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Compaq _invented_ the hard drive MP3 player. They had their first prototypes in 1997-8, I think. Their marketing folks decided that no one would want one, and they licensed the design off to a Korean company in 1999. You can read about it here and here.

I got mine in early 1999, unit #4. It still does things that the iPod doesn't do, like gapless MP3 playback. It has a superior interface, battery life and sound quality. A shrunken version with an attractive design would have kicked ass.

At any rate, HP bought Compaq, which means that they actually own patents covering almost every aspect of the iPod.

So what does the New HP do? They license the iPod from Apple. Yup, pay Apple for the IP that they own. I'm guessing that the clever MBAs running the company never decided to do a simple patent search.

Thus, HP wins the Dumbest Big Company Ever award. HP's stupidity regarding this matter has been confirmed to me by former employees who will remain nameless.

Jonathan

Compaq's research labs created one of the best large capacity MP3 players around (Personal Jukebox - www.pjbox.com) which they then licensed to HanGo in Korea to build and sell. This was, oh, 4 or 5 years ago now (I've had mine since 2000), so they were a mile ahead of Apple. Shame HP seems to have missed that technology at merger time.....

I have one of the first sold, almost 6 years ago. Back then, it featured 10 hour battery life, gapless play (albums were ripped as one large mp3 with pointers), and open sourced PC client and drivers. It is still the golden standard for audio quality from such a device. No player out there has all of its technical features, still.

People were so excited when it first came out, delayed over a year (yes, this thing was ready to be sold in '96/'97), that the first units were bid as high as $2000 on mp3.com. My girlfriend, flush with dot.com bucks, bought me one.

So, what happened given the HP acquisition? What happened when a shipping product was so accutely sought after, people where paying 4x what Compaq originally sought to price it at? It was abandoned, licensed to a Korean company called Hango that had no marketing or R&D budget, and forgotten. The engineers on the project were sacked. Even the case was ugly, but the unit was (and still is) great. Given the time frame, the orginal is the size of two iPods wide.

HP could have had a platform and something like iTunes a long time ago. This is apparently the new HP.

I purchased a Personal Jukebox PJB100 in October 2000. It was probably one of the first harddrive based mp3 players with 6Gb. As of a December 2002, I upgraded the same player with a 60Gb (Toshiba GAP 60Gb 2.5" Drive) drive. I used to be able to listen 10hours on those accu it came with, now I'm down at 6hours.
What is important to consider between the different HD players (after the size) is what kind of medium they use. I believe IPod's use a 1.8" drive, while the PJB100 and the Zen use 2.5", so they will be cheaper and boast larger drivers...

I'm using my Personal JukeBox 100 6GB since December 2000. It must have been running about 4 hours a day since that time. In all that time, I maybe had to reset the device 8/9 times, and only once upgraded the firmware. It's a sturdy build, and it's been my best portable audio device ever...
I purchased mine from K55 in Zurich, Switzerland. They only sell mp3 players, and they have a long list of different devices. It's in german, and the prices are in Swiss Francs, but it's still an interesting browse...
If someone has some links or HD references for an upgrade, please feel free to answer to this reply.

I am not as pessimistic as you that a good quality portable decoder cannot be built. I agree that it probably won't be, but headphones should encourage better fidelity, not worse.

I can hear the Rio One decoding errors even with the cheap earbuds because they're mid-high-frequency errors which the earbuds reproduce especially well. If they were over 16kHz or under 200Hz it would be a different story. The warbling of too low a bitrate or a poor encoder is also easy to hear.

The earbuds don't provide as much isolation as over-the-ear headphones, so listening in an airplane or subway might hide the errors, but I listen on a couch or in bed in a quiet room after my son has gone to sleep. I can't use speakers at the volume I like & don't have whole house audio from my changer (though I'm thinking of changing that). I'd rather rip the discs to an archive on my PC & grab a few to an mp3 player that I can jack into my car, carry around the house & take to work.

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When we say 24 bit audio, let's clarify what we're discussing. Junk like the Rio One use 16-bit *fixed point* DSPs. I'd assume that most PC decoders use single-precision (32 bit?) floating point. I don't know what the "24 bit" decoder plug-in for WinAmp is all about, but it is supposed to sound better than the built-in one.

The StrongArm can retire 12 bits of [multiplier] result per cycle and the adder can retire 32 bits. This yields a total latency of two to four cycles for a 32-bit result and three to five cycles for a 64-bit result. Maybe softfloat can handle quality mp3 or ogg vorbis decoding, but it seems that if inner loops are coded in assembly it might be possible.

A better approach might be to use a heftier DSP. I know the Motorola 56k series & this would seem to be a good candidate: 24 bit datapath with a 56 bit accumulator for 24x24=48 results accumulated without rounding until the end (so a 256-tap FIR is possible).

Sure it's more power hungry than a C54, but hell, skip the hard drive (use flash) but keep the lithium-ion battery and you're all set.

It'll be a lot of work to write the code, I'll grant you that, but fixed-point mp3 decoders have been written (by xaudio for example). Ogg Vorbis will be a chore too.

Actually, there already is a portable player that uses the 56k series, the PJB 100

If you're willing to deal with even worse power requirements, a CPU with FPU is possible. We can trade off things like a nice big backlight for a nice big color LCD and use a Pentium or PowerPC. I'm not going jogging with the thing, so if it weighs a pound or 2, I'm OK with that.

My old 120Mhz Pentium laptop can run WinAmp. An embedded Pentium 166MHz draws 2.35A at 1.8V or 4.23 Watts. Modern NiMH AA cells give 1800mAH each, so four might give you 3/4 to 1 hour of use. That's not enough, but it's within an order of (10) magnitude.

The "portable supercomputer" PPC 440GP also draws around 4Watts, but it runs up to 400MHz.

The TMS320C32 32-bit floating point DSPs draw nominally .675 and max 1.4 Watts @ 60MHz.

-M

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.

The PJB-100 now works with the latest Toshiba 40GB hard drives. Smaller than a Nomad, 10-hour battery, great community, open source software (but not the firmware unfortunately).

What else? It has a clever power-saving mode which spins up the disk, reads a whole track into memory, and powers down the disk immediately. That means 5 mins anti-shock (or was it 10? can't remember) and 10 hours listening per Li-Ion battery. Support is nothing less than fantastic, with new firmwares containing features such as minesweeper :-) And I can upload via USB faster than I can rip CDs, so who cares about FireWire?

This is the hacker's choice of MP3 jukebox. It's a no-brainer.

It's got a 40 gig HD. battery lasts 10 hours. Software is open-source.

How is this apple thing a breakthrough? Firewire is nice and all, but...

• It's "just a hard drive" when connected to a PC or Macintosh -- no proprietary software is needed to manage your collection. In addition, you can store and transport files other than MP3s, too -- documents, applications, whatever.
  
• You can copy MP3s (and any other file) OFF of the drive, as well as onto it. Contrast this, for example, with the PJBox, which only lets you put files onto it (Yes, really.)
  
• Good Mac support, including apparent interest from Archos in supporting playlists exported from "iTunes"
  
• Upgradable with almost any 9.5mm IDE drive (like this $160 IBM 20GB model)
  
• Only $350.

There's a discussion board about the Archos here. I've had mine for about two weeks, and I'm very happy with it.

-Mark

The archos jukebox 6000 which is supposed to have excellent sound quality and pretty similar battery life to the nomad jukebox and 100 dollars cheaper.

The pjb which superior to the nomad jukebox, (longer battery life and comes highly recommended), thinkgeek sell this, very expensive ($690 I think)

And also you should keep an eye out for the treo which is going to be pretty gun, 8 hours of battery life, tiny, the next incarnation of the pjb and only $400 dollars

Also there is the neo-25 which is cheap, but only got mixed reviews, so I would be a bit careful about buying it.

Cheers
Sam

The PJB-100, available from a variety of vendors (I think that thinkgeek advertises it on here) and the original seller here. WILL take a 20 GB hard drive. It also seems to be a better unit on the whole, certainly in terms of battery life.

I took out the old 4 gigger and dropped in a Toshiba 20. Once connected to its Windows application via USB, the thing formatted instantly and was ready for lots and lots of songs. Do keep in mind that the PJB-100 is not compatible with all IDE drives - just some IBM and Toshibas - without extensive modification.

I'd advise anyone looking for a truly useable portable music libary with lots and lots of capacity to check it out.

Don't settle for the first generation of MP3 CD Players. So far, all of the entries in the market have been by the small Taiwanese and Korean companies that managed to pull off the biggest rush job in getting their players out to market. As a result, the first generation players are of poor quality and have substandard feature sets.

If you have the patience, hold out until the big boys start hitting the market with their own players.

RCA has recently announced an MP3 CD player that features a multi-line display and ID3 tag support. When you have 650 megabytes of random MP3s on one disc, this sort of information is essential to finding what you want quickly and effectively. Some info can be found on it at here

Phillips is coming out with their own MP3 CD player, the Expanium, which is slated to ship around August. The player seems to have much more comprehensive support than the first generation no-name models, and offers support for a wide range of bitrates (32-320 kbps, while most current ones only go up to 192). More info can be found here

If you do not wish to wait for the next generation of MP3 CD players, but still crave massive storage space in a portable shell, check out the PJB 100. The latest model features a 6 gigabyte hard drive, 10 megs of buffer memory, and a USB connection for around $700. Specs and more can be found here and here

• $800 is rather expensive.

  Hopefully competition and time will bring the cost, and thus, the price, down.

• It's inflexible in what output is permitted.

  I find it rather useful that my Diamond Rio can be treated as a 64MB "silicon disk" via use of the SnowBlind RIO utility , rio .

  In contrast, according to the PjBox FAQ , there's no reasonable way of getting digital data off the unit.

  Ignoring, of course, the notion of encoding other sorts of data into MP3, and then doing a modem-like demodulation of that back into digital data, which would take additional hardware and the entertainment of building a suitable error-correcting protocol that can cope with there being no feedback from PC back to MP3 player.

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Suprised that most people missed this. I just
got one of these as a suprise gift, and already
I really like it. Had just been thinking about
the MP3-portable thing, and here it is.

First off, the thing's got a disk. Upside: 4.6 GB. Yeah, like 4600 megabytes or about 80 hours.
Downside: when's it going to headcrash and take
me out? Oh, and by the way, the LIon battery is
supposed to go 10 hours (the doc explains that
although running the HD is taxing, they actually
get 10 minutes of music loaded to RAM from a 10 second burst, then shut down the drive again - I guess this means they have at least 10 Mbytes of RAM in it for pre-cache).

Secondly, it's expensive (around $600-$700?), but
the price per playtime minutes - something like
$0.15 per min? Who wants to calculate out the
others? From a quick look, it looks like they're
all $3+ per minute for 1+ hour boxes (or, 1% of
the storage for around a quarter the cost).

Third: I have a very no-frills unit actually
produced by "Hy-Tek" and called the
"Compressor Personal Jukebox". There's
also
Personal Jukebox PJB-100", which is the
product name I remembered seeing on /. a while
back. Both are licensed from

Compaq (and Fraunhofer).

Last: the software is OK (not great), but does
support CDDB lookups of the discs you rip, and
I've had no real problems yet (like it killing
files off my HD like I've heard other one do).

Anyway, I see no other large-scale device like
this out there - what's the deal?

I know the main reason that people want a cd mp3 player is for space. There is an mp3 player, though expensive, looks nice in contrast to those small crappy mp3 players that only home 32 or 64 megs of music. It has an internal 4 gig Hard drive that holds some 100 cd's (100 full cd's,not just 100 songs). It's called the PJ-mp3 player and i think compaq makes it. Check it out at Pjbox.com Who knows, maybe you can replace the harddrive with say a 40 gig maxtor and hold 1000 cd's. At the present time it's only windows compatible.

Mine should be here tomorrow :) It's not that small and portable as the other 32/64mb MP3 players, but far more portable than even the smallest Biblo laptop.

http://www.pjbox.com/product.htm

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• A Personal Jukebox MP3 player w/ the car audio kit
• The ever-popular choice, a 3Com Palm Vx
• I could really use a new harddrive, or, better yet...
• I'd love to have an Athlon system to replace my P133
• Tux would make a great stocking stuffer
• I'd like to have a DVD player

MD is much more versatile than MP3 and until MP3 units are able to store in the region of 128MB, I won't be buying one.

Heh, if you are waiting for 128, then go ahead and by one, most 2nd generation players have 128 megs chips or flash cards...but the cool stuff is the multi-gig stuff. Like the Empeg and the HanGo Player

I have used both, and both rock.
-Davidu

(Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.

10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.

(Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.

10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.

found more details here and here. It's rechargable, claims 6-8 hours of battery life. Also says there will be a car power adapter for it available...i know what I want for xmas...