5GB portable MP3 Player

DrunkGiz writes, "Remote Solution's PJB 100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs), and incorporates an IBM 4.86 gigabyte, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB 100 equates to less than $10 per playback hour vs. $250 per playback hour for flash-media storage units. " Now we're getting somewhere: 5 gigs starts being reasonable, 15 would be better, but hey ;)

Comments

hell yeah

[jinx_]

now that's what i call storage. it's about damn time they used a drive instead of solid state stuff.

and since it's got that much space, we just have to convince 'em to drop a vga card in so we can use our winamp plugins. =)

Re:hell yeah

[troller2]

sure.

Re:hell yeah

[W4CSC]

Go look at Mambo X (http://www.mambox.com)

MUCH more reasonable approach. Your MP3s already on CD-R? Why not just plug them into a $200 player, with NO DOWNLOADING.

Taiwan IC plant was destroyed holding up production of Mambo X. I'm still waiting on mine.

Wonder how big the lawsuit is going to be for this player once the guys at http://www.empeg.com find out about it?? Empeg is a Linux box!...(c;

Larry

Re:hell yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that momboX owns I'm going to buy one!!!! thanx alot, I didnt' know something like that existed

Re:hell yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

But isn't this really defeating the purpose of having a portable MP3 player? Now that there are moving parts, they can skip and wear out.

Re:hell yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wonder how big the lawsuit is going to be for this player once the guys at http://www.empeg.com find out about it?? " Hey, we're not an American company! We think the PJB guys are really cool, and CDR based players suck, but we're happy to see lots of other MP3 products out there. Besides, we're not in the portable market :-) I suspect that the 6Gb portable player from Creative Labs (previewed at C.E.S in January) will wipe out most of the competition, if only due to their huge market presence. Rob rob@empeg.com

Re:hell yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

:-)))

first?

[RaZ0r]

Kick ass!!!, but it's still not big enough, i have 8 gigs of mp3s.


- xcuse mi grammer, i lernt it from CmdrTaco -

Re:first?

[chris.barton]

Hmmm
What's the largest 2.5" drive you have seen?
Anyone know if it take the 12mm drives or just the 8(?)mm ones?
14Gb 12mm ones are about 250GBP that would be about 3.5 times the playback :-)

Re:first?

[jawad]

IBM makes a 25GB 2.5" drive.

Re:first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kick ass!!!, but it's still not big enough, i have 8 gigs of mp3s. Only 8 gig? I'm up to 71 CDs now. That would be about 46 gig give or take a few hundred meg.

Re:first?

[Rader]

Only 46 Gig? How about 162 CD-R's... That comes to 106 GB, give or take a gig.

Re:first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it is easy to get 162 cd's full of techno... but, really, listen to... it is always the same crap.... :-))

Now this is what we need...

[Rico_Suave]

None of this pansy 64MB MP3 portables - I can use a CD or MD for that. I want *days* worth of portable music!

I want one. Probably.

[neutron42]

It can store 82 hours of music, but can it _play_ 82 hours of music? I'd be curious to battery life, even with the buffering.

What're the shock ratings of the IBM HD?

Also, good idea putting USB on it!

Re:I want one. Probably.

[juuri]

Depends on the encoding. I've noticed that high bit rate mp3s which in turn mean more harddrive hitting greatly affects the battery life. Right now I am noticing about 8hrs between recharges with mp3s at 192 and 160. Then again I leave it plugged in a good deal of the time since its usually sitting on the desk next to me.

The buffering seems at least a little bit intelligent as well. When you are in an album its obvious that if it can it will go ahead and buffer the next track its going to play. Again with lower sampled mp3s it can buffer a lot more.


---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...

Car Interface

[SEWilco]

Nice. I wonder if there's a power-control jack so my car's computer can upload scheduled audio to it overnight. I see the USB interface mentioned, but don't know if it will like being ON 24 hours a day...

I want an in car version

[luckykaa]

With a wireless LAN and an IDE interface.

Park outside your house and download.

Then hack it to allow downloads from other cars.

Re:I want an in car version

[john@iastate.edu]

Damn, won't the RIAA just pee their pants when everyone on the freeway is napstering back and forth...

Might as well do something instead of just sitting there sucking smog...

Re:I want an in car version

[pnevares]

I do believe you're referring to something like MegaCar. =)

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Re:I want an in car version

[luckykaa]

I think this will mean the RIAA will try to ban cars.

Re:I want an in car version

[Fiore2]

You want this then:
http://www.empeg.com

Re:I want an in car version

[Anonymous Coward]

YES!!! We could AMPsync (I know...xmms doesn't do this yet - have to use winamp) at 70mph on the freeway, and have everyone on a roadtrip/caravan bumping to the same jams....
Imagine cruising with your stereo bumping the entire block - now with 5 car stereos bumping the entire block.... MMM Much better.

Another rather cool MP3 player

[G27 Radio]

Here's a link to an MP3 player that is shaped like a cassette tape. It works in a tape deck, or you can plug headphones into it directly. It's only got 32MB, but I wouldn't mind having one.

cli ck here for picture

numb

RIAA

[MerkuryZ]

I would guess the the RIAA is going to try and have a fieild day with them...especially after finding out that MP3s made them lose -900000 in sales. On a tangent, I wonder how feasable using DvDs in portable MP3 players would be. nearly the same amount of storage space, and the ability to add another drive for pennies a gig!!

Wow, new news

[cronio]

Hmm, wasn't this posted like a year ago? Lets see...that story would be here

Re:Wow, new news

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted both times by CmdrTaco, no less. You'd think he'd at least remember the stories he posts himself.

Re:Wow, new news

[Wire Tap]

I think this just goes along with the general decline in good stories that have been popping up on /. recently. It used to be a pleasure to check the page... but now I find myself reluctant to do so. *sigh*
Fran Frisina (franf@hhs.net)
http://www.zero-productions.com/money

Re:Wow, new news

[pnevares]

Not only that, but it's from the same "-dept.", and the subject has added 200MB between postings. =)

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

No info on battery life

[/]

It's a lithium ion rechargeable, and they claim both "Extended battery life through advanced" (whatever that means) and "Extended battery life through advanced MP3 buffering" to 12 megs of dram. But it would've been nice to know how much people will have to plug this thing in between plays (unless it really is just a glorified luggable).

And ten ounces, while still less than a pound, is not what I consider lightweight.

And is anyone else rendering the page as a gross combination of purple and yellow backgrounds? (White text on yellow background, what a wonderful idea!)

Re:No info on battery life

[B1ood]

And is anyone else rendering the page as a gross combination of purple and yellow backgrounds? (White text on yellow background, what a wonderful idea!)

What do you expect from someone using Microsoft Frontpage to sell a Windows98 only piece of hardware? I'm surprised they don't have any scrolling marquees, or maybe a few hundred of the same animated gif.

B1ood

Re:No info on battery life

[MitchL]

The battery lasts at least ten hours. I never plug mine in unless I'm recharging it or loading MP3s into it.

It really is portable - perhaps too heavy for jogging and running, but excellent for walking, driving, sitting at your desk, ...

/Mitch.
Disclaimer: I worked on this project when it was a research prototype.

Don't hold your breath

[imac.usr]

From the FAQ:

Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I getspecifications for the programming interfaces for the PJBor the USB protocol?

A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.

Boo!

My concerns

[crivens]

I have concerns with hard disk based MP3 players. How shock resistant are these hard disk players? Or rather, how shock resistant are the hard disks inside of them? I wouldn't want to buy one of these players, if I was afraid to take it anywhere, for fear or wrecking the hard disk.

Re:My concerns

[NetJunkie]

This is why they use 2.5" notebook drives instead of just a normal hard drive. Notebook drives aren't unbreakable but they can handle a lot more abuse than a normal drive. My notebook has been thrown around in airports and cabs and still works just fine. The downside is that notebook drives are very expensive in relation to normal drives. Upgrading from a 4GB to a 10GB can be VERY costly.

Re:My concerns

[gfxguy]

I have the same problem...it's not solid state.

Sure, a notebook drive might be better than a cheaper desktop drive, but it's still not that resistent to bumps and knocks...I've seen lot's of notbook drives go bad, but (relatively speaking) few desktop drives go bad.

Those notebook drives might be good getting bumped around in a cab or an overhead compartment, but they don't normally have such abuse when they are being used.

In other words, I want something with recordable music that I can jog with.

----------

Re:My concerns

[wakko]

Actually, I bought a 12gb 2.5" 9.5mm (talk about dual standard =) from gogocity.com for 260$ and it has went down since then. It's a hitachi.

--

Just wait a bit

[drnomad]

I think it's worth waiting for FMD, if you get rewritables of these, you can listen to your MP3's making a trip around the world in 80 days, without putting it on repeat.

For the mean time, it sounds very interesting.

price

[Anonymous Coward]

i dunno if any of you guys bothered to look at the webpage. the price isn't exactly on the front page. it's $749. i'd rather buy a laptop, personally.

Re:price

[Col. Panic]

Yeah - that is just a bit out of range for a portable mp3 player. When it comes down to ~$300, tho...

Re:price

[Shadows]

Not only is it $749, but it's $749 for a limited time only, the normal price is $799. Initially this nifty piece of hardware was supplied to mp3.com for auction -- my guess is that they wanted to know exactly how much they could get away with selling it for. Unfortunately for us in the cash-deprived range, people were buying them up at $1000-$2000 each!
I think that's where they came up with the ridiculous price... Anyway, I think you're right -- a laptop is a much better and more useful toy at this price.

We are finally getting somewhere

[mr.nobody]

Now this is something I will buy!

I'm not sure how many gigs of MP3s I have available to me. But the players that have only 64MB of RAM? Huh? Figure 3-5MB for a song (get up to the higher quality ones and it can be more) and I can only hold an album-and-a-half or so. What's the point of that?

So the MP3 player is smaller. That doesn't matter at all to me if I'm stuck with the same 10-20 songs unless I go back ot my computer. If I took a long trip I'd probably want to kill myself by the end of it from hearing the same music over and over again! I'd much rather take a CD walkman and a a CD wallet with 15 CDs. The disc player is bigger than the MP3 one, sure, but not that much bigger. The wider music selection more than makes up for the extra size.

I always said that when an MP3 player could hold multiple gigs of music I'd consider buying one. I believe that day has arrived!

Re:We are finally getting somewhere

[jued0001]

Last time I checked you couldn't scratch a MP3 player and it would stop working, like a CD. It will also *never* skip like my portable CD player does. It also holds *whatever* songs I want, in whatever order. I don't have time to burn homemade music CD's, when I could spend 1/2 of the time downloading the info to the MP3 player. And if you have a Nomad, you can listen to the radio, or use the Voice option. Need I go on?

Having this amount of space for music is ludicrous, you would never listen to all of it...that would be like giving me a 100GB harddrive at home. I could put everything I own on there and would still have over 80% of it free, and I wouldn't use most of the shit anyway.

Re:We are finally getting somewhere

[Omar Djabji]

I have enough cds that it would likely take a month to listen to them all. Do I need this sheer volume of music? No. What I do want is the choice to listen to what I want when I want. I want the ability to say "I want to listen to this song" and have it available, even if it is from a cd that I seldom listen to. With 5 gigs, there is enough room to put somewhat obscure discs on it.

I won't listen to 80 hours of music straight, but I do want the ability to choose the music that I listen to.

And I don't want to have to anticipate my musical tastes and limit them to 10 songs. Bah.

Re:We are finally getting somewhere

[jag111]

AMEN....that's why I bought mine!

=)

The best of both worlds...

[Bill the Cat]

This sounds nifty, especially for long airplane trips, which is where my exisiting MP3 player still sucks. Unfortunately, the player with the hard drive, at almost 10 oz. is a pretty bad solution for excercising.

How about someone come up with a "combo" type player. Eg.) a traditional small player with flash memory, with an "expansion port" to attach a hard drive module.

Cool, but still expensive

[Refried Beans]

$10 per playback hour sounds good but $10 per hour times 80 hours = $800. Ouch! That's still expensive. I would pay spend $200 for 5 hours of portable music. If I need 80 hours, I'll spend $200 on a hard drive for my desktop.

Re:Cool, but still expensive

[Fat Cow]

the ideal portable mp3 player for me has enough onboard memory to hold a few songs and then loads in other ones from portable removable storage - eg CDs or minidiscs. it wouldn't do any encoding because the music would already be encoded into mp3 on the CD. this way you could have a cheap (not much RAM), portable (no hard disk), flexible (you can carry around as many CDs or minidiscs as you want) player.

Re:Cool, but still expensive

[cthonious]

who in the hell buys an mp3 player thinking about $ per playback hour? WTF is that? All I care about is how much up front, and this thing is WAY, WAY too expensive.

When they're under $200, let me know.

Old News

[irishmikev]

This really is a little old. The PJB has been around for a little while now, and the reason people haven't been jumping all over it is the prohibitive cost. For that much money, why not just have a laptop that you can pitch in your car with a power adaptor and line out feed into an amp? The size of the thing really makes it unsuitable for much more than car listenting. I wouldn't exactly go jogging with a device that uses a hard drive either.

Saw something similar....

[carlos_benj]

a couple of days ago. Thought it was at Sharper Image but couldn't locate it just now. I've got the link at home, I'm sure (doubt I can use this incident to cost justify a laptop in my wife's eyes --- maybe if I just say, "I needed some information today...")

carlos

Re:Saw something similar....

[jbo5112]

It was at Hammacher Schlemmer

Outrageous price.

[Anonymous Coward]

$750 per box? Sorry, but please try again. This time, how about $200. They gotta be nuts thinking people will pay that much for that thing. Just get an E100 with an IBM MicroDrive and save yourself some cash. yeesh. Yeah, i know, prices will come down, but $750? Good lord.

for the car.

[generic]

I plan to get one for the car that I can plug into my stereos audio in. Then just take it with me when I am walking around. I have a jeep so CD's get easily scratched and dinged up if the visor case migrates to the floor. At least with this I can make a shock mounting for it and just plug it in.

Eight Hundred Dollars?!?!?

[consume]

Are you kidding me!?!? Finally someone comes out with a device that actually demonstrates the definitive advantages of MP3 and it costs $800 bucks - WTF?

If someone out there has the embedded systems knowledge, would you please slap a decoder onto a CDROM drive so we can have portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism - While it wouldn't be an ass-kickin' 5Gb, by using technology that is extremely cheap (Open Source Decoder, CD-ROM player & disc) you can put this thing out with a low price point and a high enough margin to make it worthwile to manufacture...

Re:Eight Hundred Dollars?!?!?

[Dman33]

you can put this thing out with a low price point and a high enough margin to make it worthwile to manufacture...

Very good idea! And if something like this really became a big deal, it would drive the prices on the other players down as well!

Car MP3 players?

[karb]

I'd kind of hope that the wonders of MP3 technology wouldn't be limited to portable units.

Does anybody know anything about mp3 players for your car (I've already seen the cassette adaptor, I'm talking about the real deal)?

I've even heard someone say something about putting a pc in their car to play mp3's (on a /. thread). Does anybody have any clairvoyance into this matter?

Re:Car MP3 players?

[TheTomcat]

Does anybody know anything about mp3 players for your car (I've already seen the cassette adaptor, I'm talking about the real deal)?

Try mp3car.com. There's some cool stuff on there, including DIY info.

Re:Car MP3 players?

[nikh]

http://www.empeg.com/

Now that's what you want! A little bit pricey, but loads of space, and it runs linux :)

I recall reading about what these guys were doing a while ago. Apparently, the original implementation had a radio link, so the guy could upload / download mp3s to his car while it was parked in the garage. Now why doesn't someone big like Compaq do something like that?

Nik.

Re:Car MP3 players?

[RedX]

Kenwood recently announced a car MP3 deck in Japan. I can't read Japanese so I have no idea what the specs are. The picture clearly shows an MP3 track being played and displayed. Any of you Japanese-fluent /.'ers care to translate? Support for car MP3 players from Kenwood should mean that the other big audio companies will offer car support as well very soon, meaning price drops and better products.

Re:Car MP3 players?

[slim]

Where have you been?

http://www.empeg.com -- it's based on ARM and it runs Linux.
--

Re:Car MP3 players?

[Dman33]

Here is a pricy pre-made one.
Here is a much cheaper one that is also pre-made.
And This is all you need to know to make your own car MP3 player!

Re:Car MP3 players?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.kenwoodcorp.com/j/press/press20000214.h tml
47,000~ (yen) about $500 will be out in March. That's the list price..so it'll probably be sold for around $400. Why did Kenwood say $700? beats me. I'm faxing the specs over to my sister-in-law who lives in Japan.
-1FCD-R^CD-RWÆàAfffBfXfNÉæÁÄÍÄÅÈêèÜ

It says something about some CD-R / CD-RW may not always be able to play. Kinda scary! Hope mambox.com doesn't have that problem...that's what I'm going to go with. They also should have a car player out in the second quarter of this year.

mrbass@linuxmail.org

Re:Car MP3 players?

[karb]

That last link, that's what I was looking for.

Many thanks.

ah yeah...

[headcase fargone]

hoo yeah! that's what I'm talkin about. :) I'd DEFINITELY buy this thing. at the moment I have a burner, and I burn my favorite mp3s onto audio CDs so I can listen to them. this would be a tremendously useful tool to me, so I can concentrate on saving my blank CDRs for important documents and system backups.

but, man, $750? :( time to start collecting loose change...

Creative's new toy...

[H-Clone]

Coming up in Q2 of this year, Creative are releasing the Nomad Jukebox, a 6GB Digital Music Player. Note digital music, not MP3. This thing is supposed to have a DSP chip in it with changeable codecs. It'll play MP3 and WAV as standard... but I want a 6GB VQF portable. Then I can laugh at the technology curve. Check Nomadworld for the info. I want one already. VQF. Mmm.

I still prefer solid state

[Anonymous Coward]

For a portable device like this, I think that solid state is better. Just the tought of having a hard drive on me when riding a bike or snowboarding (for example) makes me pretty sure it will crash sometime due to the vibrations or schock.

System Requirements...

[RocketJeff]

From the web site at http://www.mp3factorydirect.com/shop.html :

Note: Please make sure you have the following hardware and software to insure that you can use all of the features of the Personal Jukebox: a Pentium PC running Windows 98, a USB port, and CDROM reader.

I'm sure this will go over big with /. readers (even those of us who dual boot between Linux and NT).

Battery Life

[Blue_Fox]

A friend of mine is off touring New Zealand with one of these units in his pack. Battery life is about 10 hours, or about half of the flight there. The unit fires up the hard drive to load a song in memory and then shuts the drive down. Shutting down the hard drive will also improve the drop survival, since the parked drive will withstand much more than a spinning drive. I still wouldn't want to drop test the unit too often!

Oh Yeah? and what about linux support?

[AntiNeutrino]

did you read this in the FAQ? no linux support!

Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?

A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.

Sorry, but I think that's LAME

The good and the bad...

[Dman33]

Good:
-It has 5 gig.
-It looks cool.
-It encodes regular CD tracks to MP3.
-It supports CDDB for track & disk titles.

Bad:
-Hard drive == corruption is possible
-"Familiar Windows "Explore" model for viewing and managing Jukebox content" (Where do I want to go?)
-$10/listening hour seems great until you realize that the unit is about $800!
-Damn! $800 for a stupid MP3 player?!? WTF???
-Oh, that is all of the bad...

Well if $$ was not an option, I would go for it. Oh, and I am sure we went through this whole thing on /. before...
Perhaps here or here

In fact, I think that all of the above goods and bads were outlined in the comments of these articles too! Oh well...it is still a cool device..

Re:The good and the bad...

[MitchL]

Re: hard drive == corruption possible.

not so.

The file system was specially designed to prevent problems like that. It _never_ writes the disk when you are just playing back, and there is a special database-style "commit" operation when writing data.

Unless there's a bug in the software, the PJB won't corrupt the disk during power failures or other problems.

It's $800 because it costs a lot of money to tool up a factory, order zillions of parts, pay for an injection-molding tool, etc. Hopefully things will improve.

/Mitch.
(who worked on this project when it was a research prototype)

What about MP3 CD Players?

[fleckster]

There's an MP3 CD player out there called MamboX which seems very cool. It supports just about anything (MP3s, especially). You can burn tons of CDs and never run out of space, and each CD is only $1 or so (depends where you shop). Of course, it's $170, and a decent CD-RW is around $200 at best. But hey, I think it'd be worth it. Just picture this, after pirating like 20 CDs, you'll have gained $200 worth of CDs for free! So inactuallity, you're SAVING money! ;)

MP3 CD Player More Practical

[Municipa]

I'd rather have a CD player that can play CDs with MP3s burned on them. 80 hours? I mean really, who needs 80 hours of music. 6 hours on 1 cd is plenty for me.. and it's pretty easy to carry more cds. I also don't know if I trust hard drive technology in portable format. Something that small, with a HD in it, I wonder how it stands up to a jog in the park. You can pre order CD MP3 players, only 2 I know of (i'm sure there are more), check out theMambo X and theD'Music. Each is not much more expensive than a regular CD player.

Portable players

[Anonymous Coward]

i carry a 5 gallon portable bowl so that i can pour lots of grits down my pants anywhere i go. thank you.

Where are the portable MP3 CD players??

[AGTiny]

I am still waiting for a cheap CD player that will play both audio and MP3 cd's. I think I saw one advertised once but I assume it ended up in the vaporware bin. Forget this hard drive crap.. 80 hours is nice, but 12 hours * unlimited CD's is nicer! Anyone got any info about something like this?

Re:Where are the portable MP3 CD players??

[meighan]

It's called Mambo-X P300. Runs of AA batteries and will last for about 12 hours. Weighs 9.3oz and comes with a remote control.

I like this one because as much as I am a mp3 freak, I still have an existing collection of over 300 cds. This gives you the option of playing mp3's or regular cds.

--

15 gigs? Howabout infinite gigs?

[marcsiry]

Most of the time I'm at a computer nowadays, I've got at least a 1.5Kb/sec connection to the internet. Add 11Kb/s wireless connection to the mix (IEEE 802.11), make it pervasive, and all you need is some big, fat disk somewhere serving up your entire CD collection.

Or write "Napster-on-the-Fly" and listen to other people's CD collections! ;-)

I don't even need quite this much :)

[reality-bytes]

I honestly don't think that I could be bothered to cue up 80 hours of music; in fact, I don't think I even have 80 hours of music that I would want to listen to.....

What would be nice if someone made the portable PSX that was being rumoured a while back: PSX on the back seat of the bus; now that would be cool ;)

But what I'd really like to see

[miniwookie]

USB, 4.3GB, etc are interesting but what I'm waiting for is something with these specs:

IP addressable/Ethernet support for home networks
Built in CD Player/Software for ripping
Remote Control
Standard Component Outputs
Napster Support
20 GB storage

mp3 vs MD

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a MD player for years and years now. None of the current mp3 players excited me in anyway. They were just an expensive MD machine with fast write times and very limited storage. For a couple bucks I can buy another mini disc as opposed to shelling out for another 32megs..

Despite costing $750 this technology does interest me. Finally a mp3 player thats more than just an geeky MD alternative! I can't wait to get one.

We've known for years mp3 compression like this were going to replace ATRAC compression and MDs and this is the first one with a "buy now" button that is actually worth it.

YAY!

Portable MP3 player with a base station

[crazyj]

I remember seeing a portable MP3 player with a base station at COMDEX. It looked great because the base station could hold a bunch of tunes (as well as encode) and could quickly transfer a portion to the portable player.

Now if someone really wants to make a cool product, make a portable player with multiple "docks." One dock for my computer, one for my home stereo, one for my car, one for my cube, etc.

I think it would be awesome to just carry my entire CD library as MP3 anywhere and just plug it in, most importantly in my car. Right now the biggest CD player for a car is 50 made by Pioneer, I love it because it's huge, but quality-wise it is a big piece of shit.

Also, I should definitely support Airport (or other 802.11) wireless networking so I could up/download to the player in the car form my machine in my room.

_________________________________________

For that price...

[MustardMan]

Really now, for 750 bucks is this thing really worth it? I would rather build my own for much less money, using PC104 boards, and pick a hard drive of my own choosing. This would cost less, and have MUCH more functionality than just a simple mp3 player. The Lizzy design by Thad Starner at MIT Wearables is a good example of how a machine using these PC104 boards gives flexibility and a fairly decent amount of power in a small package. I know what the first thing I will do when I start my new job is...


Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you

THIS DEVICE ALREADY EXISTS

[Gutzalpus]

direct411.com has a listing for a portable mp3 cd player from a company called "Mambo". It's listed as being available for pre-order and will be released mid-February 2000, so I'm not sure what that means exactly. Cost is $200 and battery life is (claimed) 14 hours (making it just perfect for my 10 hour mp3 cd's + still have some battery left over).

Here's the URL:

Mambo portable MP3 cd player

Anyone else know anything about these and when they might be released?

Re:THIS DEVICE ALREADY EXISTS

[Dor]

According to this letter from their Director of Product Marketing, they got pushed back to this month (March 2000). I'll definitely be buying one.
Here's the main link:
http://www.mambox.com/p300.htm

Re:THIS DEVICE ALREADY EXISTS

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want CD's any more! That's the whole point!

The reason I bought the PJB 100 is because I *really* like the idea of not having a bunch of crap (i.e. easily scratchable disks) to carry around. Just the player and a set of headphones, and maybe an extra battery if I am going on a really long flight... (do you know how much 100+ CD's weigh? Now go jogging through an airport with them - ugh!)

If I was worried about weight and exercising with an MP3 player I would just pick up one of the cheepo 32 meg or 64 meg players that are around $150 (and falling) and be done with it - you honestly think a CD ROM based MP3 player is going to be usefull for that? CD's suck! The solid state ones are smaller and don't skip - but put the PJB 100 in the small of your back and after a minute you don't notice it - I have gone bike riding and it isn't that big of a deal...

Laptop? I got one of those already! The battery life stinks and it's too much to get out in a plane just to listen to songs! I agree in a car a laptop can make a great solution (I have seen programs for the Palms that let you control a laptop in the trunk - cool!). Esp. if you put an 802.11 wireless networking card in the said laptop and can fill it up just by parking next to your house :-)

But as for a truely portable player right now, the PJB 100 is it! I know, I have looked. There is lots of stuff "on the horizon" but that doesn't do a darn thing for me monday when I am on a plane flying coast to coast! And I am not going to buy stock in a smart media card company just to have some variety (and I will still have to change the smart media cards - or CD's for that matter).

I will say that the only thing lacking in their jukebox software is the ability to batch upload. Right now it takes forever doing stuff just a folder at a time - but I know that either the software will improve over time or someone else will write an alternate program - that is my only complaint and it's not a major one because there is a really good chance it will get fixed (after all, it's just software).

Oh, again, for those who didn't pick up earlier, the battery is removable and you can have more than one if you are *really* concerned about battery life but as stated by other *owners* of the product (not those just flapping their gums) it hasn't been an issue so far.

You can wait or juggle CD's, I on the other hand will be enjoying a nice, no-repeat music out of one nice, slim player with no other crap required. And with noise cancelling headphones it makes flying a much, much better experience. Those who travel alot know what I am talking about and can appreciate it. Those of you still dinking around in school and living with mom can wait until the tech matures, goes solid state and costs $100 (who wouldn't want that?!?!?) I'm just glad there is something now even if the cost was bordering on outragous :)

so expensive...

[annarchy]

It sure would be nice to be able to take my music with me, too bad its so much. I could probably justify 500 bucks for a gadget like this, but 700+ .....nope. I guess you get what you pay for though.

I think I broke the HTML

[MustardMan]

For some reason, the HTML formatting I entered didnt work, so here's a good old fashioned plain text version of the URL at MIT:

http://www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/lizz y/index.html


Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you

Evolutionary

[el_guapo]

It's neat, of course, but it just makes me wonder (OK, so I'm weird) - what is going to be the REVOLUTIOARY development? Think about it, we've gotten to where CPU power is small and cheap, and storage is small and cheap (relatively). What's the next Big Step? I can't imagine that 10 years from now, I'm gonna be browsing on my new 4GB RAM 1TB HDD 2Ghz laptop. We are rapidly approaching (maybe we're already there?) the point where you stand up, look around, and ask yourself "What's the point?". My personal machine is as follows (to make a point) laptop with a 14.3" TFT, 18GB HDD, 384MB RAM, P3 500Mhz. I read email on this and browse the web. See what I mean? What's the point? Am I just waiting for the next "Killer App"? Or something altogether different????

Re:Evolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumerism is the point. I purchased this laptop for 125. It has 4 megs ram and a 125 meg hd, It runs debian and it does everything I need it for...and more.

Not really a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably don't want to change the contents of the player every day (it does hold 1000 songs!). There are tools for Windows that let you mount an ext2fs drive read-only. I just mounted my mp3 partition under windows and transferred away (it takes a few hours unfortunately, and the software doesn't let you transfer more than one directory at a time). I've had one for 2 weeks now. Annoyingly though, * and : seem to be illegal characters under Windows: if you get the filename data for your ripped CDs from there, you might have a lot of files containing those characters lying around on your harddrive.

Kenwood's Car Mp3 deck...

[Stalemate]

Kenwood is supposed to have a car mp3 deck out this summer in the US. That's what I'm holding out for.

If you want to read the information straight from Kenwood, look at The Response To My Post On Kenwood's Support Board


--

damn that's a lot..

[DrEldarion]

Remote Solution's PJB 100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs),

Anyone else think that that may be a bit too much? I only *HAVE* about 400 mp3s, and I don't listen to a good majority of them anyways...

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Mambo X MP3 cd player update

[Gutzalpus]

Here is information on the release of the Mambo X MP3 portable cd player as to why it hasn't been released yet (I noticed this device mentioned in numerous messages in this thread...):

From: Jason Moh, Director of Product Marketing
To: All MAMBO-X P300 Enthusiasts
Date: December 31, 1999

As some of you may be aware, we have experienced a delay in the production of the Mambo-X. The date has been pushed to March. We understand that this has been cause for concern with getting the product to market, and that both resellers and users would like to know the current status. We would like to address the problem.

The player works, and performs well under normal conditions. Even with most stress testing, it works fine, and would not have any problems for the majority of users. However, during our extended stress testing, we found a problem that could potentially cause temporarily degraded performance for some users; It doesn't involve any physical defect that could break the unit, but rather is a technical one that could affect the playing in certain specific situations. We have found the source of the problem and are implementing an effective solution, which will allow production to go forward. Since this one issue is the only one that has come up with the player, we don't foresee any additional delays in production or shipping.

It is our belief that our users deserve the highest quality for an item like this, and we genuinely want to deliver a superior product to our customers. We greatly appreciate everyone's patience in this situation, and we are confident that everyone will find the result to be worthwhile.

Sincerely,

Jason Moh
Director of Product Marketing
Tagram System Corporation

The URL for this letter

Been a /. headline before

[[Xorian]]

Maybe Rob should consider consolidating and/or eliminating the now-you're-talking department and the now-we're-getting-somewhere department, because this is at least the third time that this exact same device has been a headline on /.:

• 4.8G Portable MP3 Player
• 80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player

Re:Been a /. headline before

[figa]

Does VA Linux own a share in this company?

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[appleofsod]

I'm not sure what it is specifically, but i know it's something OBSCENE, like 140 G's. (!!!!) Check the IBM hardware page for the exact number. Generally though, IBM stuff is WAY over engineered. I had one of their old keyboards, and we tried over and over to break it and it woudn't break. not jumping on it, not driving over it with a trooper, not throwing it off the roof. The way we finally killed it (but only sort of) was we put it under a city bus.

No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[sethdelackner]

From their FAQ,

"Q: I want to copy the MP3s from my PJB-100 back to my PC. How do I do that?

A: You cannot. To ensure that the PJB-100 complies with the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), It is not possible to retrieve the MP3 files from the PJB-100. You should physically posess each CD that you transfer to the PJB-100, or have rights to the material you download from the Internet"

"Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?

A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation. "

Frankly, if they are going to treat their customers like children, they can take someone else's money. There is no way I am going to pay any amount of money for an audio device that is incapable of giving back the data that I put into it. This is the same despotic mentality that gave Intel the idea for encrypting the signal from your video card to your monitor. If I wanted that, I would pay for it. But I don't and no one else does either.

There is just no reason for it other than removing the right to use something you own. Actually, that you license because of course, you can't really own anything anymore.

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[jag111]

I've had my PJB-100 for about a week now and one thing that kind of puzzled me about the interface software is that there is an option when you click on a track to "Export Track" which then opens a file dialog box as if to save the mp3 back onto your system. However, after pressing OK, you get a non-descriptive program error.

Conclusion: The PJB probably has the capability of transferring both ways, they've just put a lock on the software that won't let it and it's only a matter of time before someone either cracks that lock or writes different interface software (perhaps for other OS's as well =)

In short, it seems like the original design for the PJB would've been just about perfect. Then, the legal department got their hands on it and forced a bunch of restrictions.

Food for thought: The interface software is currently at version 1.5.1. According to the history file, the PJB seemed to have support for an Ethernet interface right up until 1.5.0.

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[hawk]

"You see, boss, there's a couple of choices we need to make.s

"The first is whether to make something that can't be used for privacy, still achieves the purpose of playback, and won't buy us a lawsuit that costs millions to defend if we win, and puts us out of business if we lose, or to buy a lawsuit that will costs us thousands of times the revenue from a a handful of extra units, but we'd get brownie points for standing up to the folks that would sue us.

"The second is whether to enter the market now, while we can cover 90% of the potential consumers, or to wait six months and not sell to anyone until we have all 100% covered, losing millions in sales to our competitors."

Sounds like a pass/fail intelligence test to me . . .

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[MitchL]

I wrote that FAQ. I also wrote a bunch of the firmware in the PJB (here at Compaq Corporate Research). Not wanting to anger the recording industry is why you can't copy files back. Given a choice between that an SDMI, I pick this any day. Nobody's treating anyone like children... we'd just rather make money and let other people have MP3 players than give it to lawyers. As for Linux... let's see. I work in a research lab. Researchers like Linux. The only thing stopping an SDK from being released (under GPL) is legal stuff from the corporation. It takes more than just documenting protocols and stuff (reverse engineering wouldn't yield the best results) - real example programs derived from the real sources are the best way to get a Linux/PJB GPL effort started. Keep your fingers crossed, I'm hopeful we'll be able to get an SDK out soon. /Mitch.

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[jetson123]

The concerns for the recording industry are valid but pointless. PDAs running Windows CE or Linux with equivalent capacities and processing power are coming out. They do allow bidirectional transfer. Is the RIAA going to dictate what kind of software we can put on our PDAs?

Maybe what PJB should do is add general PDA and installable software support. Then, you can ship it as is, and people add the PDA application for bidirectional transfer between units and between a unit and their desktop themselves.

Otherwise, I'm just going to wait for the next device. If I'm going to lug around a 5G drive, I at least want to be able to store some files on it as well.

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[kabloie]

The picture of the thing shows what looks a lot like an RJ-45 jack. Guess the USB port got added recently. Like ethernet is obsolete. Gimme a break.

kabloie

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[MitchL]

Your conclusion is not quite right.

"Extract Track" never worked on real PJBs - it was used with "simulated" PJBs eons ago before there was real hardware. It manipulated a container file on the local file system.

Yes, the PJB is just a little computer. Sure, someone could reprogram it to spit data back out. The shipping software doesn't have that support, and there's no code in the Jukebox Manager to deal with it.

That extract track command was removed in 1.5.2. When the simulated PJB support was disabled, we forgot to remove the menu from the resource file.

/Mitch.

Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way.

[MitchL]

That picture _was_ an RJ45 jack. Revision 1 PJBs (the first ones that were actually assembled into portable units) had 10MBit Ethernet controllers on them, since we were familiar with the chip and had lots of them in the lab. About 40 of those were built (I still have mine). Many of the photos you see are of rev1 prototypes, because we were using those pictures to pitch the product viability of the PJB.

The choice of Ethernet vs. USB was difficult. There are lots of really good reasons to use Ethernet (easy compatibility with all OSes, good performance, even the possibility of using TCP & HTTP to talk to it :-).

But, there are also good reasons to use USB, and that's because many people do NOT have Ethernet controllers, and it's unacceptable to ask them to install one just for this application. Not every customer is a slashdot regular, so we have to cater to less-geeky consumers. USB is also getting lots of press these days.

I don't regret the decision (it was the right move for the product), but I still like the idea of Ethernet myself.

/Mitch.

Major Problem with the PJB!

[juuri]

I recently got one of these. Rad device. There is something so amazingly cool when you can carry around music for whatever mood you are in. With that said... Have you ever tried to load a portable device with this much storage? SHEESH. Its like having a second job, I've spent at least 8 hours moving songs over to it from my pc and from some cds I hadn't converted to mp3 yet... and thats only to get about 650 songs on it.

The PJB *is* a high ticket item, but don't worry it comes shipped like one. The headphones have exceptional bass reproduction. The leather case believe it or not is nice and cushy. The only two drawbacks I've noticed so far is the requirement for 98 (and no 95 with USB updates wont do) and my unit is solid black. Not something to impress your girl with on aesthetics.

---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...

The right gadget for the right moment ...

[cah1]

Do you need such large amounts of storage in a portable machine? I'd be more than happy to file away the Gb of MP3s on CD-Rs or HDDs or whatever and only squirt in (or transfer direct from audio CDs) what I needed temporarily, enough for the 2-3-4 hours I was actually going to be mobile.

How stable is the HDD going to be for mobile users? The solid state's greatest marketing point over CDs and MiniDisc walkmen is no moving parts. Nothing to jog.

256Mb of RAM (oh, go on then, 512Mb) will suffice - that's more than enough for a journey, you can refresh from your laptop when you get there!

Hmmm..

[genome]

It's a cute start, but, I think they're jumping on this one a little too fast. I mean, I agree, it's a good idea, but, I have way over 5 GIG of MP3's. The other idea that occurred to me was perhaps using this idea, and putting it in a car.

-genome-
human genome project

More info on RomeMP3

[Anonymous Commando]

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).
________________________

apply to digital cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

When is someone going to take this hard-drive idea and apply it to digital cameras? HDs in MP3 players are dubious for some uses such as jogging due to the contant jolting, but digital cameras (like all cameras) are meant to be held still. Plenty of digital cameras need to be bigger in size than this MP3 player already due to their lenses. It seems perfect. Why are all the digital cameras stuck on the much lower capacity media.

Imagine how many pictures you could take with your 5GB digital camera. :-) Then stick it into a USB port when you go to sleep and let them all transfer to your computer overnight.

And if it's a moving picture camera too (ie camcorder type) you could finally store a decent amount of live action. It'd be the Tivo/Replay of camcorders (except with the ability to get the stuff out to archive it, which I wish Tivo and Replay could do).

-Karl, kpfleger@cs.stanford.edu

Re:apply to digital cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitachi makes a digital camera with a hard drive -- shoots JPEG and MPEG video, holds (I think) 20 minutes of MPEG or 3,0000 JPEGs. http://www.mpegcam.com/m2/index.html

Re:apply to digital cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

A Portable CD Audio + MP3 CD Player Price approx 170 GBP "available anyday" according to the nice lady at Pine UK. http://www.pine-dmusic.com/cd/cd.htm

RIGHT ON!

[mnemon1c]

I have wondered for years why someone hasn't just put a decoder chip inside a cd player and let people burn cd's with mp3's on them, or the recording industry selling mp3 discs? Oh wait, they would never do this, what am i thinking. Maybe someone could modify existing cd players to play mp3's?

Re:RIGHT ON!

[ga53n]

well I don't know, have you ever tried to fit a portable cd player in a jacket. I tried and failed quite a few times. something sized like the md player with higher capacity would be my kind on device.

maybe they should increase the solid state memory and ad a feature so you could stop access to the hd while you are jogging or doing somethins similar rough

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[bonehead]

Don't you EVER do that again!!!

Do you have any idea how hard it is these days to find a keyboard that:

a.) is of high quality
b.) doesn't have Windows keys
c.) has the damn backslash key where it freaking belongs?

I'm down to my last one of those old IBM PS/2 keyboards, and if anyone wants it, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

:-)

It is worth $750?

[kperrier]

Is it really worth that much?

Re:any application

[Anonymous Coward]

surprised you've never heard this one.

what it means is this
if you have 5gig of space, you will eventually want to store 5.1gig.

that's why you can get 20 meg hard drives sell for nothing.

just wanted to clear that up

cd industry runs from tidal wave of money

[kettch]

With regards to the article posted a few days ago, what will the cd industries reation be to this new player? Will they cower in terror from the immmense negative losses?

Will they be able to cope with a negative 2 billion dollar loss, or a negative 200 million drop in cd sales?

only the future can tell....

the Windows keys

[Mr. Neutron]

As someone who administers about 70 Windoze machines, I have to say, the Windows key is nice. When I have to reboot an entire room (which happens a _lot_) it makes things much faster (Win, u, r, enter vs. Ctlr-Esc, u, r, enter).

--

Re:the Windows keys

[juuri]

haha sorry but...

Some MS marketing phrase about everything being easier thanks to Windoze intuative interface design keeps running through my head while imagining someone running around a room entering such an obtuse key sequence on every machine.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...

Re:the Windows keys

[shawb]

The windows key isn't necessarily the best way to shutdown windows... Try Alt-F4.

Re:the Windows keys

[dillon_rinker]

Alt-F4 closes the currently active window. That may or may not be the shell, so Alt-F4 may or may not shut down Windows. Repeating the key sequence doesn't always work either, since some applications pop up a dialog box ("Save Changes?") when they shut down.

Re:the Windows keys

[Anonymous Coward]

and what do you type to shut down any other operating system? I hope you're not implying that unix's command line is more intuitive. :)

Re:the Windows keys

[_Bean_]

I've always been a fan of turning the power to the room on and off and then running around the room smacking x to skip scandisk. If that isn't your thing there is always Ctrl-Alt-Del, Ctrl-Alt-Del

Re:the Windows keys

[delysid-x]

shutdown -h now

Re:the Windows keys

[Anonymous Coward]

Now why in the world would I want to go to every single computer in a room and reboot them manually? NDS does all of that for me with a single command thru ZEN...heck, I can even re-image my 500 node lab in about 15 minutes...just by setting a single flag in NDS...oh...by the way, Linux controls the windows boot process.

Re:the Windows keys

[bonehead]

Ummm....

I never found the Ctrl-Esc combination particularly difficult to master. It's particularly worthwhile considering the advantages of not having the Windows key in the way.

Although I can't recall a situation where I ever needed to reboot an entire room full of machines, I think that if you've got 70 of 'em and it's something you need to do often, I'd recommend abandoning the keyboard method and finding a way to automate the process.

But that's just me...

Yo, how about some NEW news?

[ChrisKnight]

CmdrTaco posted about this same player back in November.

It still hasn't shipped, two months past the release date stated in November.

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/10/1118237.sh tml

Old news, reposted, still vapor ware...

[ChrisKnight]

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/10/1118237.shtm l

IBM laptop drives

[Lazy Jones]

If the 4.86GB laptop drive is the same as the one in my laptop (IBM DBCA-24860, I think), then expect this to make so much noise that you'll want to smash it to pieces. :-) I can't stand the noise that drive makes, it's much louder than modern 3.5" drives and the fact that the laptop's thin plastic case (HP Omnibook 4150) doesn't isolate noise well doesn't help either...

You can get it at $700

[Krollekop]

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?

Ooh... the ultimate MP3 player :)

[Samurai Cat!]

What would rock:

A Bluetooth (or similar-protocol-enabled) MP3 player that would allow you to skim the playlists of OTHER MP3 players in its range, and either a) snag a copy for good or b) just play a song from the other's playlist while it's in range.

Imagine pulling into a parking lot, and hitting the "scan" button... and getting a complete playlist of ALL the other players in the lot...

As well, you could just dump tunes to it from your desktop (also Bluetoothed) machine while your car is sitting in the garage...

RIAA, chew on that! :)

Re:Ooh... the ultimate MP3 player :)

[cpt kangarooski]

Congratulations - you just invented wireless Napster.

I own one of these

[cullman]

I have one of these for about, 3 months now. I love it. Here are some answers to the questions I've seen.

Battery life: 10 Hours.

Danger of using a hard drive: Small. Basically the PJB-100 reads the next ten minutes of music into ram, (this takes about 10 seconds). So the odds of dropping it in a 10 second period out of a 10 minute period are roughly 1 in 60 (or even exactly). Now the dangerous part in my opinion is when you are transferring mp3s. I've dropped mine twice when doing this, with no ill effects. This reading ahead scheme also helps battery life. The funny this is, regardless of how you're listening, random, sequential, repeat, etc... the pjb reads ahead. So if you are listening in shuffle mode and you switch to sequential, there is about a 1 second pause, and you hear the hard drive chirp for about 10 seconds, then it's done.

Size : It is slightly bigger than one would want. It's about the volume of one the first sony sports walkmans. However, it's a little longer and wider, but less thick. It is by no means luggable. I have 3 pound sony laptop, I would never use it for mp3s now. For starters I can put the pjb-100 in my shirt pocket, basically keeping it out of the way while I'm working. Granted with it my pocket there is not much room for anything else. Also, it's very usable for skiing and snow boarding.

Data transfer: It takes about 18 minutes to rip the average CD. One intersting thing I noticed, was that you can listen to other CDs on the player while you're rippng new ones. That's kinda cool. One other nice feature is you can create different play lists using the same song, with only one copy of the song one the player.

Weaknesses: No graphic equalizer, you can only adjust the base from three settings. No backlighting on the LCD.

Bottom line: Great product, probably the best first generation thing I've bought (I buy a lot of first generation things, please don't ask me about replay tv).

Re:I own one of these

[ramparte]

Sorry to post this to the group - there's no email address here. I know someone considering working for replay - I'd love to get your feedback for them.

ramparte@hotmail.com

Finally, enough memory!

[El]

5 GBytes is enough memory. The problem now is that the battery life is only 10 hours! Now if they could only get the battery life up to equal the 80 hours of music...

Also, $750 is a bit steep. For that much money, I'd want an integrated PDA and cellphone, all using the same CPU and memory.

Re:Finally, enough memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

5 GBytes is enough memory. The problem now is that the battery life is only 10 hours!

If they'd designed the thing properly (i.e. so that it worked on standard AA batteries) that wouldn't be a problem. As it is, the 80 hours of storage is reduced to irrelevant marketing hype, given that nobody is going to buy and carry seven extra proprietary battery packs for this thing.

Large Drive Mp3 Players

[flatrabbit]

Creative makes a similar player with 6GB of storage.
It's shaped like a regular discman so it can fit in all the standard carrying cases. Unfortunately i'm sure it's goning to cost a few dollars. but the concept is pretty cool.

copy? ive seen this player before

[cvincent]

htt p://www.hammacher.com/DefaultPage/default.asp?Cont entPage=/publish/74201.htm

I saw this one about a month ago, and they looks strikingly similar :/

Based on tech from Compaq

[doomy]

Now I wonder how much of Itsy is in there. If so, what OS does it run? :)
--

Re:Based on tech from Compaq

[MitchL]

The only things in common between the Itsy and the PJB is that they're both designed by Compaq Corporate Research, and they're both portable devices. The researchers on both projects eat at the same restaurants... does that count? :-)

The PJB has a 24-bit Motorola 56309 DSP as its CPU, and the Itsy uses a StrongARM SA1100. The PJB doesn't have an operating system at all (real programmers don't need 'em :-), and the Itsy runs Linux.

/Mitch.

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Sloppy]

You ought to be ashamed. You intentionally destroyed one of all-time best made pieces of computer hardware.

I'm typing this on an IBM PC AT 84-key keyboard. A hundred years after my corpse has rotted to dust, this keyboard will still be usable. Do you know what the ultimate cause of this keyboard's destruction will be? Our sun's red giant phase.

I wouldn't dare to put this keyboard into the path of a bus. I don't want to be responsible for killing a busload of people.

---

just build a wearable

[moebius_4d]

What I hear people saying they want is access to their music all the time, long power cycle, ability to easily add or remove music, trade with friends, etc. The price point is too high for a dedicated player? Then get or build a wearable. It's not that hard, you have all your stuff with you all the time, and the marginal price increase to add any particular feature, like IR or a camera, is much smaller then to add this same function with a dedicated unit.

Big deal

[Lumpy]

Let's see it compare to my rio-300. we'll put each in a paint shaker and press play. I'll bet the rio plays flawlessly while this silly spinning media,moving armature system will fail miserably and also come out unuseable. having a hard drive in a player is pure stupidity. drop it once while playing, it's now dead. heck look at the over-engineering the empeg went through to get the hard drives safe, and even then it's in a safe environment like a car. This is not a smart product.

Overall Value

[-ParadoX-]

It's a nice system, but for $750 a pop which is rather pricey for my poor geek lifestyle, I'm going to want to run this thing portable for more than just an hour or two...

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Lotek]

Those old PS/2 Keyboards totally rock.

Here is a tip: check out auctions and old retread hardware places. I got mine at a surplus hardware auction at a local college. Using other keyboards is almost physically painful for me, as they let the user get away with bad hand position. Those old IBM keyboards force you to use proper hand position and placement, or you know it almost instantly.

Not to mention, they are indestructable. My boards were used by legions of CS majors for several years before I got them, and they are like they were brand new. Clicky too!

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Car audio and car power adapters are available. Says so right on the linked page. Oh, you didn't read the linked page? I see...

IBM PS/2 keyboards

[jms]

They *are* indestructable. I have a personal stash of about six of them, which is hardly necessary because I have never had a single one fail on me.

First thing I do when I get a new computer is throw away the keyboard.

Re:IBM PS/2 keyboards

[generic]

I had a friend in high school that used to pop off the keys from is PS/2 keyboard and toss them all in the sink when they got dirty. He would wash them with some soap and water then dry em' and pop them back on his keyboard.

Re:IBM PS/2 keyboards

[joenobody]

>First thing I do when I get a new computer is throw away the keyboard.

That's funny, the first thing I do is get a screwdriver and put it together.

CD-ROM based solutions!

[Tackhead]

> would you please slap a decoder onto a CDROM drive so we can have
> portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism

Agreed. I have no interest in flash-memory-based devices. Nor do I have interest in devices which require me to run proprietary software to transfer my MP3s to the device. The former - hey, battery-operated portables that play an hour's worth of music have been around for years. As for the latter, I really don't trust most major companies' closed-source software not to embed RIAA-friendly codes in my MP3s. A CD-ROM-based solution wins on both counts.

(For bonus points - scan the disc as an ISO-9660 disc or just use the ISO-9660-friendly part of the Joliet filesystem for *.mp3 - through all subdirectories - and ignore files not ending in *.mp3. Then you ensure that nobody will have to re-burn their CDs to use them with your device. Primitive solutions like "assume only .mp3 files exist" or "assume all files are in the root directory" are a cop-out, given the infancy of the market.)

People have already mentioned the MamboX as a possible contender - personally, it's been delayed so long that I'm not sure it'll ever get released. (That said, the day I see one is probably the day I buy one! :-)

On the open source front, check out these guys: Soundbastard. Looks like a group of geeks doing a decoder-in-firmware device that'll have an onboard IDE controller. It'll be your choice whether to use it with a conventional CD-ROM or an IDE (laptop or even conventional) hard drive. And the whole thing - hardware and firmware - is GPL'd!

What's nice is that the Soundbastard folks seem to be doing it with a minimum of surface-mount parts, meaning that the end product should be assemblable in kit form by an end user with a soldering iron. Sweeeeeeeet!

5GB? Why?

[Merk]

I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy. To me, 5GB in an MP3 player is like having a car that can do 400 miles per hour. I'll never really get to use that speed so why pay extra for it?

My wishlist for an MP3 player is:

• 64MB upgradable to maybe 128 with a SmartMedia or similar card
• No SDMI handcuffs
• The ability to upload/download files, so I can not only use this to listen to music but to move files around too.
• USB connection. Not so much for the speed but for the convenience.
• Decent battery life, maybe even something that can be recharged by the USB cable.
• Decent "portable audio device" features. Good sound, small form factor, easy to use buttons, but a way to disable them so when I'm working out I don't hit them accidentally, random play, some equalizer type control, etc.

Did I miss anything? What are you guys looking for in an MP3 player? Does such a device exist? I'm eager to ditch my clunky portable CD player. It's a great CD player but has crummy battery life and is really bulky.

Re:5GB? Why?

[Eric Smith]

I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy.

The point is that I don't have to decide which few hours of music I want to listen to before I leave on the trip. I can just load up a substantial part of my collection and choose later.

There's definitely a market for flash-based players that store only a few hours. There are lots of products that address this market. But there's probably also a market for high-end devices like this one.

My complaint about it is that the disk stores too little. IBM makes 12G drives in the same form factor and with the same shock resistance and power consumption as the 4G drive chosen for the PJB. Hopefully they will offer an even more expensive model with the 12G drive.

IBM also makes 25G drives that are only twice the size (17mm tall vs. 9.5mm), but still have very good shock resistance and power requirements. I'd be willing to pay even more to have a PJB with one of those, although it would have to be 9.5mm thicker. 18G is enough to store my entire CD collection, so 25G would leave me room for some expansion.

Alternatively, a model that the drive can easily be swapped would be OK. My Toshiba Libretto palmtop uses drives in this form factor, and although Toshiba doesn't consider the drive to be user-swappable, it was design so that this can easily be done, and I swap drives on it frequently.

Encoding and bit rates

[discHead]

Does anyone know how much this player's software will let you fine-tune the encoding when it rips? Will it let you choose between stereo, joint stereo, and mono? Also notably absent from the on-line literature is any mention of Xing's Variable Bit Rate encoding.

Re:Encoding and bit rates

[MitchL]

The Jukebox Manager lets you encode at 64, 128, 192, 256, and 320kbps. 160kbps was accidentally left out of the table... sigh. Next release maybe.

It uses Fraunhofer's best encoder. It will automatically choose frame-by-frame what stereo mode to use.

It will play back any bitrate (8..320kbps), including VBRs.

/Mitch.

I'd buy that for a dollar...

[Stvweiser]

but not 749. It's definitely a step in the right direction, at least until prices on things like compact flash and memory sticks drop.

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Mik9113]

Yeah, but if he rolled a city bus over it, it had to be one of those old PC keyboards, not the PS/2 101key clicky kind that rule the earth. And those PC keyboards had the function keys in the wrong freakin' place and weighed more than most monitors. The PC keyboard was truly a marvel of overengineering, you could take on a whole bar room full of ruffians and only lose a few keycaps. Windows Keys Suck

I submitted this twice before!!!

[Cheerio Boy]

"RANT mode on"

What's going on here!
I submitted a link to this item on two separate occasions and it was never posted! Here's the most recent comment I made about it. Not to mention the fact that I submitted the original article more than two months ago!

What do you have to do? Be a "Friend of Slashdot" before something gets posted?
Go ahead - moderate me down! I don't care!

"RANT mode off"

The Tick - "Spoon!"

Jukebox Manger, eh?

[GeekLife.com]

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!

This is a Digital/Compaq research lab product

[Yumpee]

The Personal Jukebox was initially developed as a research prototype at Digital (now Compaq)'s System Research Centre (SRC) in Palo Alto, California:

http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/pjb

Y.

Where's the BANDWIDTH!

[axis-techno-geek]

What is with the USB port, even with no traffic, you get what 600-700 KB/sec, to load 4.8 GB at 700 KB/sec will only take 2 hours.

Why didn't they use a 1394 port (FireWire), heck even with the slowest connection (100 mbps) you can get 10 MB/sec transfer rates, giving you a little over 8 minuets to load the whole HD.

Re:Where's the BANDWIDTH!

[1DeepThought]

How many people have FireWire(IEEE1394)? Not many I am betting. How many people have USB? A number in huge orders of magnitude greater than those that have FireWire. I believe your question is answered.

"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to." - I don't remember

Re:Where's the BANDWIDTH!

[Nargler]

It might seem like a long time but keep in mind this is the worse case length of time. How often do you think you'd completely wipe everything off it to upload another 4.8Gig? Don't know about you but most of my mp3 collection would fit on it!

Does it recognize Play/FF/RW?

[beeblebrox]

I know it's a silly question, but... When in a conventional cassette player, does it recognize when the tape is "playing", "rewinding", "fast forwarding"?

The romemp3.com site has no contact info so I can't call/email them to ask, I was wondering if any /.ers might know...

If the answers to the above are favorable, one of these will be permanently residing in my car stereo very soon :-)

Some nice ideas, but what about CD

[Anonymous Coward]

This player has some nice ideas, shame about the price tag. A question would be... how much power does it take to keep standard SDRAM running in standby. Is it possible to use cheap RAM rather than expensive FLASH? I particularily like the 'grab a whole lot then spin down' idea. Could this be translated to a CD player, surely the spinning the disk is what uses up the most power. CD are cheap media and provide an unlimited amount of listening time,if you carry a collection aroud. Even if you drop to 3 inch disks you still get approx. 200MBytes per disk which should be 30 or so songs. Simon Wood.

Re:Some nice ideas, but what about CD

[Eric Smith]

shame about the price tag.

What's wrong with the price tag? Didn't you even read the article before replying? It says "less than $10 per playback hour vs. $250 per playback hour for flash-media storage units."

Is it possible to use cheap RAM rather than expensive FLASH

Cheap RAM? I don't know where you're buying it, but around here (Silicon Valley), RAM still costs on the order of a dollar a megabyte. And at 128 Kbps, that megabyte only plays for about a minute. Using RAM isn't going to make the player much cheaper than a flash-based player, and the battery life will be worse. Besides, if your battery goes dead you'll have to reload the player. Doesn't sound like a fantastic idea to me.

Re:Some nice ideas, but what about CD

[Eric Smith]

Even if you drop to 3 inch disks you still get approx. 200MBytes per disk which should be 30 or so songs.

What kind of 3 inch disk are you talking about, and what the heck is your point?

They're using 2.5 inch disks, and they get 4G on a disk.

Re:Some nice ideas, but what about CD

[CmdrSam]

>>shame about the price tag. >What's wrong with the price tag? What's wrong with it is that it's $800. Sure, you can call it $10 per hour of memory, but it's still $800, and that's a substantial amount of money for a music player. "Only $10^(-23) per atom!" --Sam L-L

Re:Some nice ideas, but what about CD

[Eric Smith]

What's wrong with it is that it's $800

Well, there's a very simple solution to that. Rather than whining about it, just don't buy it. That'll teach those idiots a lesson.

Personally I think it's a good deal, and I'll probably buy one.

Yes, that much storage is useful

[V. Mole]

I would have really liked one of these when I was doing a lot of overseas travel for work -- 12 hour flights, then two or three weeks on-site. I either had to haul a buttload (how much is that, anyway?), or get used to repetition. Being able to haul 80 hours of music in one small device would have been way cool.

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[rcw-work]

140G's can be incurred in much less of a drop than you think. It just has to accelerate at 9.8*140 (1372) meters per second squared.

If the object is one meter high, and falls to a concrete floor, if it reaches a full stop in less than 7.14 milliseconds (almost certain if the material is concrete-like) it has exceeded 140G's.

It may be possible exceed those ratings in a drop as short as a few centimeters.

Wow, how about you DO something about it, whiner

[ukyoCE]

Whine whine, I saw this before.
Why don't you e-mail CmdrTaco and let him know instead of just whining,
"Oh no, my slashdot that I pay good money for has a repeat story out of tens of thousands of submissions"
You want an interesting story?
Go read THIS.
The JERKS hes talking about is you, and the two who replied to your message so far.
If you don't like slashdot, fucking go somewhere else, we don't want you here.
</flame></troll>

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey!

If ya'll live in the Atlanta GA area, try Delta Computers! they have some great AT style PS/2 adapter keyboards! cheap, (don't last long) but hell, for $5 for a brand new keyboard is good, just don't spill stuff in it/etc yet I LOVE them because they don't have windows keys, I do too much dos stuff that doesn't like you changing resolutions when you press a wrong key!

Thnx
Fuller

Does this actually exist? I doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have a picture of it on their website, but instead have a poor illustration. They haven't even thought about it long enough to think that you may want the artists name on the LCD panel. They think it will sell at $800. I think this exists on paper only.

Interesting,...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I wouldn't touch one of these without RCA outputs. Let's face it, tape adapters REALLY suck. Besides, the thing doesn't actually exist yet. Guess it's still empeg for me,....

Gamewire.org Reviewed it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gamewire.org/reviews /pc/hardware/jukebox they gave it raving reviews!! Duncan

This IS what you want

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using a prototype for about a year and a half. I've taken it skiing and snowshoeing and cycling and haven't had a disk error. I use it every day on the train to and from work, and on the bus, and when walking down the street. I use it for 10-12 hours/day at my desk.

It isn't a Sports Walkman (and doesn't cost like one either). It's in the price and fragility range of a laptop - don't drop it, don't shake it like a moracca, don't take it swimming or leave it in the rain.

Yes, a spare battery and AC adapter is a good thing. Yes, I would expect higher capacity models in the future.

The sound quality is JUST FINE (even through a stereo), the capacity (I have 102 complete CDs loaded) is enough for reasonable variety, and the convenience of not carrying around 15lbs of CDs is overwhelming. In short, it's worked well for me and I could never go back.

Get Real..This Costs $750

[quakeaddict]

I can get a PC for that much cash.

amen!

[_Bean_]

I'm currently using an old Packard Bell /me "hangs head in shame" keyboard that's probably 10 years old just because it doesn't have Windows keys. btw Where is the correct location for the backslash key?

Re:amen!

[bonehead]

The correct location for the backslash key is, of course, directly above the Enter key.

The reason that this is the correct location is "Because I Say So." :-)

But where's the control key?

[hawk]

Is it where God meant it to be, next to the "A" (depending upon language)? I've never seen a ps/2 keyboard that doesn't suffer from CKIE syndrome (control key in exile).

then it's quicker for him

[hawk]

since he has to assemble one less piece than you do . . . :)

Re:Wow, how about you DO something about it, whine

[Matchstick]

Actually, I think he's talking about you.

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[asqui]

Whered u get those figures man??
Are you an engineer of some sort? :))

Hmm..lets see...NO

[ukyoCE]

I dont find as much a problem with the parent post just stating it was posted before as the flamers posting replies, especially Wire Tap's reply.
Here is the exact text from his essay that I was basing my complaint on:

Why is it that I post a dozen stories a day, but if one happens a duplicate of something I posted a few weeks ago (hmm, 30 days, a dozen stories a day- that would be 360 stories ago. 300 submissions a day? That would make it 9000 submissions ago. Ooops. Sorry I didn't remember that one) or one that Hemos or Sengan posted yesterday that I missed, or one that they just don't think is up to snuff, there always are a few people ready to chime in helpful criticism: "Slashdot Really Sucks Now" or "This Story isn't Good Enough For Slashdot" or my personal favorite "Is this really News for Nerds?"

And more, since you refused to READ the link..

[ukyoCE]

Heres the rest of the text in his essay relevant to this thread, since apparently the trolls don't know how to follow links and read relevant literature.. :

(speaking of "this was already posted" messages)
These people don't email me. They post it publicly. Considering that I read perhaps 10% of the 3,000 comments posted daily on Slashdot, I miss the vast majority of their complaints. Now I don't care if people want to complain-but often there are bug reports in the complaint that probably could have been fixed if I simply got a polite email. I occasionally read an article that has 30 comments on it, half of which could be summed up by saying:

1.This was posted yesterday
2.Rob is an idiot
3.Slashdot really sucks these days

I'm fine with #2 and #3. You're free to hate anything I do, although the moderators tend to moderate them down because Slashdot sucking, while probably true, is also probably offtopic in a discussion about Holodecks or Light Sabers or Linus coming out of his office and seeing his shadow so transmeta won't update their webpage for 6 months. But if someone had politely emailed #1, then we all could have saved some time.

Re:And more, since you refused to READ the link..

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you stopped reading at that point, because he went on to say:

The scary part is the anger. The anger directed towards me. Towards the folks mentioned in my cheesy examples above. The reckless disregard for other people.

Why is this? Anonymity? Facelessness? Ease of Communication? Yes, Yes, and Yes. Its easy to forget that there is a person on the other side of the submit button. You say things in an email that you would never say to someone's face. I've done it. I'm sure many of you have too. Slashdot. Usenet. IRC. Email.

So why did you call him a whiner, a jerk, and tell him to "fucking go somewhere else"? It's not like he was calling Rob an asshole, he was just pointing out that the story had already been posted. So why did you react with such hostility?

Re:And more, since you refused to READ the link..

[ukyoCE]

I can't disagree with you there. I know my original post was out of anger, but it was still more than "you fsck1ng l4mm4 s14zhd0t suckz n0w r0b 1z s0 st00p1d", I had a point, made it, then backed it up politely in my replies.
I also e-mailed the writer of the parent post apologizing for any anger assumed to be directed at him, and clarified that I was only truly pissed off by the two follow-up posts wich were the exact kind Rob was complaining about.
The writer of the original post agreed with me, and encouraged me(after my apology for proactively yelling at those people) to continue proactively yelling at those people.
I'll still try to do it more politely whenever possible. ::shrugs::

Re:Wow, how about you DO something about it, whine

[cronio]

My post was NOT meant as a flame of CmdrTaco, or anyone else. I realize now that the title really sounds like it is actually. It was meant more as a redirection in case the other story had other links/comments that are still relavent.

WAIT is not over - fluffware?

[Khopesh]

These things are announced right and left. Do a search right here on slashdot if you don't believe me.

These things are often announced only to be forgotten. This announcement has even appeared here on slashdot in the past.

Anything that can hold a few gigs of mp3s or a cdr of mp3s would be nice to see on the market, but I'd rather see the rumored attachment to the palmtops (a Palm VIII variant if I recall correctly) that would allow mp3 play... remember that Palm Pilots can go online, so you'd be able to stream from your home computer and its limitless storage.

Here it is - PDA+MP3

[Khopesh]

Right in the search I posted for "portable mp3 player," exactly what I was talking about:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /05/29/1611223.shtml

Math Error

[Anonymous Coward]

Point taken (hard surfaces yield hard shocks), but:

If dropped from 4.9m (thus falling for 1s and reaching 9.8 m/s), stopping in 7.14 ms (1s/140) will exceed 140G.
If dropped from 1m, it must stop in (2*1m*g)^1/2 / (140g) = 3.23ms to exceed 140G.

Henh!
We are all nerds here, aren't we?

Re:Math Error

[rcw-work]

He/She/It's right. I screwed up on the 1s thing.

I've had one for a few weeks

[tkrotchko]

I think I got one of the first...serial 327 or something like that.

Anyway, its a cool product; it feels beta, but I can live with it.

Here's the good parts:

a)The drive only comes on to fill the 12M buffer in the thing. That means about every ten minutes the drive comes on for 10 seconds.

b) It uses the franhaufer codec, which a lot of people (myself included) is the best.

c) It has a big LCD screen, so you can display a lot of info about the songs playing.

d) It uses USB

Here's the bad part:

1) It uses USB. That limits the xfer rate but more importantly means you can use it with Win98, period. Also, the xfer rate of USB is pitifully slow when you're talking M's of data.

2) No *nix support or even Mac support

3) The encoding takes place in the player itself.

4) You can put songs in, but you can't get them out. I understand this is to deal with various legal issues.

5) the codec encodes at a variety of rates, but not the one I consider optimal, 160. It does 128 and 192, so I have to choose either space or sound.

6) The menu system feels kind of poorly done.

7) It has no means of plugging a microphone directly into it. Thus, you can't use this as a way of capturing live music.

8) Battery life is reasonable, but all over the place. If you're moving a lot to different songs, the disk is going constantly, limiting batter life to 4 hours. If you listen to a lot of albums and songs straight through, you might get the full 10 hours from the rechargable LIon battery.

9) While playing a song, if you try to scroll through your list of songs, it will immediately jump to the song. That means you can't simultaneouly play a song and browse the 80+ hour music library. THIS IS A PAIN IN THE *SS!!!

Still, I consider this a landmark product. Its produced by a Korean company Hango. Its the coolest toy I own right now.

Re:I've had one for a few weeks

[MitchL]

Some minor corrections:

2. Macintosh support is being worked on. I'm waiting for clearance to release an SDK for Linux hackers.

3. The encoding is done on the PC, using Fraunhofer's encoder. The MP3 bits are shipped via USB to the PJB.

4. Not including 160kbps was my mistake. I left it out of the table. We'll get that into a future software update.

6. "menu system feels kind of poorly done." Um, care to explain that? How would you do the menus?

8. The disk will only continuously spin if you're continuously pressing buttons to change songs.

9. [browse while playing] - probably the biggest single requested feature. I think you can count on that eventually getting implemented, as I want it myself, and I worked on the firmware.

/Mitch.

Re:I've had one for a few weeks

[tkrotchko]

""menu system feels kind of poorly done." Um, care to explain that? How would you do the menus?"

I don't know; I suck at user interfaces too.

But in some ways it feels like I'm missing one level of menus; in other ways, the hierarchy feels too rigid. Its almost as if I want variable levels of menus depending on the purpose.

Also, I want to be able to define sets of music. That is, I want to store music hierarchicially, but I want to define play lists that bear no realationship to the physical structure.

Re:I've had one for a few weeks

[MitchL]

We chose three levels deliberately - four was deemed too complex for non-geeks, two was too flat.

MP3 tag information does lend itself to four levels, though (genre/artist/album/track).

You can define your own sets in the PJB - just create a blank set, create discs in the blank set, and copy the tracks in.

For example, I have a set "Driving Mixes" and discs "Fast Mix" and "Slow Mix". The tracks in these discs come from other things in the Rock set.

Similarly, I have about 90 albums in the Rock set, but I also have a "Beatles" set containing only beatles albums, when I want an all-Beatles day.

The PJB lets you make as many references to music as you want, so a single track can live in multiple discs. The storage is not duplicated.

Doesn't that do what you want?

/Mitch.

Re:I've had one for a few weeks

[tkrotchko]

It does do what I want.

I guess I'm too dense to see how you can make logical links to songs anywhere within a set.

When I create a new set and then copy songs into it, does it copy the song, or does it create a link? I'm looking at the software right now, and whats implied is that copying a song physically creates two copies of it.

Re:I've had one for a few weeks

[MitchL]

It looks like it is creating copies of the song, but it's actually just copying directory entries around. You can even rename the copy you made and then make copies of that, and it's _still_ just going to make links.

The PJB does impose the Set/Disc/Track hierarchy though (something I find mildly annoying but I can live with it). So, all tracks must be in a disc, all discs must be in a set. Usually not a problem though.

Basically, the only way you can eat storage is by ripping CDs or adding MP3s from your hard drive. Everything else is just pointers. One of the many benefits of a custom file system :-).

We should make this clearer in the docs.

/Mitch.

WTF?!!!??

[DarthVdr]

I *tried* to post about this before the frickin' comdex, which is when I found it back then, but it was rejected! As was my attempt to post This DIY car mp3 player about two or three weeks ago... WTF is up with that/ --DV "Linux is to BSD as Mac is to Windows"

Previous post is the AUTHOR of the FAQ. BOOST IT.

[sethdelackner]

I don't understand this. My original post got a 5 and 'funny' yet the much more important response is sitting there at a 3.

Thank you Mitch for discussing with the rest of us the issues surrounding these decisions. Forgive me if I wait until that SDK and the digital crack come out though.

Copyright law may have forced the copy restriction, but that doesn't mean copyright law is in the right here. When I buy a license to song x, I expect to have the right to any and all private use (that means copy, mix, disassemble, reverse-engineer, but not distribute in any way).

MamboX will own the portable MP3 market

[falser]

Once MamboX starts shipping it will own the entire market for portable MP3 music - and destroy the market for audio-CD-only portable players.

I don't want to lug around a 5G hard drive. And if I want to put more songs on it, I don't want to hook it up to my computer, waste 20 minutes copying more stuff to it etc. And who the heck would buy a audio CD player, when you can buy an mp3/cd dual player for just a little more.

A CD-based solution is by far the most practical,. I got like 20 mp3 CD's already burned. Once I get my grubby hands an a MamboX I can play them immediately. I can put my cd's in a pack and easily transport 10GB of songs anywhere I go.

It's the perfect solution. I cannot understand why all these companies are putting so much effort into little 32MB players that no-one wants.

"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

40GB player for the same price

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I wish it had an ethernet port, but this is MUCH bigger, and cheaper:

www.mp3changer.com

CDs are dead

[zeck]

The Mambo X is not the player of the future you make it out to be. It will not "own the entire market for portable MP3 music". While I'm sure it will sell a lot of units, CD technology is a dead end. Now that flashRAM is practical in large quantities, CDs will gradually be phased out of existence. For one thing, the technology is old. CDs have been around a while, and are by no means cutting-edge - especially when you realize that DVDs with the same dimensions and shape as CDs and virtually the same cost can hold 26 times as much data. And DVDs have been around a couple of years, so they're not really cutting edge either.

As time goes on, flashRAM and low-power hard disks will become cheaper and more effective until (very soon) 5GB MP3 players will be standard. And why carry a bulky pack of media in addition to your bulky media player, when you can have a pocket-sized player with the media built right in.

The Mambo X is a great idea, and will probably sell fine, but it will by no means own the MP3 player market. I have a 64MB player, and can't imagine going back to the days of carrying a bulky, battery eating CD player and walking carefully to avoid skipping. The Mambo X is just a hack to milk the last drops of usefulness from the rotting fruit of CDs. A good idea, but not the future.

Re:CDs are dead

[falser]

CD's dead? Are you kidding?

CD's outsell every other form of media in existance. They are so cheap, and so popular, that everyone has CD's. It will be 10 years before DVD completely replaces the need for CD.

There is no recordable DVD technology on the market today, and probably won't be for several years. But once it does I'm sure a CD/DVD MP3 player will be created - with the possible capacity of DVD's reaching 17GB it's a whole lot more practical than having a HD built into the unit.

CD's are *much* better than Flash Memory - I've never heard of an MP3 player that has ~600MB of Flash memory. I would never buy a unit with a maximum limit of 64MB. Who would want to listen to the same 10 songs over and over again in a long car ride?

Having the media should be built right into the player is too restrictive. What if I want to trade songs, or bring my mp3's over to a party and play them on a stereo or in a car? I'd have to have adapters ready etc. Once dual CD/mp3's are popular you just need to transport the media.

"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

Re:CDs are dead

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no recordable DVD technology on the market today, and probably won't be for several years. But once it does I'm sure a CD/DVD MP3 player will be created - with the possible capacity of DVD's reaching 17GB it's a whole lot more practical than having a HD built into the unit."

Wrong. I have a DVD-RAM drive that I purchased from Central Computers (in SF) for $289.

Re:CDs are dead

[zeck]

CD's outsell every other form of media in existance.

So did records, once. For a brief period, 8 track tapes were at the top of the market too. And don't forget 5.25" disks. The point is, even though CDs are common pretty much universal, they are old technology and will be replaced.

There is no recordable DVD technology on the market today, and probably won't be for several years.

Really? I'm glad you told me. I'd better throw away all of my DVD-RAMs and accompanying drive since, according to you, none of those things exist.

CD's are *much* better than Flash Memory - I've never heard of an MP3 player that has ~600MB of Flash memory.

Don't be stupid. Would you have said 2 years ago that computers would never cycle faster than 500 mhz? Technology improves, so in a couple of years MP3 players will have 2GB of flash memory (or something new and better) and CDs will still be just like they are today.

Having the media should be built right into the player is too restrictive.

I'll try to interpret your lack of grammar; you think that having built-in media is restrictive. I completely agree. Hence the need for a slot for a memory card - already present on most MP3 players. The drawback to a card is that then you have the same problems as CDs: In ten years technology will have advanced but memory cards will be the same. The answer is to forget about creating a standard memory card (each new player would have its own, allowing technology to advance) and instead allow transfer through USB or even an IR port. All of this will be worked out in the future. What could be more convenient than bringing your MP3 player to a party, plugging it into the host's MP3 stereo and tranferring all of your songs to be played during the party?

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the Mambo X is a bad idea. Actually, I think it's an ingenious temporary solution to a bad legacy problem. But as any idiot knows, the best solution to legacy problems is not to have them at all. Throw out the old technology and usher in the new. Of course it will take a while for the world to change over, and there will be some awkward half-breeds (like the Mambo X) until everything gets sorted out, but things will be better in the long run without CDs.

that's the manufacturer's point of view...

[SEAL]

but not the consumer's.

I fully agree with what the previous poster was saying. We (consumers) don't need to spend money on a product that restricts us so severely, with the assumption that something illegal is being done.

Sure, the company making this MP3 player wants to keep the RIAA happy and avoid being bullied. Fighting that stuff costs money and I understand the decision.

But as consumers there is no way in hell we should be buying such a product. To do so is a tacit approval of the RIAA's point of view. Which, in a nutshell, is that fair use doesn't exist, and consumers should have to pay for each and every copy of a protected work.

Well, frankly, that isn't what the law says. But if we just go along with what the RIAA wants, then it might as well be the law.

If, on the other hand, consumers reject "crippled" hardware and other solutions that restrict their freedom then things change. Companies who are bold enough to challenge the RIAA will sell more products. And sooner or later, more court cases will come about and the laws will become more detailed and clarified (hopefully for the better).

NOT buying limited products like this isn't just a moral decision -- it is a practical one.

Best regards,

SEAL

Re:that's the manufacturer's point of view...

[MitchL]

You're right of course, sooner or later more court cases will come out and eventually all this stuff will get straightened out.

I don't think we (a humble research group :-) want to be the the test case. So, technology-wise I think the PJB has a fair compromise.

That said, (my opinion follows) I can't think of any reasons I'd want to extract music data _from_ my PJB. I've had one for 18 months. What I do _NOT_ want is all the wierd "check-in"/"check-out" stuff that some DRM schemes use, like Sony's MagicGate.

Given a choice, I pick write-only anytime. I really don't want to go down the "rights and freedom" rathole, it's pointless. I just want to carry 100+ of my CDs in a small portable device.

/Mitch.

This just in from Pine USA re SM-200C

[jarataN]

How timely that /. would (re)post a portable mp3 player article on the same day I received this email:

D'music MP3/CD Player - http://www.pineusa.com

Dear All the SM-200C fans:

Pine Technology USA apologizes for the delay of releasing the D'music
SM-200C Portable MP3/CD Player. At this point, we need to announce that
the release date will be delayed one more time to the middle of April.

The only reason due to the delay again is that the player has some minor
technical issues happened in the final stage of testing. In order to
giving our valuable customers the best quality product, we need some time
to find out the solutions. We will try to correct them and release the
product to the public as soon as possible.

In the recent trade show, CeBIT 2000 held in Hannover, Germany starting
from February 24th to March 1st, we had already displayed and demonstrated
the SM-200C at our booth (Hall 13, Booth F20), but the player could not
work perfectly due to the minor technical issues.

PINE hopes all of the SM-200C fans would understand this situation. And,
one more time, we apologize for any inconvenience because of the delay.

Sincerely,
Pine Technology

Re:any application

[Anonymous Coward]

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Way too limiting - My demands - Gimme gimme gimme

[Northern Hunter]

Jeeze, for something with so much storage made by a company with such resources in this day and age (what year is it?), to be so limited... it's pathetic...

• I want to be able to plug this into my USB port and use it as a massive transfer device between computers.
• I want to plug my digital camera into it and dump all the pics to/fro.
• I want an ethernet port on it.
• I want to be able to plug in an 8 inch wide 'hand scanner' (like those cheap hand drawn scanners of old, but 8" wide instead of 4.)
• I want to be able to plug my PDA/Palm into it.
• I want to be able to plug in my mini plug and digitize audio on the fly. Don't forget a pair of spring loaded speaker wire connectors.
• Add an FM receiver
• I want a microphone jack. Ah heck, give me a tiny cheap microphone as well.
• I want to plug in my video cable and digitize that on the fly. And then there's playback.
• There should be an 'leet' model that is a digital camera / video camera / Palm all wrapped in one.
• By the time you've got all that together, USB 2 will be out, so there'll be no more bandwidth problems... oh wait a minute, I already have an ethernet port (100base-T of course) :)
• One word. Bluetooth.

Gimme gimme gimme :)

Need flexible storage/playback

[Serveert]

If I'm storing gigs of mp3's, I might want to play these mp3's at work as well as in my car. So what would be nice is a storage medium which I can put mp3s on and play them with a player which may be my desktop, small computer in my car,...

Sort of like a portable hard drive. If someone can put something like that out, they can leverage off of that and make many players... Is this done? If not someone needs to "make it so."

ibm keyboards.

[GiMP]

Speaking of ibm ps/2 keyboards:

I have 3 that I don't use... they are too loud. Although otherwise they are nice. Ibm made a soft-click board but it is extremely rare and even then was expensive :(

--
Eric Windisch

Name

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or has anyone noticed the posters name

This is old news - and has its own downsides.

[Dred]

This came out about 3 months ago first...and what they don't tell you is the $800 cost, and the fact that you can't put any of your pre-existing MP3s on it. You MUST make new ones with the included software - which is considerably slower than say, AudioGrabber and GoGo combo.

So, your gigabytes of MP3s just became useless with this device - gotta do it all over again.

Check out AudioGalaxy for some reviews and thoughts about these players - this is definitely the future of portable MP3's. Let's not kid ourselves, the Flash RAM option is ridiculous unless we suddenly find a way to make those cards ultra-cheap - and I don't see that happening.

The other way is the CD MP3 player, but that has its own problems - it's no longer skip-free. On the other hand, all those MP3 CDs you already have should work on those.

For now, the cheapest and most effective solution is to get a CD burner and a Discman - you can burn anything you want, blank CDs are less than a $1 a piece (in the US anyway), you can get a Discman for under $50 nowadays as well - and a CD burner has other uses as well, so you don't lose money there.

Re:This is old news - and has its own downsides.

[tkrotchko]

"This came out about 3 months ago first...and what they don't tell you is the $800 cost, and the fact that you can't put any of your pre-existing MP3s on it. You MUST make new ones with the included software"

Sorry, this is not correct (and yes, I have done this).

Re:This is old news - and has its own downsides.

[MitchL]

"You must make new ones with included software". No, No, No. Wrong. Incorrect. Where do people get this misinformation? I worked on the PJB when it was a research project. It would not be much of an MP3 player if you couldn't put your own MP3s on it. The Jukebox Manager does have its quirks (they are being worked on) that make it difficult to import huge trees of MP3s, but downloading your own MP3s is right there, the fourth button on the toolbar. BTW, I get about 7X encoding speed on my 450Mhz PII, using Fraunhofer's very fine encoder. I think that's pretty fast, and the quality of the bitstream is excellent. /Mitch.

Re:This is old news - and has its own downsides.

[MitchL]

[Gack, forgot to do "Plain text" again. Here it is, formatted the way I wanted to see it. Apologies for the double-post.]

"You must make new ones with included software".

No, No, No. Wrong. Incorrect. Where do people get this misinformation?

I worked on the PJB when it was a research project.

It would not be much of an MP3 player if you couldn't put your own MP3s on it. The Jukebox Manager does have its quirks (they are being worked on) that make it difficult to import huge trees of MP3s, but downloading your own MP3s is right there, the fourth button on the toolbar.

BTW, I get about 7X encoding speed on my 450Mhz PII, using Fraunhofer's very fine encoder. I think that's pretty fast, and the quality of the bitstream is excellent.

/Mitch.

HEIL JON KATZ!

[Anonymous Coward]

IIIIIIII| HEIL JON KATZ!
IIII|
IIIIIIIIII|The Fourth Reich is Upon Us!
IIII|
IIIIIIII| jonkatz@slashdot.org

"tivo" for radio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was listening to the Art Bell show (yes, I know) and he was advertising this product which sounded like a "tivo" or "replaytv" for radio. The idea was it would sit on your stereo rack and you could program it to record any radio program you can receive on to its hard drive. It sounds like a great idea but I can't seem to find info about it. Anyone?

hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder if it could be used as an extra harddisk

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish their crappy software were as well designed ! Anybody heard of Lotus ?

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I still have a spare... I've tried new and "improved" keyboards... isn't playing Unreal, trying to hit Ctrl or something like that only to hit the Windoze button and wind up at the start menu fun? As if... and about this new backspace thing.. it's the greatest invention since the QWERTY-system... one giant leap - backwards.

Re:15 gigs? Howabout infinite gigs? Stupid !

[Anonymous Coward]

U stupid ? Do you get an internet connection on the train or in the plane ?

Right on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right on. The guy had a point, he expressed it short, and they moderated him down, just because of their tiny little brains

You->point() : Miss

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the point. Ever seen a unix admin run through a room of Linux machines entering the same command on dozens of different machines?

Re:You->point() : Miss

[Anonymous Coward]

a little expect script should take care of that kind of problem.

USB?

[kabloie]

How exactly am I supposed to get files onto this thing through a USB connector. Load Win98 on a machine around here? Are you nuts?

I guess Linux 2.4 will support USB, so maybe there is hope.

kabloie

Re: the shock rating of the IBM hard drive

[rdl]

It's possible the external casing of the unit
will absorb a good fraction of any impact
energy, though -- it looks like it's made of
plastic.

Laptops are known to survive 1m falls onto
ceramic tile, provided non-essential plastic
pieces of the case take the impact, crack or
chip, and thus suck up a lot of the energy.

I certainly wouldn't want to *throw* this thing
to the ground, but I think dropping it from
waist or shoulder height onto concrete isn't
going to do much more than crack/chip/break
the housing, and possibly the LCD.

Re:Previous post is the AUTHOR of the FAQ. BOOST I

[MitchL]

I'll try to post here if/when I finally get to post the SDK. It will include plenty of information (file system documentation, USB protocol, etc.) and an example program that already runs under Linux. I'm very interested in what the Linux world comes up with for a "Jukebox Manager" equivalent application.

There's no firmware support for retrieving data from the PJB, so the SDK won't help with any digital cracking.

/Mitch.