response: (08/16/2005 02:25)
Hello,

Please contact LAME support. They may have an issue with their encoding and volume levels.

LoL, so apparently LAME encodes MP3's too loud?

[hafree]

Originally Posted by Rotareneg

LoL, so apparently LAME encodes MP3's too loud?

Actually if I remember correctly, LAME does in fact do some normalization in its encoding routines. I learned of this in an article written a few years back attempting to compare the sound quality of different MP3 codecs, the caveat being that louder output typically sounds better, so when one codec does some normalization it makes it difficult to do an honest test of quality.

[Rotareneg]

Originally Posted by hafree

Actually if I remember correctly, LAME does in fact do some normalization in its encoding routines. I learned of this in an article written a few years back attempting to compare the sound quality of different MP3 codecs, the caveat being that louder output typically sounds better, so when one codec does some normalization it makes it difficult to do an honest test of quality.

LAME does perform track based ("radio") replaygain analysis by default, but the results are simply stored in the LAME tag, it doesn't change the volume stored in the MP3. I loaded the original lossless file, the LAME encoded MP3, and the OGG into Adobe Audition and they're all the same volume (besides the very slight differences due to the lossy encoding.)

[dimitri_souza]

The current iFP7xx/8xx firmware has various bugs (including this one about playing OGG files at a lower volume).

However it seems that iRiver is doing nothing to fix these bugs. The last updated firmware was released almost 8 months ago.

Even considering the fact that my iFP-799 does have an excellent sound quality, due to the current lack of support, in the future I'm not sure if I would buy an iRiver model again.

Dimitri

[bug80]

The lower volume when playing Ogg Vorbis is not my greatest issue, the soft "click"/"crack" between each Ogg track is really annoying.

edit: And the whole thing about Lame being at fault is a joke. Lame is one of the best programmed encoders around. When a Lame encoded MP3 file is equally loud as the Ogg Vorbis file on my PC, it should be equally loud once transferred to my iRiver player. That has nothing to do with Lame.

[seadzz]

You need to understand that the average customer serice person that gets these emails at iRiver has almost as much of an understanding of ogg vorbis as the average Misticriver poster....and that would be very little. It would be logical for them to be a little off the mark when replying to your email.

If ogg playback is a little lower in volume than the same mp3LAME encode you could normalize the tracks in question while they are still in wav format. The other option since the majority of your music is in ogg now is to just live with it.

sdz

[Dunno]

Originally Posted by dimitri_souza

The current iFP7xx/8xx firmware has various bugs (including this one about playing OGG files at a lower volume).

However it seems that iRiver is doing nothing to fix these bugs. The last updated firmware was released almost 8 months ago.

Even considering the fact that my iFP-799 does have an excellent sound quality, due to the current lack of support, in the future I'm not sure if I would buy an iRiver model again.

Dimitri

With several models that iriver have brought out there has been an issue with lacking features/upgrades to frimware, but if you browse other DAP manufacturer forums you will see that ALL DAP's have issues, there isn't ONE DAP out there that is perfect, all have pros and cons, moral of the story, do your homework before you buy and make sure that the feature set it has at time of purchase is what you want, find a forum and see what the folks are bitching about before committing yourself.
If you want to see real bitching go back in history here at mistic and read the saga about the H140 firmware upgrade, oohh the winging and threats and curses and verbal abuse thrown at iriver was tidal, tsunami infact.

[Rotareneg]

For whatever reason, the little click between tracks doesn't bother me although of course it shouldn't happen at all anyway. I was more curious as to what they (iRiver) thought of the issue than anything else, and the answer was pretty clear: they don't think about the issues very much.

[Nork]

Originally Posted by Dunno

If you want to see real bitching go back in history here at mistic and read the saga about the H140 firmware upgrade, oohh the winging and threats and curses and verbal abuse thrown at iriver was tidal, tsunami infact.

ya...it was the same with a couple upgrades when i first joined MR back in march. it's nuts - everyone wants everything and the kitchen sink. i'm kinda sad that i probably won't see anymore upgrades for the 3xx series (i was kinda hoping for .wav recording, the loss/expansion of the 5hr recording limit), but oh well.

rockbox cometh. and i'm happy with my player now.

[dimitri_souza]

Right. In fact I like iRiver, and the fact I choose it is because the firmware can be upgraded. So, this give the chance to the manufacturer to fix any problem even after the product has been released.

So, my only complain so far is that it's more than 8 months, the firmware still has issues and iRiver didn't release any updated firmware.

I mean, I don't expect that all issues will be fixed at once, but at least they could do better such as removing the OGG minimum bitrate limit (as sonicman already did). If this is so simple, why iRiver doesn't release an official fix for this?

Dimitri