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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.
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 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")