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Sony Cigar-Sized MP3 Player
Aaron Johns writes "The newest MP3 player on the market is from Sony, the VAIO Music Clip. It weighs less than two ounces, is a little over 4.5 inches long, and less than an inch in diameter. Only 64 Megs, but that's still two hours of music in a pen. " It's pretty cute. One thing ya gotta say about Sony, is that the guys designing the VAIO, AIBO, and this new music clip have a cool design sense... Despite how nifty this player looks I have to believe that with the onset of portable MP3 players with several hundred megs of storage, this one is probably too little too late.
the musiclip isn't really an mp3 player; it plays atrac3 music files. if you have an mp3 file, it conerts it into an atrac3 file and plays it. not that atrac3 is that bad but that's one more level added on to degrade sound quality. it can change wav files directly to atrac3.. but this is sony, one of those big-wig corporate companies so they put in all this security junk on it to screw you over. read this.
a) It's awfully expensive for a couple of hours worth of music.
b) It looks (God forgive me) like something you'd buy in a shop with a name like "Pure Pleasures" or "Sex World" and use for something other than a couple hours of music.
Seriously, the real problem with all of these sorts of devices, walkmans, personal CD players etc. is that whenever I bother to program out what I think I want to hear, I change my mind a song or two in. The difference between MP3 and the previous generations of personal music devices is that they have the potential to solve my problems (well, at least this specific problem).
What I'm really keen for is the day when I'll be able to stream music from my server at home directly to some sort of personal device -- maybe a Palm descendant of one kind or another. This probably isn't too far out; digital cellular of some sort coupled with your favorite PDA. This will let me decide what I want to hear when I'm out jogging or mowing the lawn or whatever. That would be a real nice paradigm shift.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Seeing as there's no legal reason for those OS's to lack USB support, the proper answer here is to finish USB support for Linux and add it to those other OS's. Honestly, do you expect the entire hardware industry to wait for every OS to get in line? That's not the kind of computer industry I want. (Though, OTOH, I don't want the kind that patents everything, either...)
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Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
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Not at all. You can record digitally from another device, ripping byte-for-byte exactly what is on the CD, similar to ripping mp3s. You just have to use the optical in and digital cable that comes with the units these days.
Minidiscs use the ATRAC format, which is comparable to MP3. In fact, there is less loss when compared to mp3 at similar bit-rates, although the end product is slightly larger.
There are also, as I said before, home decks that record MD's which rip digitally, in faster than realtime, as well as soundcards you can get that output the cd info directly to the MD. There is _no_ discernable difference introduced, and in fact the sound can be enhanced with effects like additive bass. MD's sound incredible with good headphones or speakers.
Go to www.minidisk.org and get the facts, MD's are too good to pass up anymore.
BTW, the CD players that play mp3 CDs and regulars: expensive ($300 min). Skips, cause it's a cd player and can be jostled. large, comparatively, as are the media. MD is palm sized and smaller every day. Possibly much more fragile than the rugged MD players. They can be found by going to some links off of mp3.com, if you still want one.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
I would recommend that this item not be sold to the President, who knows where he'll try to stick it.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
Hey, CmdrTaco please add an update to the article mentioning the fact that this thing is SDMI compliant. I don't think any of us really want to be giving the SDMI people any money. Dose anyone know if SDMI compliant means it will not play mp3s from a water marked CD?
I think we should try to make an example of this thing by hurting their sales. It would have a very positive influence on future mp3 players. The people who buy protable mp3 players are geeks anyway, so we can spread the word and start an effective boycott.
There is a link at the bottom of the page which helps you find dealer locations. I think we should all find the dealers in our area, print up a bunch of informative stickers about this product (mentioning that it may not play CDs you pay for in the future, the general nastiness of SDMI, etc.), and go stick them on the packages to warn customers about this. I guess I need to come up with a concise list of problems with the product.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This device embodies everything that you just outlined. And they're taking pre-orders today!
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
I was reading their web site and I found...
"SDMI Compliant" in the flash presentation. Oh my.
As we all know, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (Their site is at http://www.sdmi.org) can't do anything; anyone heard "bit-by-bit" before? And there's always those nice dummy wave-output audio devices....
<sigh>
Silly RIAA.
I'm guessing though that Sony's player (due **Winter** 2000) won't be restricted to just SDMI; their web site seemed to make that reasonably clear.
|/usr/games/fortune
The site says that 800x600 is required, as well as Windows 98. This implies that you need their program to send the music to the player. So does that mean that us linux users are again forced to find some kludge to make it work?
The page says it has non-skip technology. Do other portable mp3 players skip?!?
(I'm assuming that it's just some marketing person's way of saying "hey, mp3s don't skip like CDs")