Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
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!
With a wireless LAN and an IDE interface.
Park outside your house and download.
Then hack it to allow downloads from other cars.
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
Hmm, wasn't this posted like a year ago? Lets see...that story would be here
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
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!)
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
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!
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
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.
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.
$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.
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?
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
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.
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!
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
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 /.:
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
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.
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!
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
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!
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
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).
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.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Now I wonder how much of Itsy is in there. If so, what OS does it run? :)
--
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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>
They're using 2.5 inch disks, and they get 4G on a disk.
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).
www.mp3changer.com
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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