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Dell To Make MP3 Home Stereo Component
ytsejam-ppc writes "C|Net has this story on a new MP3 player that will be part of your home stereo system, but use a connection to your PC to get MP3 files." $199 if bought with a PC configured with home networking capabilities and $249 if bought separately. Not bad, although I'm not seeing how much disk space, or what sort of UI you get.
They also don't tell what sort of connection it'll have to your LAN or PC. Does anyone know?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
This will be alot easier then running my laptop through my stereo for all of my party music.
There is (almost) always a degrade in quality due to compression. I few parts of the mp3 compression algorithms cause sound degrade at just about any frequency (as I recall, I may need to go back over the code).
Eh...
read my other post...after I bought it
If we have to have our computers on to feed the stuff to the 'player', then why would we not use the computer and sound card to play the stuff anyway? If you are worried that your sound card doesn't sound good enough for you, then you would probably also not be satisfied with the quality of MP3s and also of the equipment that Dell makes. After all, Dell aren't audio experts. For $200, the device doesn't seem to offer too great a deal on features.
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Kind of hypocritical, but you like listening to DVD's loud (so do I) but won't listen to mp3's on a equally-configured system. They both use psyco-acustic methods of eliminating redundant info.
My mp3's are at 192k for a stereo file, Dolby Digital uses 384k (usually, can be 640k on rare demo dvd's) for 5.1 channels, and that info is bit-pooled.
DTS uses 1.44m for their encoding. Newer DVD's (Saving private ryan) use half that, around 700k or so, and not bit pooled.
Give a good listen, or read my post above about quality.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
>What, a $250 box from Dell is going to be better?
I don't know yet. But it has a _chance_ to be better. Good DAC's and audio outputs aren't _expensive_, per se, they're just not cheap.
>I somehow doubt the box this article talks about will be much better. It's going to have plenty of noise around it, too.
Totally. But unlike your sound card, which exposes the components and traces directly to the noise field, this will at least have a shielded box around it, cutting the noise floor by tens of dB's. I'm not saying that it's going to be audiophile quality, just that it's starting from a better position than a standard soundcard; that there are benefits to this scheme.
>That's not really a concern for me, I've got a whole other machine for that.
What? You don't run dnetc 24/7 on every machine you have access to?!? Heresy!!! (*grin)
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It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu/ but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?
Try http://cajun.sourceforge.net/.
You can get a SBLive for about 60 to 70 dollars and it is worth every cent.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
First of all, sory for the re-post, but the previous one was html-formatted and didn't include any line breaks. I'm relatively new here. Please limit your hazings to 1 a person and mod the other post down.
:)
I have a unique setup, but my mp3's sound better than anybody else's, heh.
1. Good mp3's. 128k isn't going to cut it. 160k minimum, 192k if you can get it. Napster's filter is a godsend. Hallelujah.
2. For those of you that are (unknowingly) using Xing encoders, I'll say a little prayer. They sacrifice high-end for size, and suck, making cymbols sound like running water. Tip: use Fraunhofer's encoders. I've got the codec (the C source is avaliable somewhere) so even audiograbber uses them. See? It's right in my media control panel.
3. Good soundcards now have digital audio output. Mine has optical digital output. Besides the cool factor (mp3's x-fered via light!) the quality doesn't diminish, you bypass the DAC on the soundcard (which is usually really crappy), plus it is very electrically noisy inside a PC. Digital bypasses that. For those of you using analog, another prayer.
4. Outboard DAC/Pre/Pro. This is a beauty. I've got a pre/pro that decodes the following data:
A. CD digital audio
B. DTS CD audio
C. PCM digital audio (mp3/wav/midi/any other file format)
D. AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 audio
E. DTS 5.1 audio
And guess what? The soundcard's digital output passes all of this info. D&E requires DVD decoding software. It's hard to distinguish mp3's from CD's if ripped right. And the added plus is that you now have a decent Home Theater (at least from the audio standpoint).
5. A good Amp. I use a Carver. Very good for the starving college student, which I am.
6. Good speakers. Paradigm Atoms do very well, thank-you-very-much. Also a bang-for-the-buck must-have (sorry for all the hyphens). And a 12" sub.
Voila! These "digital" speakers sound great, I now have DTS in my dorm room, and mp3's are good. I may have lost 30lbs in the process, but I needed to cut back on my food budget anyways.
This post is longer than I thought, but I just get a little aggravated when people comment on how crappy mp3 is. It's just a format, like wav. Just compressed. Dolby Digital is compressed too, 384k/s. So is DTS, with a higher bit-rate. I think they use ATRAC or ATPCM algorithms, I can't really remember.
However, there's a reason I'm not converting all my cd's to mp3 and selling them back to the record store for $5/ea.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
and it plays CDRs full of mp3s... very nice.. can lose at 180.00 bucks! yahoo!
I stream my MP3s on a Sony Vaio using a PCMCIA wireless LAN card. This wireless connection goes to a server in the NOC on the other side of the building, which relays over to a box sitting right next to me, from which at least 10 people are playing MP3s at any given time. It also runs a web server, an eggdrop bot, and lots of my ridiculous C code that sucks.
I have had no problems.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Well, it's pretty much gotten to the point where the legitimate (non-pirate) uses for MP3 have become so large that there's enough of a market for that. Maybe they realized that people like my are going out and buying whole PeeCees with VFD displays and IR remote sensors, in order to handle these kinds of jobs. There's real money to be made here.
I don't think of it as being like Corning selling bongs. It's more like someone selling spraypaint. Yes, you can use it for vandalism/graffiti, or you can use it to inhale the fumes. But apparently you can also use it to paint things.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Samba is a series of daemons that allow Linux to use the SMB protocol to communicate with Win/NT servers and the like.
-MunKy_v2
Jay
Well, that and a slightly faster CPU. You do benefit a little from the fact that your PC isn't doing the playing.
Though not a whole heck of a lot. I've found I have trouble playing music and compiling at the same time on a K6-2. I get a few skips. My other, faster box does both happily.
I've also found that you don't need a particularly top of the line sound-card either. My six-year old Soundblaster 16 does fine.
Though I personally keep the patch cord short and use long speaker cables.
The cake is a pie
This is completely untrue.
MP3's over a stereo sound fine, provided when you buy the mini-headphone to rca (y cable) you get the one from radio shack that costs $9 instead of the $4 one. And thats just if your computer is more than 6 feet from the stereo. Under six feet, get the cheap cord.
I've got a cheap sound card in my p2, connected to a 100w kenwood reciever and bose speakers. At about 160kbps and higher, you can't hear a difference between mp3 and a cd. Next step is to buy a p100 with a nic, big hard drive and a sound card to run as an mp3 appliance. Anyone know how big a hard drive you can put in a p100?
Mike
Troll Like a Champion Today
I have no idea what their target audience is, but Joe Sixpack is going to be just as happy (if not happier because of the cost savings) with a 20 foot patch cable. I'm sure that my technogeeks and audiophiles will care about the difference, but then it becomes a niche product.
It's in the shape of an audio cassete, it comes with 32 MB of storage space, you can stick it in your car stereo, living room stereo, walkman, etc., it costs $199.95 dollars and it has a USB interface to transfer files from your computer to Rome. It even has a button that doesn't do anything (Menu Button), jejeje.
I haven't used it, but I think the idea is pretty cool!!!
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EHC
This is all fine and dandy, but why does it have to be a connected device to transfer files?
Apple has the AirPort, and there are plenty of other wireless devices running around. I'll be honest and state that my PC does not sit next to my stereo system. (See, there's this wonderful thing called magnetism.)
On another side note, put a zip disk, superdisk, click disk, or some other type of storage medium into the stereo unit and let us tansfer files that way. We really haven't seen much of that. Have we?
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
...A 20-foot stereo patch cord.
My computer is in my living room. My stereo is in my living room. For those who are still starving students, substitute "bedroom" for "livingroom" above.
Most of us who are geeky enough to use MP3s are geeky enough to either a) have our computer in the room in which we spend the most time - which probably also has our stereo, or b) have a spare computer kicking around which may already be in the stereo room.
I question whether a storage-less MP3-to-stereo device is aiming for a market that exists.
MP3 anywhere is in theory a great idea... wireless transmission is great and all, BUT... I can see a couple problems.
/. about this about a week ago... the band MP3 anywhere operates on is much less regulated. read: bigger chance to interfere.
1.) interference: there was a thread on
2.) flexibility: with a real unit sitting next to your stereo, you have better control, etc (think remotes).
3.) range. CAT-5 can go a hell of a lot further without signal loss than mp3 anywhere.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
I suppose it's a good idea if you have a big house and want to use your PC in the office to play Barry White in the bedroom, but, living in a studio apartment, I just plug my stereo into my computer with a few $5 attachments, and voila.
- Justin
You will get a better audio signal from a separate MP3 box than a soundcard in a computer. Then again, this is MP3 we're talking about so it isn't exactly hi-fi to begin with.
Hopefully, it'll look good and have a choice of black or champagne case to fit most audio systems.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Too bad no one will do it :(
Being stuck with napster might not be the best thing ever though...what if all of a sudden people switched to a different program.
I play my mp3's using the UI of my choice on my linux box, send them straight out my ultra-cheap SB16 card from before the invention of the transistor, and using $10 worth of cables from Radio Shack, send them right into the back of my sound system. I don't see the need for a dedicated unit for this, unless your processor is too overtaxed to handle the mp3 decoding (in which case, you'd be better off spending the money on a new processor).
That withstanding, I think it's a cool idea, and definitely a positive move for the mp3 format. It will help people realize that it's just another medium, rather than a weapon of anarchy and mass destruction.
You can do this easily already. All you need is a 486, a soundcard, and a CD drive. Put good 'ole Linux on it and use these scripts. Take a CDR with MP3s burned on it and put it in and listen. You can just run a standard audio cable from the speaker out on the soundcard to the AUX in on your stereo and you have a perfectly good MP3 player. I'm sure it wouldn't be a big deal to mount it in your car. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than $250 for this thing.
-Antipop
My guess is it's the standard turtle beach that Dell puts in their desktops.
Hell, my guess is that this is a dell desktop design - pentium chip, LCD screen, and some sort of embedded OS. Why would they design something from scratch when they've got lots of musty old computer schematics sitting on the shelf.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
And it's made by a company called Lydstrom It can be hooked up to your Computer, or you can record CD's through it. Completely searchable by artist, title, genra, etc. A bit more expensive, though.
The Phono inputs go into a phono preamp before they are passed into the reciever's line ins. I've accidentally done the same thing and it does sound like crap. Note that *real* audiophiles use an external tube preamp for their precious vinyl :)
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
I find that really hard to believe, at least for an average user. I did tests myself between a CD, an 192bit mp3 played through a SoundblasterLive and an 192bit mp3 played through a Soundblaster 16. I could not tell the difference.
I found the cabling itself to be far more important.
The cake is a pie
Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver.
Yes, that would be very cool. It's importent that the computer retain control of things like seeking with the MP3 and selecting songs. I do not want to be stuck to some fucking playlist or a massive random play. I wrote a little program which attempts to learn your music lissening moods. It's not very reliable or stable, but it makes the point that ALL current mp3 players and sterios have uninspired crap for user interfaces. Anyway, if Joe Random Geek has the ability to write his/her own music user interface then we should see some cool shit in a few years, but if the corporations keep giving us the 3 button remote control because they are affraid to cornfuse their customers then we will be stuck with the crappy interfaces we have now.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
>The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap.
>Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
Heh. Yah. I've heard MP3's that sounded 'fine,' even 'good' when you get into the 256K range. But since Napster doesn't have any actual meta information (you can't filter out MP3's made with the insanely bad Xing encoder, for instance), you can never tell what you're getting until it's already assaulting your ears.
I suspect that part of the reason Napster is so popular especially at college campuses is that the target market -- people who definitionally don't care to spend their liquid income on music -- have never owned, probably never HEARD, a proper music reproduction system. And so they believe the myth that "MP3's are CD-quality" because played back over 4" speakers out a $3.99 motherboard-mounted sound chipset, MP3's and CDROM-spun audio CD's _do_ sound about the same.
Not that everyone who hears a proper reference system will become a raving audiophile junkie and disavow anything but first-play virgin vinyl in an anechoic chamber with $35000 in speakers alone; many many people are content to hear their music in 'good enough' fidelity, and I'm not here to bash them for that by any means....
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Will it need disk space if it connects to your PC?
I dont think it is meant to replace your CD player, but rather to compliment it. You keep the CD player (or get a SA-CD player or whatever) for your "serious" listening, and use the MP3 deck when you download a bunch of 80's crap for a party or whatever, so you don't have to go buy a bunch of music you're only going to play once.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Not bad, although I'm not seeing how much disk space, or what sort of UI you get.
I think the point is, the disk space is provided by the PC. Maybe it plays the files over the network? Seems like bandwith would be an issue though..
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
By George! Someone call the patent office! I think we're in business!
The ones they're currently selling are locked to region 1 and don't let you kill Macrovision. They still play MP3s, though (it only groks ISO-9660, not Rock Ridge or Joliet, so names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).
I snagged one of the "good ones" back when the /. articles you mentioned were first put up. Can't say that I've gotten any urge to become a "DVD p1r4t3" (arrr) as a result, though. :-)
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Why would you spend $190 and up for an mp3 player when apex dvd players are under $180?
:) Goes great in your home stereo rack as well.
You remember apex AD-600A DVD player? The one that let you play illegal DVDs. Well, they took that feature out but it still plays cd's full of mp3's -- plus it has a built in DVD player
I wish that they had a picture of the unit, but what I am envisioning from the description is a box with little more than a 'off' switch and a display in front (it doesn't need either, but they are cheap, and would aid marketing at this price point - $250 w/o system purchase)
The real magic would be the 'back panel', standard output jacks to mate with a home stereo, which unfortunately will probably just be phono plugs and clamp-ons for bare speaker wire. It's really too bad, because believe me, if they added stereo 'balanced input' jacks, I might even suggest it some people I know. getting a decent balanced in to a computer, even one with a studio-style music card (not a Soundblaster) is pretty expensive.But that would make the device and I/O device, and I see no suggestion that it's anything but an output device.
I also wouldn't immediately assume it's Ethernet or anything like that. It could be USB.
It's primary advantages (if I envision it correctly) are:
0) Fiddle free operation: i could (and have, in the course of helping people with home studios) create some of all of the advantages below without adding components, but I like hacking. And because it was important to get it 100%, I noticed how many apparent solutions weren't 100% for various reasons
1) Skip protection -- face it, HDDs are *slow* to change tracks. I doubt there's an IDE HDD around that can't be pushed to 20-30ms *worst case* track seeks. Don't bother checking your specs, NO ONE publishes worst case numbers, and even their 'typical' and 'capability' (best case) figures are unstandardized between manufacturers and suspect, technically, as savvy HDD review sites like Storage Review will happily show you, via exhaustive testing and comparisons. So when you're doing a few things at once, skips aren't unheard of, even at modest CPU loads. I rarely notice them, and they don't bother me, but they are there. A meg of buffer at the output device is cheap and easy anti-skip pretection.
2) Better sound reproduction -- Yeah, you could buy a better sound card, but as great as those can sound, a dedicated device can be better, especially when driving a stereo amp/speakers . I'm no sound snob personally, but I help a lot of home studio musicians, and the difference is easy to hear, even for me. Similarly, few PC speakers come close to a goo set of home stereo speakers. Even some $300 'big name' (you'd recognize it instantly) USB speakers I tested recently were very disappointing.
3) Device segregation: There are actually good reasons why a normal user mught be better off keeping a 'game style' (FMsynth/MIDI/WAV) card like a soundblaster as his primary audio device, rather than a killer studio-style card -- I have a friend who has separate semi-pro MIDI and digital audio cards, and a cheap Ensoniq for apps/surfing, so he doesn't have to power up his whole studio for normal computing. Such a set-up tends to create confusion in apps that expect a SB compatible, too. Sure, you could do this with USB speaker drivers, but see above re: those
4) Looks cool on shelf: don't knock it
5) allows full utilization of existing Home Entertainment components (which, in many houses doesn't revolve around the PC, as strange as that sounds) Unfortunately, this is merely a theoretical advantage. This product seems clearly targeted at the market that will buy first (computer users) and will probably not even talk to other home stereo components, aside from passing on the audio analog signals.
However, having said all that, I am utterly unmoved by this product, and I expect most users will be, too. What I'd like is a "digital entertainment station" - bidirectional, so it would be able to pipe me radio, TV, good balanced mike input etc. as well as piping my decompressing and D/A'ing mp3 (and WAV) stream to the speakers.
There is a market out there for this. Lots of companies sell this stuff for Beaucoup bucks. But Dell is going for a mass market portal model for revenue and expansion
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
why not turn an old pc (486 and on) into an mp3 player. you can easily hook it up to a stero via the sound card. and all you need is mpg123 and lots of diskspace.
Check out www.mambox.com - It does all your asking, its portable, and its $199. Pretty sweet.
I have a p5-200 in a little case that has many gigs of mp3s on a couple of hard drives. it has a sb16, but could easily have some fancy schmancy newfangled sound board.
if you're goin to have to have a computer on which to store mp3s, why not play mp3s off that computer too? I'm lost.
Most likely the computer would store the MP3s. UI would be like any CD player. Might have an external component on your computer to setup the play list.
Interesting device. I'd wait until the technology grows before getting one.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
It would be pretty sweet if it mounted like a stereo component, could be openned and modified similar to a computer rack component (or a stereo rack component if you really put some thought into it).
Probably doesn't need disk space if all it is doing is playing it, could be done over the network, but network traffic would interfere with operation, of course.
What would be cool is if it did more than MP3. MP3 loses some of the sound quality (still love it though). Perhaps there are other formats out there begging to be ported to this that could be added with some sort of bios flash or software/hardware modification?
Eh...
Actually, you can buy car decks that play CD's of MP3's. Crutchfield (www.crutchfield.com) sells two such units: the Kenwood eXcelon Z919 for $750 (list price... they won't list what they actually sell it for) and the Aiwa CDC-MP3 for $300.
it's called an Apex 600A :) (too bad they've been neutered).
just my blog and pix
Well I'm glad to see that Dell is finally stepping up to the plate, and joining the 21st century. It will be interesting to see how the first wave of MP3 players interact with our home stereos. We should be glad that Dell is putting an MP3 player on the market instead of some company like Pioneer, even though I'm sure Pioneer's would have a lot more lights!
Get your own Red Swingline Stapler
MP3 Discman. It took 3 weeks or so to get it, and the way you change dirs on the CD is screwy, but other than that I'm very satisfied.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
The phono input is set to take the input from a phono cartridge. There used to be seperate inputs for moving coil and moving magnet cartridges. Sometimes I get a chuckle from the "vinyl's best" folks, records have equalization (riaa?) set when to mixed to compensate for various frequency rolloffs inherent with "wax." Digital really is the purest signal when properly recorded.
In a time of universal lies, Telling the Truth is a revolutionary act - George Orwell
Crap it may be, but then MP3 is crap in the first place (at least at any reasonable bitrate). It turns the top end into nasty, tinny slush, and bass becomes incredibly flabby. Anyone with an ear for fidelity wouldn't be using MP3 to start with.
Of course, it turns out that lots of people don't have an ear for fidelity (perhaps, ironically, as a result of going to too many rock concerts?), hence all the oft repeated claims that "it's as good as CD", and "I can't tell the difference". For the lucky people who can't tell the difference, just run a cable from your PC and have done with it. The rest of us will stick with CDs.
What...are you deaf? What equipment did play that back on? On my Kenwood Dolby Digital receiver with Wharfedale speakers it's a hell of a difference. 128kb mp3's have always sounded as a washermachine while 192kb sounds better, but still not good.
names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).
.. a lot of MP3s obviously have pretty long filenames!
.. and this doesn't bother me since I don't own any Macs.
That's ISO 9660 level 1. Level 2 lets you have filenames that are up to 31 characters in length. The reason for this restriction is that the Mac OS cannot currently handle filenames that are longer than this, and an industry standard is useless if it is not implementable across a wide variety of platforms. Nevertheless, the ISO 9660 implementations found in most other operating systems (i.e., Linux, Windows, etc.) happily handle filenames that are longer than this, and that's a good thing
Unfortunately, I had to manually add an extra option ("-e") to mkisofs to get it to pre-master images with the longer filenames. Sure, it breaks ISO 9660, but doesn't seem to cause any problems on any OS other than the Mac OS
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I've had this idea for a while, knew someone would eventually come along and do it. So here's my version of the dream component:
:) - Your kids will no longer each need their own copy of the same CD. This may require the server to restrict streaming the same song to two different clients simoultaneously to avoid any legal hassles.
(1) A CD player and software to allow you to rip & encode all your CDs just by popping them in and pressing one button. (CD player of course can also be used to play Plain Old CDS and MP3CDs)
(2) Digital output for modern amps would provide noise free sound and 190 kb/s encoding gives you decent enough quality.
(3) Embedded Linux on a SansDisk and space for two 2.5" laptop drives would give you a nice quiet player. - and making it user upgradeable means you can double your players capacity every couple years. (A 10 GB drive for starters should allow for over 100 CDs)
(4) NTSC output for enhanced on screen menu based music selectoins and categorization. (No X server though as that would be overkill)
(5) Builtin streaming server for whole house music. (Assuming you have Cat 5 going to every room
(6) Enough RAM to cache the songs being played to HD access doesn't cause interrupts. (64 MB should be more than enough to allow local play + 5 streams at 190 kb/s)
(7) Front mounted USB port to allow download of MP3s to handheld devices.
(8) HTTP server for remote browsing of song selection with option to allow download/upload of files from remote source with module to sync file uploads to main CD database. (You may have to make this option a "hack" to allow yourself some protection from lawsuits that will probavly ensue anyway.)
(9) CDDB access as well as on screen/IR remote title entry for those not savvy enough to network the thing.
When someone builds one of these I'll be their first customer. - Anyone want to collaborate on making this the first open source and open design consumer product?
--Aaron Greenberg
Here's what I never understood: CD's aren't that good! In some ways, LP phonographs have better sound (they are analog). I would like to see a new audio format (say, on DVD discs) with the following:
-96khz sampling rate
-24 (or 32?) bit audio
-5.1 channel surround sound
-and would it hurt to include the Artist, Album and Track names in the table of contents, so they can be shown on computers/stereos playing the disc?
That, I think, would push any differences between the digitized sound and the original analog sound out of the range of human discrimination.
And, as a bonus - if we devote more data to sound quality, there is less total available recording time for an artist making an album. I would like to see a limit of say, 45 minutes. I think that would cut down on the number of crap fluff songs that artists put in their album nowadays because they feel like they need to fill the 74 minutes or just like to hear their voice.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I believe that this may be what you're looking for. Get a 486, install mpg123 and those scripts and just insert your CDR of MP3s and it'll play. Works great and it's cheaper than something like these MPTrip Discmans which are $115, which isn't too bad but you can't beat free =).
-Antipop
Why not just hook up the line-out of your soundcard to the line-in of your stereo? All you need is some cables.
Besides, you can not only use it for listening to MP3s but for gaming or listening to MOD, XM, S3M etc...
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
With this box you get your mp3 collection accessible from the same place as your stereo, without having your computer and monitor in the same room (produces noise and heat, looks ugly and reminds you about work that you need to do...). If my PC is placed in another room it's easier to ignore it even if I know it's involved.
Probably you get a remote control too...
I'll still plug my laptop into the stereo for now, if it's all the same with you.
That's just a normal soundcard with S/PDIF and optical outputs, with a wavetable and other such stuff added, too.
What I'm on about is actually an MP3 to WAV rendering engine onboard the card, and not all that other foo. Poke a raw MP3 stream at the card, get standard full-bandwidth digital audio out the digital outs the other side, without my primary CPU needing to think about the decoding. Save CPU time and frontside/PCI bus bandwidth.
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i have an apex dvd player that will play CDRs full of mp3s.. it is perfect! it was 179.00 bucks from circuit city... can't beat that.. g
this technology needs to be merged with something
like dragon "naturally speaking" or some other
voice recognition software so that we can lay in
bed and say "stereo, play some cd|some mix|some song" and for control volume.
hook it into something napster/gnutella-like (presuming it gets developed to where it treats the napster network as an extension of the local filesystem) and you never have to leave your bed.
I submitted a story about a petition to have Halo ported to the PC/Mac. Since the take over of Bungie by Microsoft, it has been an X-Box only title. Would this story have intersted people?
On the story submission page I wouldn't mind seeing who rejected my story, and maybe a reason for its rejection.
Bang & Olufsen I presume? They're ugly and proprietary (cables).
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I also disagree with people who say "that's too hard" and "people aren't smart enough to do that." We aren't talking about anything hard here, popping in a sound card and ethernet, and a small linux distro. If someone put together a little pamphlet on it, it would be easier than assembling a swing set.
Eh...
This is interesting, as I was currently in the planning process of building a unit like this. With the REDICULOUSLY low price of hard drives, I was going to allocate a spare P166MMX to my audio cabinet in my living room and interface it to some sort of "remote control receiver" that would talk serial (so I could then use a universal remote control to go forward/backward through song)s. Anyone know of a good remote control receiver unit?
FWIW, pro studios have been using a 96/24 format for the past few years, and some DVD audio specs on the drafting board want to use that same scheme.
That pushes the amount of data/time up to something like 320% of standard CD audio (for stereo -- 5.1 would triple THAT), but the fidelity is, as you say, getting into the realm where we're pushing the limits of physics for humans to perceive the granularity.
I once saw it demonstrated that in 32 bits, you have the resolution to capture everything from explosion-style-shock-wave-air-compression on down to the quantum jiggling of molecules due to heat, with a lot left over. 24 bit is just about right to capture the subset of that range that's audible to the human eardrum.
--
The only advantage I can see for this product is that you can control your mp3's from another room.
There are many other options for that, including the Irman infrared receiver to control your PC with a normal remote. And with $29 it's a lot cheaper too.
But the article seems to imply that the decoding will be going on inside the box- that means there's a processor, RAM, NIC (or whatever they're going to use to get the input), and sound card in there with it. Sure, the noisiest component (the hard drive) won't be there, but there's still going to be enough electronic whine to make me wince. And if it's that bad, it'll probably be enought to put an audiophile into some sort of epileptic episode. Especially if they go with a *shudder* Sound Blaster 16 or similiar sound card.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
A friend of mine has one of these and although the player feels a bit cheap (the CD-bay is for example an ordinary computer CD-bay with a nicer front) and the DVD playback quality doesn't match that of more expensive systems (OK for me though) it does play (non VBR) MP3s very nicely from the CDs without any problems with what I found to be good quality after some listening (no serious testing though).
Unfortunately I don't have a link to them, www.raite.com seems to be in the hands of a domain squatter
I use mserv to play mp3s and Penguin Power to control playback using RF wireless remotes scattered all over the house (including a couple of keychain remotes). MP3s allow a much larger collection than even the largest of CD changers and much better control of playback preferences. The X10 interface adds the ability to control it from all over the house.
The only problem is that Linux sound quality is lacking. My machine dual boots, and my Creative AudioPCI card sounds dramatically better under Windows than under Linux. I still use Linux though, because I haven't gotten software with the same functionality under Windows. I keep hoping that someday I'll upgrade the kernel and suddenly the sound quality will improve.
If Dell's player can be configured to decode and playback any MP3 pushed to it by a PC on the network I'd buy it and use it as an outboard decoder. That way all the intelligence of song selection could be handled by X10 triggered scripts on the PC.
Dammit, I should have read your whole post before responding. ;)
I would rather see an MP3 encoder that is built in hardware than one in software, you know solidstate.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I have a feeling this will become a trend as MP3 and digital music becomes more mainstream. I just hope I wont need to put a cow-motif stereo component from Gateway on my stereo rack!
-Woody
This is actually the Rio Reciever being bundled with new PCs and getting a shiny new Dell casing...
More info here...
What I really want to see is a Kerbango Internet Radio in a normal black stereo component box. I'd stack of these right in with my receiver and DVD player in the entertainment center.
The point being that it is completely standalone with an Ethernet port (connecting to a PC is not a requirement).
From what I can tell, the Dell box has no storage of its own and requires a PC to feed the stream to it. No thanks, as another poster mentioned, a 20 foot patch cable will serve THAT purpose just as well.
Now I'll have to print out all my Natalie Portman skins and paste them on the box!
[pink beam of light]
Each directory on the CD (it scans recursively) is considered a playlist. The code scans the cd for directories containing mp3s and keeps an alphabetical list of those. It then scans those directories for mp3's and makes an alphabetical list of tracks within the playlist. The user can then use an infrared remote to scan through the disk one track at a time, with shuffle mode on, at the playlist level, or even type a number to go directly to a track.
I have one of these running at home and I'm about to convert the code to use a hard drive and use it in the car.
I have considered building these for sale, but I don't have any good connections to get hardware cheap, so it wouldn't be very profitable for me and not worth the time.
If anyone is interested in one of these and has some extra hardware, I'd consider converting your hardware into a player.
My email is ericwyles [at] hotmail [dot] com.
I'm not saying I would do this for certain -- I'm just throwing the idea out to see what you all think. Depending on the response I'll decide whether or not to pursue this idea further.
PEACE
I
--
Does anyone else find it bizarre, that no matter how illegal mp3 piracy is, we see major companies making mp3 players to everyones delight. I mean, obviously there's alot of free mp3 music out there, but I really don't think the hype could sustain itself unless people had pirated things. Anyway, I just find it comical in a sense that another major player has decided to enter this market of selling "paraphanilia" [sic]. I guess it would be akin to Corningwear selling bongs, or Sony selling pirate radio kits.
-f
..when some thought that MP3 was going the way of DAT and Mini-Disc (although I've had both and loved them both.. but I digress).
Just goes to show that a compression scheme has less to do with the availability/ease of access.. in regards to the success of a carrier medium.
.........
Whatever you come across in life.. as long as there's no money in it,... it'll probably be alright.
What's slick about MP3 Server Box is the number of ways you can control music playback, IR Remote, Command Line, multiple GUI clients, Windows clients, and my favorite the CGI client. Lets me control from any system w/browser on my home network.
>I don't think SMB wasn't designed
FIX:
I don't think SMB was designed...
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
It's not ready to post up yet, but if anyone wants a copy, my email is ducdan at usa dot net. I think my ultimate goal would be a bootable CD (faster than a floppy and elimininates a piece of hardware) that autoprobes your sound card, mounts the CD and starts the player. With a 2.8MB CD boot image it wouldn't be that hard to add support for network and SMBFS, if you want to copy the Dell player.
If you get them from your CDs why would you need a redundant piece of equipment in your stereo rack?
So I don't have to get up and change disks. I can also put my CD collection in storage, so it works out to being much more compact in my living room even with the player size taken into account. I can also get more than one of these, so my collection is in every room.
Also, I'd like an MP3 player (with internal storage) so I don't have to take my >$1000 CD collection to my office, I can just take the device.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I really like the idea of this. Running a patch cord to the stereo is not a good option for me. As someone explained, my sound card sitting inside my PC is not the best for driving my Rotel. Especially if I'm playing Quake3 or Unreal Tournament.
.asf, .mpg, etc. Then, for me, it starts to get real interesting.
What I really want is video out, so I can play
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap
</WHINE>
What's your point? Are you stating for the record that MP3 does not provide the absolute best audio fidelity available?
No shit.
MP3 serves it's purpose. It provides a perfectly acceptable listening experience for the rest of us non-anal-retentive people who carry MP3mans or play music on our PC while we work or play. It has good sound quality that any layman is hard pressed to distinguish from CD. And the 128Kbps bitrate gives an excellent tradeoff between quality and file size.
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
Ah, well. I know there's no point arguing with one of these luddite zealots.
Umm...its not even that hard, you get a cable at radio shack, that goes from your sound card to the audio in of your stereo, I have mine hooked up to two 4' speakers in my living room.
The idea is to make your MP3 CD's bootable with Linux and a built-in player. Then you only depend on a computer when you bring your MP3 CD's, it does not matter what is installed on that computer.
--
yes... i just got a apex DVD player that will play dvds CDs vcd and CDRs full of mp3s... very nice at 179.00 bucks... i love it...
This is just a SoundBlaster Live with an extra chip that can decode MP3 in hardware and save less than 5% of the overall CPU load. Not much point, especially as it is then specific to a certain audio file format.
Audio decompression is no longer demanding enough relative to modern CPUs to make this worthwhile. An SBlive and a reciever with a digital in is all you really need.
doh.. no else has to stop.. to hell with them and you.
I think the potential (and demand) for things like this is great. What other projects are there that are designed to turn low-end hardware into MP3 players? I was only aware of mp3box, does anyone know of any others?
-Antipop
I'm seeing a lot of "Why not just run a cable from your computer?" posts.
A few points:
-- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.
-- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.
-- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.
-- Moving the decoder and DACs offboard allows them to be shielded from the above noise, as well as keeps your analog run to the shortest possible. Unless your stereo amp is 12" from your computer, you're running cables that are too long for the best possible sound. You're also probably running some $1.99 Radio Shack 1/8"<->RCA cable, instead of a short run of something good like Monster Cable. Keeping the signal digital as long as possible minimizes analog loss. (Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)
-- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?
Of course, in case you can't tell, I'm all into extreme fidelity, so I don't understand AT ALL why anyone would want to listen to MP3's as their primary source of music. (*shudder) But I'm just elitist that way, don't mind me....
--
Yeah, this is *much* better than my set up now. I'd much rather pay $250 for a box to connect to my pc and my receiver than to pay $8 for the cable from from my pc to my receiver. You can never have too many middle men, especially when that middle man makes someone else $.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
This thing looks pretty spiff. A self-contained component MP3 jukebox with ethernet. Supposedly has Linux & MacOS software coming.
I like the idea behind the Dell thing if it doesn't require its own storage. The last thing I need it a dozen 30GB drives all over the house.
The main reason MP3 was developed was for portability. Their quality is low, even on their highest sampling level. They are great when you are on the road, but over a good stereo you hear exactly what they are: a low quality CD substitute. On a PC or in your car you don't hear the difference because of all the ambient environmental noise, but in your home that's not the case. Let MP3's stick to what they are good at: letting you listen to your favorite tunes on a laptop with crappy speakers. I would hope that we could have a better quality format for those that want it and have the space. I mean no disrespect to the developers of MP3! I think it is a great format and I use it a lot, but it isn't a substitute for a CD yet.
When is somebody going to make a stereo component that reads ISO9660 filesystems, goes into the directory structure, assembles a list of the MP3 files in the filesystem, and then plays them? I like to burn CD-Rs full of MP3s (which amounts to about eleven hours worth of music), bring them to work, and listen to music all day with xmms (never once hearing the same song twice.) It would be nice if I could take that same CD and throw it into a MP3 stereo component and have it be able to recognize the format.
..)
Hard drives are nice, but IMHO removable media is nicer. That way you don't have to maintain a network connection between your stereo and your computer. Or better yet, do it both ways (of course, that type of design decision tends to affect the price tag
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Is a box with ethernet and audio line outs that I could mount with the stereo, and just run the net connection over there instead of the audio wires (being better able to deal with the distance). Then allow users to play MP3 they have on their local machine out through this device and through the stereo.
I have nice PC speakers, but they're being used for other things (games, etc) and they aren't as nice as my stereo setup. But it's a pain to dedicate a whole freaking PC to sitting behind the stereo, plus then you have to control it remotely, which just seems to be getting to be way more work than this ought to be (actually, this might be just what I want if it has an RJ45 on the back!).
This must be why I keep buying CDs.
The price sits at $799 right now and if it comes down to $699, I'm buying one. It has all the feature I want and integrated with my stereo. Way cool IMHO.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
When I started doing MP3's a couple years ago, I decided to get a really nice sound card and really nice computer speakers. The benefit to me was that I could also improve my computer game experience (especially now with the A3D surround sound in games) So I have my own happy computer stereo solution.
However, I do understand that some people have extremely expensive stereo equipment, probably hooked up with the TV enjoyment, so I do understand the need to maybe move the music from the computer to the 10' tall speakers in the living room!
But there is a cheaper solution, and it's been out for a year now: x10.com's MP3 Anywhere. It will broadcast your MP3's from your PC wirelessly to your stereo. I can't vouch which technology they're using since their web site has changed since last year, but probably a radio frequency since walls are not a problem. I suggested this to a friend of mine who needed to get music from his bedroom's computer to the living room (60 feet away, down some steps - obviously wiring wasn't a solution)
So, maybe it's X10's fault for not being a market figurehead like Dell. So let's look at Dell's black box. What the hell does it DO??? From their zero specs, It looks like it contains a network connection, buttons on the front, and a in-out port to push ALL the data straight to the Aux Input of the stereo.
I'm curious who is PLAYING the Mp3. Is it the computer? Or this black box? Hopefully it's the black box, then they could add usefull features like a CD-R tray in front, and make it a stand alone player. Truly... to make this component shine, it should be just like the diskman. PLAYS mp3's. Heck, options could be to include hard drive space, CD-R, or even DVD-R. You can fit a lot of music on a 5.4GB DVD. And THEN and only then have this "added" value of being able to access your computer's mp3 storage.
It's just seems WAY too pricey for something that won't work alone. I'll say it one last time: accessing your computer mp3's would be the killer feature for a stereo component that already played MP3's.
Rader
Just like they did with the Diamond Rio and are trying to do with Napster and mp3.com. Plus, what happens when a newer, better digital music format comes out? There's already an open source digital music format whose sound quality is just as good as MP3 if not better. Will this contraption support it, or the other formats such as .vqf? I'm sure it will be about as upgradeable as a typical Dell PC. In other words, prepare to shell out several hundred dollars more for another of Dell's proprietary boxes.
________________ Joe Hylkema WINTEL-FREE ZONE This is a 100% Microsoft-free message. No M$ product participated
According to the article, Dell is just designing the outside box and marketing them...
The real mker is S3 www.s3.com. S3 seems to make the Rio and Home Free family of products.
Looks like it might be a cool product to play with... I could not find any information about the product on the s3 site....
I actually wonder if it has any storage whatsoever... the blurb phrases it kind of strangely:
To me, that sounds like a very expensive winamp-in-a-can... more like a translator than a solid-state MP3 jukebox, which is what I'd much rather have in my stereo. :)
Don't forget the MP3 discman. Burn CDs full of MP3s and play 'em. I got one from easybuy2000.com... took a while to get it in, and the way they make you change dirs on the cd is kinda screwy, but other than that it works great. $125 too, can't beat that.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
You can find something similiar to this here. It is from the makers of the Rio and it uses phone lines to send the songs. Sort of a cross between a Rio and their Home-Free Networking.
Ok, this is slashdot, we're mostly linux computer-types here... I can beleive no one's mentioned CAJUN.
It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu, but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?
Anyway, it basically turns a linux box into a jukebox... Mine is kindof neat, I mounted a pentium motherboard into a tape deck. It runs LIRC [linux infrared remote control] and so I control it with my reciever's remote. It also has a nifty LCD screen.
Also, because I wanted it to sound good, I bought a fancy SBlive and use SP/DIF, and also took out all the fans and spun down the hard drive. So now it just plays mp3s over ethernet from the samba server in my basement.
Definetly not mass market or anything, and a real pain to build... but it's so 1337...
Ive got my ram image of it here along with some really bad blurry pictures.
I hope cajun is progressing 'cause it is really cool.
MP3 is the current popular format, but it will surely be extended with more features. I hope all these dedicated MP3 players have an easy way to upgrade them to support new formats. Otherwise, we'll all be stuck with the old formats, because lots of people will have players that only play MP3's, so content providers won't use newer formats because they don't want to lose part of their audience.
I have a unique setup, but my mp3's sound better than anybody else's, heh. 1. Good mp3's. 128k isn't going to cut it. 160k minimum, 192k if you can get it. Napster's filter is a godsend. Hallelujah. 2. For those of you that are (unknowingly) using Xing encoders, I'll say a little prayer. They sacrifice high-end for size, and suck, making cymbols sound like running water. Tip: use Fraunhofer's encoders. I've got the codec (the C source is avaliable somewhere) so even audiograbber uses them. See? It's right in my media control panel. :) 2. Good soundcards now have digital audio output. Mine has optical digital output. Besides the cool factor (mp3's x-fered via light!) the quality doesn't diminish, you bypass the DAC on the soundcard (which is usually really crappy), plus it is very electrically noisy inside a PC. Digital bypasses that. For those of you using analog, another prayer. 3. Outboard DAC/Pre/Pro. This is a beauty. I've got a pre/pro that decodes the following data: A. CD digital audio B. DTS CD audio C. PCM digital audio (mp3/wav/midi/any other file format) D. AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 audio E. DTS 5.1 audio And guess what? The soundcard's digital output passes all of this info. D&E require WinDVD or PowerDVD. It's hard to distinguish mp3's from CD's if ripped right. And the added plus is that you now have a decent Home Theater (at least from the audio standpoint). 4. A good Amp. I use a Carver. Very good for the starving college student, which I am. 5. Good speakers. Paradigm Atoms do very well, thank-you-very-much. Also a bang-for-the-buck must-have (sorry for all the hyphens). And a 12" sub. Voila! These "digital" speakers sound great, I now have DTS in my dorm room, and mp3's are good. I may have lost 30lbs in the process, but I needed to cut back on my food budget anyways. This post is longer than I thought, but I just get a little aggravated when people comment on how crappy mp3 is. It's just a format, like wav. Just compressed. Dolby Digital is compressed too, 384k/s.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Hmm, seems to me with a device the size of a home stereo component, you could put a full 3.5in HD in it to store the MP3's on.... imagine the possibilities: 75gigs of home stereo MP3 storage... *drool*
-colin
-Colin
...a real standard for MP3 audio encoded on a CD. It could even be based upon an existing standard (ie. ISO 9660), with some required heirarchial structure.
That way, we could have a real MP3 home audio player, rather than something that just seems to simplify what can already be done with a PC and some technical knowledge.
I would buy one, especially if they were available for car stereos. And you could even integrate it with a standard CD player!
mp3stereo
Knight Rider MP3 (I know, corny name)
ELMP or here
Will this only recognize mp3 files on fat partitions? It'd be nice if it could be used to recognize mp3's on an ext2/BeOS/MacOS formatted drive.
Alrighty... What I'm looking to do is just throw together a cheap machine to play the mp3s over a network.
Throw in a p133 (or equivalent), a sound card, a small hard drive pretty much just for the linux install, a video card with tv-out (so I can get the video over the tv screen, and choose my playlist easily), and a product from intelogis (I think it's called the Passport) for the networking (it runs the network over the electrical outlets, which is good if you don't want wires strung all over), and a wireless mouse (or some other input solution, such as IR remote or something...)
But anyways... As the topic states, I'm new to linux; I've used it for programming, I understand the file system, but I've never installed it or managed it or anything like that. How do I go about finding info like: "best" version for this purpose (ie. very quick boot time, able to handle video card with tv-out, ...), and various other things like this?
Thanks...
Quite simply, some people can tell the difference in sound, and some can't. Maybe their ears aren't as sensitive, maybe they just don't listen to music enough to recognize the acoustic crispness (or lack thereof), or maybe they just never heard of Polk Audio speakers. The big problem here, is that most people (I'd hope) who own decent home stereo systems can tell the difference between FM stereo and CD sound. Add this Dell MP3 player to their system, and they will certainly notice the slightly degraded sound quality, or maybe the wishy-washy high frequencies of anything run through Xing Encoder. On cheap 10$ pc speakers these details might go unnoticed, but on a 300 watt home stereo, the difference will be rather obvious to a moderately trained listener.
Audio enthusiasts are notorious for being extremely perfectionist. We're the guys who frown upon car mp3 players that don't go above 192kbps. We're the guys who want to punch the marketroid from Diamond who said "If you recompress at 96kbps you can fit more tunes on your Rio". We're the guys who measure the distance between each wall and speaker to make sure everything is perfectly balanced. We're the guys who'd rather enjoy silence, than use cheap Radio Scrap headphones.
No self respecting audiophile would dare patch in a consumer cheap-grade MP3 player onto his 4500$ Harman-Kardon system. It's just absurd.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm guessing it'll be used primarily with Win9x file shares, so any such file server should work including 95/98, NT, and Samba.
According to an article on Slashdot Dell has decided to jump into
;)
the stereo market by making an MP3 box that feeds data from your computer
to an RCA equipped Stereo for $199. (I always wanted an external
soundcard).
It seems that the computer industry has decided to make a buck of
Metallica's misfortune. Will this help to Legitimize MP3's by breaking
down the difference between them and cassette tapes which can be freely
copied and traded (abeit illegally). Mabye they'll stop overreacting when
it becomes apparent that they would have to begin impounding walkmen.
I wonder how much time in jail I'd get for my old Beatles tapes
I don't know about this Dell product specifically, but I'd love a product that acts as a front-end MP3 player and plugs into a 100baseT network. I'd throw some whopping hard drives into an old box, stick in the basement and have it do nothing but serve up the MP3s. That way there's a central music repository that can be accessed by not only any PC in the house, but a non-PC stereo component.
The MP3 player component would be great - just walk up, hit the power switch and browse for music. Better than having to wait for a noisy PC to boot up, and it could be nice and easy to use. And there are places where it'd be nicer to have a simple little component rather than a full-blown PC setup.
No, there's not much point to it if you're a solitary geek. But if you're a geek living with other people and you already have a home network, hey, for 250 bones it could be a cool little deal.
Aiwa claims to make one...too bad it was pushed back to SEPTEMBER.
On my home LAN I have no problems streaming MP3 files from one computer to another. I can listen to music on my webcam machine streamed over the LAN from downstairs at my primary machine. Sure, there's a lot of data being transferred, but it doesn't really interfere with other traffic on the home LAN - the MP3 streaming is all within a firewall, which manages Internet access for...it's now five client machines...off of a single cable modem connection.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
This will be the most cool thing to happen! Can't wait to jam to my own made jams!
Got shack?
ShackCentral Network
Worlds best gaming network!!!
And can I get a hallelujah? The MP3's you get off of the net sound like crap. They get played back on crap equipment.
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap. Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
The recording industry is running against competition that is simply too big to squash underfoot. Their previous stretgy was to threaten a lawsuit against the isp, using lobbying to get laws such as DMCA that make this a viable plan for scaring ISP's to death. Obviously, this won't work against large companies such as Dell.
It remains to be seen what they will actually do to handle this. Will they go down struggling and gasping for air, suing everone they can as they defend their distribution system down to the last dime? Or will they quietly and blissfully disappear?
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
I agree with you that the RIAA will try, but I dont think that they can have a problem with the playing of MP3's, only the distribution of them. Now if this thing had a DSL modem, and embedded Napster then it would be something for the RIAA to go after, and something that I would want really bad
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I had an old IBM Aptiva board lying around with a P75 chip in it, and it played MP3's just fine with DOS 7 from Win95 and XTC-Play... I guess the author of XTC has said programs like Sonique have slighter better quality output, but I never heard a noticeable difference through casual listening...
I'd like to get rid of that board... it's just taking up space and the hard drive controller is flaky on bootup once in a while... anyone want it?
In a way, this MP3 revolution is scary.
More and more companies are making these players, nad more and more people are using them.
Now I know they're designed to pay MP3s, and the companies aren't responsible for legal MP3s being played, but it does encourage the distribution of illegal MP3s.
Wouldn't be surprised if a law suit came up against these players in the near future...
Anyway... I think companies are missing the boat on this one... they never have features, or if they do, they're basically f'd up computers with proprietary features.
Here's some advice for mp3 box people: Linux with SAMBA, drag and drop mp3s onto it via 100mb ethernet, and give us a full screen display that you can read even in Picture-In-Picture... or give us a nice LCD, and simple remote... don't comprimize and make us juggle whatever paradigm you thought would be cool...
----
I don't know if this still exists or not, there is a piece of software that I had installed for my brother's computer (Windows Box) that came with his internal IDE Zip drive. It would allow a CD to be copied and transfered into the MP2 file format with decient results. Of course, this would be copied onto the Zip Disk and then could be transfered over to the hard drive.
Once it was on the hard drive (or before transfering) I would change the file extension from MP2 to MP3 and winamp would read it with no problem. As well as Window's media Player.
Put the box on a network, burn the MP3 to CD and you were set to go to do what you wish. I would do this for most of what I wanted to transfer over to MP3's.
I also do believe that there was an interface that would hook up to CDDB and get the song title, artist and alblum imported in the ID and in the file name.
Till then.
kernal32.exe has corrupted and turned into popcorn32.exe
Ah...why should I shell out two C-notes for this when two Georges will get me a cable from RadioWhack that does the exact same thing?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I've thought about this, and I think that the main reason would be a clean UI - a nice looking component with a remote & an easy to use display would be way more attractive in the entertainment center than an old laptop... $200 doesn't sound all that bad really. I just hope it takes CAT5 rather than some wierd home networking standard....
Shame, I've been looking for a USB-based hardware MP3 player to chain off my overstressed old 266MMX portable...
This afternoon (minutes before this was posted), I finally decided I wanted to plug my computer into the stereo. And after reading this story and associated posts, I drove straight to Best Buy.
:).
I've got an Sound Blaster 32PNP sound card, Sony STR-DE835 Receiver (second from Sony's top of the line for consumer-grade receivers), and some big-ass JBL 3-way speakers with 12" woofers. I just bought $18 worth of Recoton (read: CRAP) RCA cable and a "stereo mini" adapter to plug RCA into my sound card. (note, please don't think I'm hyping up the stereo... I'm sure ALL of you have much better stereos than I do)
Anyway, This thing sounds bitchin! I love it, and its the best $18 I've spent on a nerd-toy in a while.
I dropped a real store-bought RIAA-endorsed Enya CD in my CD player (a real stereo component). I started up XMMS with a 128kbps joint-stereo "Book of Days" track. Pressed play on both at the same time and then switched the stereo's input back and forth between the MP3 player on the computer and the real CD player.
There IS a difference between the CD and the MP3. My humble and non audiophile opinion is that the difference is caused by the MP3 compression, as I could not hear ANY noise from the computer, even with the stereo relatively cranked. (no hisses, UM-UM-UM-UMs, etc)
I cannot imagine how this Dell thing would do a better job, except that it ceratinly would be nice to have a remote control and not have to fish tape another RCA cable under the carpet and across the room
On a side note, when I set this thing up I initially made the BIG mistake of plugging it into the "Phono" RCA input on the stereo... have no idea why it sounded so horrible. Then I moved it to the "CD" input and now it sounds great.
A typical MP3 is 1M in size for each 1 minute of music. That's only 16K a second. Even if you don't get 10 megabits a second, you still are JUST FINE.
Latency on hard drives is hardly a problem too! When I skip around on my CD-R's... sometimes I get latency. But only sometimes. Hard drives are much faster. I'm actually surprised all of this came up as a question. Just pushing NEXT on a cd-player will take longer than practically getting the first 20 seconds of an mp3 song from a hard drive and over the network connection.
Rader
Also, what kind of networking is it, and is it something that would normally be found near your stereo? If it's HPNA, it'd need a phone jack nearby...how many of you have phone jacks near your stereo stack? If you're gonna have to run cable anyway, you might as well forget about HPNA and go straight to Fast Ethernet.
(I suppose the "geek factor" might still draw some people in. I had a K6-200 parked under my TV, configured to play DVDs, MP3 CDs, MP3s off of the file server, etc. That still didn't stop me from snagging an Apex AD-600A (one of the region-free, Macrovision-free models) back when they were available.)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
If this has a FireWire port. I remember back when I first read about FireWire, one of its potential applications was the "digital home entertainment system" you firewire VCR connects to your firewire TV and your firewire stereo system, etc... Everything is exttremely easy to use and analog degredation is a thing of the past. Of course, DVD manfucturers are prevented by the MPAA from making FireWire DVD players, but it would still be cool...
They won't ban it. They'll just make Dell put some sort of wacky copy protection on it. Isn't that what they did with the Rio?
-- Dr. Eldarion --