Slashdot Mirror

The PJB-100 addresses these issues. it handles gapless playback - not only does it not give you the ludicrous 3-5 second spinup delay, it doesn't even give you the 0.1s delay all other mp3 players give when playing precached mp3s back to back - it allows you to encode a whole album as one big track with separate "pointers" into it for the track points, so to the user it still looks like an album made of X tracks. they are also still manipulatable so you can delete a track in the middle of an album, or move it to the end etc.

it does this by encoding a cd with its own software, or a third party utility for it can take an mp3 and a cue file and upload a gapless album for you. Exact Audio Copy will give you the cue file and the album as a whole track, but you can of course make your own cue files if for instance you have a recording of a book you want to upload. it has an open source SDK so there are a lot of nifty third party utilities out for it, including for linux, of course.

the pjb-100 is rock-solid and really good, i've had mine for over 2 years. it is of course old - it's only USB1.0, but takes 2.5" HDs so capacity goes up to 60 gigs. there are rumours of a PJB-300 meant to come out toward the end of this year, but it's not materialised yet and the featureset is unknown, it may not even be as good as the pjb-100! we shall see.

i almost forgot a link. you can get a lot more info on the pjb-100 here.

David

It's available for sale at the following sites:
Innogear.com
MP3 Factory Direct
DGN Depot

Although the initial advertising claimed otherwise, with the more recent firmwares (2.3.x, the one I have currently is 2.3.2) DO in fact support transferring data from the device back to the hard disk. There is a FAQ that has links to the various places which have software that can do this -- one of which is a SourceForge Project.

The PJB itself is a fairly nifty device (though the main website tends to get either broken out outdated from time to time -- and the pictures they have of the products are in some cases DEAD WRONG! The only colors that are really available as shown are the titanium with black buttons and the all black; the blue one is actually kind of an off teal with dark teal buttons) -- storage capacities range from 6GB to 30GB, making the high-end model the largest capacity wearable MP3 player that I know about.

There are Linux synchronization tools available, but they were all unfortunately in a more or less half-finished state the last time I checked, so I still rip under Linux and then boot back to Windows to transfer the MP3 files to the PJB. It also has the downside of being USB rather than firewire, so transferring large amounts of data can take a while. Battery life is around 10 hours with the rechargeable LI battery. Recharging can only be done in the main device though -- no external chargers are aviailable. It also makes a loud tone when the battery is getting low, and will make the tone again after a few seconds of playing if you stop and then start the device again, which can be somewhat disconcerting if you weren't expecting it, especially since it triggers when there's still an hour or two of life left in the device. It is documented in the manual, but was easy to overlook or forget.

The navigation buttons are fairly easy to use and simple to understand. I've had one problem with an mp3 that had a click in it that wasn't present when played on the PC, but it was an isolated case, and was one of my oldest rips, so it might be a genuine glitch in the encoding.

Well, this turned into more of a full review than a comment on another device that can do two-way transfers, so I should probably shut up now. I will add a final note that I had problems when trying to reach the company directly or order directly from their website, so I ended up buying from MP3FactoryDirect and quite satisfied with that.

$398
size: 150 x 80 x 26mm
weight: 9.9 oz.
capacity: 6.4 GB
12 hour battery
USB interface: takes almost 4 hours to load
128 x 64 pixel display
buffer holds 10 minutes of music
plastic case / sub-optimal industrial design, to say the least
USB cable and separate brick AC adapter

iPod:

$399
size: 102 x 61.8 x 19.9mm
weight: 6.5 oz.
capacity: 5GB
10 hour battery with one-hour quick-cahrge to 80% capacity
IEEE 1394 interface: takes 10 MINUTES to load
160 x 128 pixel display
buffer holds 20 minutes of music
stainless steel case / Apple industrial design
IEEE 1394 cable and tiny AC adapter that uses the IEEE1394 cable
Simultaneous English, French, German and Japanese support
Automatic synchronization
WORKS AS PORTABLE FIREWIRE DISK

The advantages of the PJB are that it comes with a car adapter kit, a $15 value for those of you who don't already have one from a CD player, and a stereo adapter, $5 at RadioShack. Both come with some decent headphones and the standard sound-quality tech specs. It also has and extra 1.4 GB and 2 hours of battery, both of which are easier to acheive in a bulkier machine. It also has 20 GB and 30 GB options, which might actually be interesting for those needing the space and looking for something between the "CD-player" sized jukeboxes and the "deck of cards" sized iPod and flash-memory players, but the $515 and $665 price tags might make you really start thinking if you'd rather have a second computer insead.

The PJB has a very low resolution display and a UI that is more useable, if much uglier, than most other HDD players, but doesn't even compete with the iPods much higher resolution screen and Apple-designed UI, which you can see here. The iPod automatically synchronizes with your computer, something which you couldn't do with a USB player because it would take hours instead of minutes. The iPod also works as a portable firewire disk, greatly increasing its utility considering the price of an ultraslim external firewire drive. If the PJB does this too, please inform me; I know that many HDD players work as disks, but I would think they would note this on their website if it did. In any event, one of the huge advantages the iPod has over other players that work as disks is that as a FireWire drive it will probably be faer than your internal HD, as opposed to the nearly unuseable speed of USB devices for mass storage.

The PJB is definitely a step ahead of most of the HDD MP3 player competition, but I don't think anyone who has a machine that works with the iPod would choose the PJB. If anything, this device shows that the iPod is priced very comparably to other devices of its kind, of which there are very few. Since the initial price targets were rumored to be $249-299 perhaps there is some chance that the iPod will drop in price quickly as Apple clears up manufacturing issues or whatever the snag with this might have been. An iPod at $249 or even $299 really would be able to dominate the MP3 player market.

yes, just xfer software. the actual device is custom hardware licensed from compaq. it includes motorola dsp, fraunhofer mp3 decoder and thompson mp3 hardware too. look at the features page for more info...

http://www.mp3factorydirect.com/pjbfeat .htm

"As seen on Slashdot"

Hang on people...I don't like that Diamond Rio crap either...but there is a PJB100 MP3 player available from MP3 Factory Direct that holds 4 Gigabytes of data. Yes 4 gigabytes. I have like 900 mp3s on mine, all high quality. This thing rocks. Check it out. It kicks the crap out of the 64 MB ones with switchable flash cards.

The features page mentions that the PJB100 comes complete with "Jukebox Manger" software.

Now my cows can play any of their favorite 1200 songs while they eat!

You can get the player for $700 if you buy two of them. It's still rather expensive, but for the one who was going to buy one anyway, it is a nice extra. ' Just needs to find someone else as rich as him, or as frantic about getting this new toy...

So who is interested?

The PJB 100 Personal Jukebox limited Premier Edition will be available the week of Nov 15, 1999 at a major web music site. If you would like us to notify you by e-mail when additional product is available please contact us at pjbinfo@mp3factorydirect.com