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This has actually been around for a while. I remember reading a review for it on IGN.com before they started charging for premium content.

And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.

The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.

mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.

However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.

If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!

I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.

That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.

At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.

And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.

I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.

Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction? ;-)

And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.

I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.

Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!

Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.

If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.

Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!

Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.

I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?

Why is this news? Using an analog input to circumvent copy protection is hardly ground-breaking technology. Making an MP3 player that emulates an audio cassette isn't at all new. Nor is it a particularly good idea. It sounds cool -- an MP3 player that you can operate with the controls of your car cassette player. But it doesn't work all that well in practice. Auto cassette players vary a lot in the way their controls work, and you usually can't use all the features of the MP3 player. Plus you have to do without that handy LCD readout.

All in all, I'd much rather have a conventional MP3 player with a pseudo-cassette adapter. I only bought the Digessette because it had other good features that outweighted the silliness of the basic concept.

Still, the interface is a new thing, particularly being able to control it through standard FF/RW/Play controls on the tape deck.

From the RomeMP3 Home Page:

"Transform those fast forward and rewind features into skip features. The RomeMP3 can be inserted directly into your car deck and controlled with the car deck's controls!"

I have posted links about Rome MP3 player - same as this, 1.5 years ago, but it my story was rejected. Do I have to get my story to big publishing warehouse, before it can show up on ./?

-T

It's in the shape of an audio cassete, it comes with 32 MB of storage space, you can stick it in your car stereo, living room stereo, walkman, etc., it costs $199.95 dollars and it has a USB interface to transfer files from your computer to Rome. It even has a button that doesn't do anything (Menu Button), jejeje.

I haven't used it, but I think the idea is pretty cool!!!

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Manufacturer's web site: http://www.romemp3.com/ - Wired News reviewed it a couple days ago.

They say that they're working on an upgraded version including 64MB and an LCD display... I might be convinced to shell out for the 64MB version (would be nice to be able to play my tunes in my car).
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