Nomad Firmware

My MP3 player went a bit funny the other day – paused itself and refused to do anything. So I pulled the key out of the battery holder, and plugged it in and nothing worked So I decided it was time to finally upgrade the firmware.

Firstly some points about the Nomad world website – working out how to upgrade the firmware is really hard. And they have completely messed up the ‘Read More’ links on the downloads – they all jump to the same page, but instead of jumping to the section about the file that you want, it stays at the top, which was really confusing and I didn’t realise until I tried to download the same file twice.

However, the new firmware is great – now when I stop the player it remembers where it is in the file, rather than having to go back to the beginning and fast forward. This is especially good when I am listening to 1 long file, like the 60+ minutes of LUGRadio. It also now plays small snippets of sound as you fast forward, giving you a better indication of where you are in the file.

The one thing still missing is OGG file format – I can’t see how this would be difficult to add, unless the media decoding is hard coded onto a chip, rather than in the firmware.

mrBen

Glossary
Firmware – firmware is basically software that sits on a computer chip. It has similarities with both software and hardware (hence the name). It doesn’t ever change normally, like hardware, but you can reprogram it, like software, using special software – this is called ‘flashing’ the firmware.

Ogg – The Ogg Vorbis file format is an open compression sound format, much like MP3. The compression is actually better, for the same or better sound quality, as MP3s, and it has the big advantage of being open source, which means that there is no license fee involved. Most software media players will play OGG files, but most of the MP3 players on the market won’t, despite the fact that the manufacturers have to pay a sizable license fee to the owners of MP3.