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New Philips eXpanium Will Use 3" CDs
SpunOne writes: "Phillips is gearing up to release their new eXpanium mp3 player. Unlike most players in the past that use proprietary storage technology, Phillips is turning to the use of those cute little 3 inch CDs that have been around forever, but never really used for much. Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter. Phillips even has a beta test available if you're interested in giving it a try." If you should get into the beta group (50 people), why not write up a report for us on this little device? If it only played .ogg files, I would try to pre-order from somewhere.
Amazing that people are complaining about the lack of an open-source only hardware media player when the media player itself will likely contain undisclosed or otherwise patented components.
At Otakon this past weekend I heard about a new Panasonic DVD-R drive that's due out by November that will be only $500 US.
Ka-Ching! Count me in!
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
this guy seems to be protected and allowed to post this stuff
Yes, he is. It's called the First Amendment and a recent court ruling.
I don't like what he's saying either, and seeing it sprayed all over Slashdot is a gigantic pain in the butt. You replying to him will just make him post more though, so stop it and ignore the stupid fuck.
By the way Ralph, one trick ponies get boring real quick. Not to mention, no self respecting troll would be so offensive. You're more like a script kiddie and crap flooder rolled into one. What a bunch of arse, bring back OOG, the glorious Meept!, hell KTB & spiralx are more than welcome. At least they had style and inteligence.
It's a sad day when the trolling on Slashdot isn't the same as it used to be.
I have a first edition Phillips Expanium mp3 player, and I must say, Phillips really seemed to be rushing this baby to market. Immediately, I knew this device was constructed in poor quality. The sound coming out of it is pretty bad, even for mp3 standards. It is slow to read the CD-Rs, taking approx. 20 sec before any music comes out of it. Even after the initial reading, it still takes 5-10 seconds when changeing tracks. Browsing through 120 or so tunes is almost out of the question, unless you happen to memorize the track position of all your favorites. It supports directories as albums, which is nice, but I wish they had a higher-end model. It'd be nice if they improved sound controls (equalizer anyone?) and/or made an insertable car player model! Still, despite it sound performance and overall cheapness, it is much more convenient carrying one CD-R than carrying 10 Red Book CDs.
"given the fact that there aren't nearly as many females as males"
Um, actually there are very slightly more females than males, at least in the United States and I believe worldwide(females live longer, which makes up for the fact that more boys are born than girls). The ratio is 100 females to 96 males in the United States (2000 data). Why do I get the feeling that you're a geek?
why Phillips thinks that people will want one of these more than a Sony MDLP player/recorder?
Copying your existing MP3 files you downloaded from mp3.com or that you ripped from your CDs a while ago to a 3-inch CD-R is a lossless process. Decoding MP3 and encoding ATRAC isn't.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So, if you don't use the CD to full capacity, insert some padding to move your data to the outside of the disk.
I don't think slot-loading iMacs will be able to spit them out, or am i thinking of the oval-shaped CDs?
Actually, a standard CD is roughly 4 3/4 inches. Thus, the uncrackable copy prevention technology requires about an additional 20 megabytes of space. Perhaps an encoded speech from Jack Valenti?
But then again, I could be wrong.
i bought a mess of those for a marketing campaign. The unfortuanate thing is that they dont make stickers for them yet, so i just use them for when im in a hurry and want like 5 songs, or a real small bunch of data. They work great in everything but my old 2x cd writer. The only problem here is that I wanted an MP3 player because it is skip resistant...plus now were back to size restraints due to physical media. Unless its really cheap, i'm just not interested...
________________________________________________
Nice try, but the storage capacity of CDs is tied to the surface area, not the diameter.. Now try to remember that 'pi r squared' thing from high school, and do the math again..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Samsung has announced memory stick support in some products as well, as well as manufacturing the media.
I'm really stunned that the concept of a Data-MD never caught on. (Actually, I'm surprised that MD never really caught on in the US, a fight that the record companies won). As far as I know, no one has made one. It strikes me as a really useful data storage device, which, theoretically would hold in the 500MB range. The media is cheap, small and rewriteable. Why hasn't anyone developed and marketed this?
50 PK 3 inch CD-R's = $60 (found by typing 3 in CDR in search string.....not even listed when clicking Media)
50 PK 5 inch = $8 (found by clicking media, then 50 PK CD-R)
Granted, I would NOT trust anything much under 15-18 bucks per 50 PK to burn at anything but 1-2x with any consistency, even if it was 18 bucks it would be cheaper! Per disk even!
3 in with above price = 60/50 = $1.20 per disk.
5 in with above price = 8/50 = $0.16 per disk
5 in with good quality = 18/50 = $0.36 per disk
Now, price per MB
3 in price per MB = 1.20/180 = rounds up to about a penny per MB .16/650 = Not even a penny per MB it's about .0002 per MB .36/650 = Not even a penny again.....about .0005 per MB.
5 in price per MB =
5 in quality per MB =
Now, I know that the 3 inchers are DEFINITELY cheaper then solid state memory devices such as CF, MMC, SD or Smart Media, but they ain't cheaper then 5 inchers! Now if you WANT to pay $0.50 to $1.00 per 5 inch disk, go right ahead! I won't stop you! ;) I don't buy the cheapest disks either for 5 inchers, but I don't spend $0.50 to $1.00 either, at least not at the moment! I have some ULTRA cheapies and they won't burn at 8 x at all. Throttle them down to 1-2x and they work fine. I don't loose data and those are the ones I use for little one offs. So cheap I can throw them away and it would not bother me. I just DO not find the need to spend mega bucks on a CD just to assure that it burns at a high speed or whatever. I don't have a burn proof drive anyway, so whether it takes 8 minutes or 20 to burn a disk my computer's still tied up. I also don't waste too much money on RW's yet. When they start to be as cheap as all CD-R's AND can be read in every CD player I own (I don't buy new drives or players every freakin year either...), I will STAY AWAY!
Gorkman
Normally, it is done by test reads. The drive spins up to the maximum speed and the laser turns on and focuses. Then the drive tries to read from the disk. If it can read it keeps spinning at the same rate. If not, it will slow down and try again. It does this every time that the drive stops and restarts. This is why you will sometimes get really slow read rates on dirty/damaged/out of balance (poor labeling) CDs.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
Personally, when trying to remain gender neutral (very rare for me, I dislike the PC crap), I use "their".
"being the slaves of the evil industry that they are" they make CD recorders?
Fixed point ogg decoders have already been written. This is how the HipZip supports Vorbis.
--
GCP
I like my MP3-CD player because of how much music I can fit onto a disk, and because it's easy to switch what I'm listening to without having to have a computer around to re-download music to a memory-based MP3 player.
But try bringing one of those to the gym. most of the aerobic machines have drink-holders in them, but a full-sized CD player won't easily fit in them. This might be a good compromise when you want the benefits of CD storage (165 MB is still more than 32 or 64!) but a much smaller size (not only for the gym, but for carrying in pockets, etc.
To me, it looks like the best of both worlds.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
Because 8cm CDRs arent a proprietry format! minidisk is SONY minidisk
http://www.freecom.com
Interesting.
Could you supply a link to the source ??
The dimensions of a minidisc is 7cm x 6.75cm x 0.5cm and holds ~160mb of data.
Plus, minidiscs have a hard plastic case with locking shutter door so they won't get scratched.
This (otherwise) fine 5-disc changer suffers a serious jam if you try to play a round 8cm disc in it. And it has to be turned upside down if you want to get the CD out of it.
ummm Just make sure that there is nothing malicious in the upgrade before installing it. I bet that it would show up pretty quick in message boards and the like.
To upgrade Sonic Blue's Rio Volt, you have to burn a special cd with the upgrade in the root of the disc.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I don't see any major reasons for it to catch on over conventional cd based mp3 players, which could potentially have less compatibility problems...
3 inch CDs = 185 Megabytes.
Bush's education improvements were
All excellent points, but you forgot the most important thing:
They're really cute.
This
Get with the program, almost all decent CD players have skip protection. Philips says this one has 100 seconds of skip protection on the specs page.
yah, but while 3" might be 60% of 5", we are dealing w/a circle right? the area of a circle is pi x r ^ 2 if i rember my last gemotry class right, which explains why they have so much less data space.
Cause the testers keep one if I recall...I signed up 4 days ago.
The MPzip 3-inch MP3/CD Player has been available for a while now.
Personally, I think the relatively small capacity and dubious availability of 3" CDRs make these players a poor choice.
You're better off with a full size MP3 CD player or a big memory unit like an Intel Pocket Concert Audio Player if you need the smaller size.
Business card CDs can hold up to about 55 MB of data or almost 40 minutes of CD-quality audio[1] encoded with a good MP3 encoder, making them very useful for distributing a demo "tape." This new player should be able to play them just fine.
[1]Yes, 192 kbps MP3 encoded with LAME is CD-quality if you consider CD-quality to mean "capable of profound fidelity over 0-20 kHz" or "transparent to the human ear vs. stereo 16 bit per channel linear PCM." See also R3mix.net's "encoding" section.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Memory Sticks are still by and large Sony's Proprietary effort. Compact Flash & Smart Media aren't. (I prefer Compact Flash)
Whereas a MiniDisc is 2.5" wide, holds 256 MB, costs $2 each for a rewritable blank disk, the player is much less sesceptible to skipping, and uses ATRAC2, which at 256Kbps is generally regarded to be superior to mp3 at the same bit rate,
So why bother with this mutant mp3-cd player? It won't even play my CDs.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
actually there is some text: dumbass.
The 3 inch CD only holds about 85 megs more then a Zip disk. I can buy 50 650 Meggers for about half the price of a 3 incher, so why bother? The only thing I can think of is that they'd be nice to drop a 3 incher into a letter or card with a bunch of images on them to send it to grandparents who would like to see pics of their grandchild a bit more. While the size is nice, I don't see why they'd go that way. 2 inches is not much to save! Now if they could build a 3 inch CD player that fits into, or onto a handheld I'd be more interested, but for a portable player, maybe not. If I am selected to beta test, it will still be a neat toy to play with!
Gorkman
Look, nobody really cares about Ogg Vorbis. It may be free and may be non-patented, but it is too late to market to become anything of any use.
It is so sickening to listen to this horseshit.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It's already been mentioned, but the Freecom Beatman has been around for a while now and after my old Rio300 gave up on my I decided to opt for one of these nifty 8cm players instead. One or two others are on the market right now, but I opted for the Beatman because of its wide availability and Freecoms reputation for portable storage devices.
Whereas my Rio only held 32MB of music, the Beatman will store 185 megs. That translates to over 50 tracks in my case. And as opposed to conventional CD/MP3 players such as the original expanium, the Beatman fits snugly into my coat pocket. True, it's slightly larger than a solid state MP3 player and the battery life is a bit shorter (about half as long on twice as many batteries), but those are the only disadvantages that spring to mind. The media is nice and cheap and you can carry many of the little discs around without much hassle. Skipping isn't too much of a problem. The buffer seems to cope quite well with all but the severest of shocks. But best of all is the price. The beatman, here in NL, costs less than the cheapest MP3 player on the market.
There are several areas where philips could improve on the beatman design in their new Expanium. For one, I'd like to see a display that reproduces song titles and not only track numbers. It would also be nice to have some form of directory support. I'd like be able to easily select all songs in a single folder, for example. Finally, the beatman is still a bit on the largish side. This seems to be a result of Freecom using a standard reading mechanism as encountered in laptops and made for regular 13cm CDs instead of a custom mechanism. I think Philips could possibly shave several centimeters off the depth of the thing with a custom-built optical subsystem. The original Expanium was somewhat bulky, however. It remains to be seen how small this one will be.
I want the fire back.
Well, I don't see the point in using Ogg Vorbis anyway considering the widespread availability of MP3 encoders. As for any patent issues, I think that has been sufficiently dilluted to be worthless. Software and mathematical patents are bullshit anyway.
Well, first of all, these little discs are cool as hell. Problem is my Plextor CD-R drive will not burn them. Actually, no Plextor drive will burn them. I called Plextor and asked, and they said that, since it wasn't a "standard" they would not include support for it. The lack of ability to burn comes from their in-drive "smart" chip that detects CD-R flaws and size and such pre-recording to minimize problems later on. It isn't a new feature. I own and older 8x recorder, and the newer ones have the same problem.
Now, my question is... where can you get one of these 3" - 5" adapters? I've looked high and low for them, online, local stores, even while I was in Singapore. I can find them NOWHERE. If anyone knows, PLEASE email me (xepherys@xepherys.net). I would be quite grateful.
-Xeph
i have bought a big pack of the cds, they were about ten cents cheaper per cd that my normal memorex cds I buy on a spindle. I guess for size they proly are a lot more than the large cds, but for the coolness factor...its a lot less waste too, if you dont need it, that makes me happier than just throwing away all that wasted space
good call on the psychalgia, I used to run a comapany called MindStrain Authoring, and this was my handle from then, we have sicne merged to AUBURNskies Internet Enterprises, so I don't go by that co. name anymore.
________________________________________________
It plays normal CD's, CD-R's and CD-RW's. It has up to 8 minutes of shock protection for MP3's (it actually spins down the disk). It uses normal AA batteries. It can play MP3's no matter how you organize them on the disk, not limited to root directory. And best of all it has a really nice UI on its LCD screen. Don't take my word for it, read another review here.
</UNSOLICITED PLUG>
I guess you mean 180MB.
Shut up. You knew what he meant.
They are definitely cute. I want some. :P
"Gender" in this context is a wholly American politically-correct corruption of the language
So American isn't sexually repressed? Wouldn't a language grow to mirror the mindset of the people who speak it? On what planet is a language controlled by something other than how people use it?
Oh yeah... France.
-Erik
What exactly are the advantages of using these 3" cds over the normal sized ones? They hold less, cost more, may not be directly (though it seems you can get an adapter) supported by your burner and are probably a lot harder to find. I could only find one other device (those digital cameras) that really needs to use these things, so that means much less use of the extra mini cdrs around. Again, what exactly is the point?
My MPTrip goes for 6 hours on 2 good AA batteries.
I suspect most of the current goes to MP3 decoding, not CD spinning.
Smaller CD should require even less energy to spin.
Battery life is not an issue for me, but smaller form factor would be really nice.
70M would be an order of magnitude smaller than 700. Where did you people go to High School? :P
I haven't found a use for them yet.
Two words: mini frisbee.
Actually, my experience has shown me that that a big buffer actually increases battery life. My player will actually turn off the spindle when it's running on the buffer, using less power.
Doesn't spinning the CD and continuously running the laser suck some serious juice too? An MP3 CD player can do those at a _much_ reduced duty cycle. Also remember you don't have to buffer uncompressed stuff. I've been very impressed with the battery life of my Rio Volt, and have pretty much switched to disposable alkalines from the NiMHs I was using with my traditional player.
Fair enough, but once hardware players for Vorbis appear, then there won't be any point in not using Vorbis either. Then the decision of which to use will simply be a matter of which happens to work best (i.e. fidelity per megabyte), and Vorbis has the advantage in that regard.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
OK, it took me a day to find the link so now nobody is reading this thread anymore. But just in case someone should stumble across it. You can already purchase this little beauty at& su bcat=mpZip
http://easybuy2000.com/store/?cat=mp3%20players
It costs $139 US and includes a set of rechargable batteries, an AC adapter, earphones, and a blank 8cm CD-R to get you started.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Its not a full release yet, so why even place them on a player.
RC2 of version 1.0 Vorbis audio was released just a few short days ago. See the Voribs www site for details.
The Soul Player CD player (which plays full size CDs) supports MP3 and WMA. This player's firmware is flash upgradable. I've written to the manufacturer requesting Ogg Vorbis support. Their quick response was basically that they would consider it.
You have a 5digit /. UID (albeit higher than mine), signifying that you've "been around here" and you STILL expect people to RTFA? My god, man, stop being so idealistic!
3 inch CDR drive in my new Be/Palm OS device next year. That would rock.
And they broke the law too by taking my money and not providing the services promised nor a refund per their written policy -- it's called BREACH OF CONTRACT. Isn't every site that gets posted on /. suffering a DOS attack anyways?
psychalgia (mental pain?) wrote: " i bought a mess of those for a marketing campaign. The unfortuanate thing is that they dont make stickers for them yet, so i just use them for when im in a hurry and want like 5 songs, or a real small bunch of data. They work great in everything but my old 2x cd writer. The only problem here is that I wanted an MP3 player because it is skip resistant...plus now were back to size restraints due to physical media. Unless it's really cheap, I'm just not interested ..."
:) I like those little disks, too bad they cost 2X (at least) what full-size ones are commonly available for.
... well, some of the full-size CD-R MP3 players I've seen which also play conventional CDs (probably all of them) have a memory buffer with longer times for the MP3 playing part than the regular CD. Which makes sense ... I doubt that skip resistance will be quite as much of an issue as you make it sound, but I'm letting myself be optimistic about it :)
a) what's "a mess" in number terms? Do you have a lot of these to get rid of to a willing buyer?
b) re: skip resistance
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
When DVD was first invented there were a ton of different models ranging from 2GB all the way up to 20GB. The format that made it to market first pretty much won.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Full size DVD-R: 4,700 megs
Full size CD-R: 650 megs
3 inch CD-R: 180 megs
A quick ratio gives the result that a 3 inch DVD would hold about 1300 megs, twice the capacity of a full size CD..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Its not a full release yet, so why even place them on a player.
Yes its that simple.
Matt
"Sex" and "Gender" are distinct semi-technical concepts in psychology.
Sex refers to whether an individual is male or female as defined by genetics and primary sexual characteristics (genitalia, basically).
Gender is defined as the set of cultural and psychological characteristics typical for a member of a certain sex in a certain environment.
Naturally most people of male sex also have male gender (same for female sex/gender), but then these distinctions arose because psychologists enjoy studying people who defy the norms.
i think these will sell. at ~$0.50/each, it would be fun to swap 3" CDs with people.
smaller disc = less mass to move (assuming 3 inch discs have the same density)
I wonder how much power this would save, considering the player must keep the disc spinning throughout operation.
I signed up for the beta test with an email address I've never given out before (over 2 years old) and I've never received spam in and within 24 hours I got spam from tickets.com.
someone sent me one of those cds a few months ago and one of the first things i wondered was whether or not it would work in a slot-loading drive. . . took it to work and tried it out on an imac (not mine!) and it worked perfectly. . . i think the business-card shaped ones might have a problem tho'. . .
I'm pretty sure he meant, "a MiniDisc and completely ignore the compression artifacts."
Education is the silver bullet.
I have read that the battery life is 4 hours tops on this player. Which makes it impractical IMHO
A company called DataPlay is building a drive that uses proprietary, matchbox-sized DVD-ish rewritable disks. They come in two sizes: 250MB & 500MB. Don't know if any companies have announced products based on it though. Unfortunately, the disks aren't compatable with regular DVD or CD drives. Still, it seems like a neat technology.
"If I only had a brain ..."
.ogg, this would be fine with me :)
Actually, since I really don't have MP3s, and I have been ripping a few of my favorite disks to
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Sony's CD Mavica digital cameras also use the 3" discs, FWIW.
On the other claw, I'd just as soon not support Sony, given its involvement with the MPAA and RIAA.
Too bad Olympus doesn't have a CD-based digicam...
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
CD's don't spin at constant speed. You can easily see this for yourself if you have a CD player where you can see the CD spinning. It spins much faster when playing tracks close to the center of the CD.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Definitely not "most" (go look at a rack of cd players in a store, there will be about 20 audio CD players and maybe 5 mp3 ones), but there are definitely more mp3-cd players now than there used to be.
picky git time - only the 3" CDRWs are 200mb - the normal writables are 180. no, I don't know how this works out, but yes it's true. I have some of CDR-By-Mail's fine 3" CDSs and business card CDRs on my desk (try their "small media" sample pack, when they open the web shop up again in a week or so)...
Nice try k-whore
I'm looking for a 3" CDROM drive that fits in a floppy drive bay. I'm still trying to shrink computers down smaller and smaller. I only need the CDROM drive in there at all to serve as a rescue disk (and a floppy won't hold enough for what I need).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've got a sony minidisc player/recorder, and it bugs me to no end that a 7MB mono MP3 takes an hour to record and takes up 1/2 of the disc (as opposed to 10 seconds and 1/20th of a small CD). As far as I can tell, the new "PC" option that sony has is just a USB->Digital connection, still only capable of recording in real time (someone please correct me if I'm wrong... oh wait, this is slashdot). With an MP3, I can control the bitrate and can skip the re-encoding to ATRAK that the minidisc does.
But with a width of at least 3 inches, reduced battery life compared to most others(since CDs tend to be power suckers) and 3 inch CDs that are not exactly common in the US to buy, will it take off?
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
surely /. should be allowed to fix a typo (...) right?
I will be avoiding this one.
Think about the advantages an MP3 player can have over a CD player:
If you want to burn your music on to a CD, get something that takes a full-size CD. Standard CDs are higher-capacity, not much larger, cheaper, and more widely available. Plus, I believe that there are MP3 CD players that can handle standard audio CDs as well, so you have more flexibility.
If you want something small, get an MP3 player that takes a flash card. They much smaller than this thing, have more battery life, and don't skip.
The main reason the Iomega HipZip does not sell well is not because people don't trust optical/mechanical drives. Many people (including yourself, according to your post) have had optical drives that have lasted for years. It is because the size of the media is ridiculously small, and the media is still too expensive. How many songs can you fit on a 40mb disc? This is not the case with the eXpanium. The 3" cd stores over 180 megs, more than four times the capacity of the Clik. Also, last time I checked, the 40mb Clik discs were around $7 a piece, compared to the $1 price of the 3" cd. There is simply no comparison between the two. The eXpanium has a huge advantage.
The eXpanium has quite a number of advantages over the MiniDisc as well. First of all, a good 4x minidisc recorder costs around $170. You can get a good 12x cd-r for about $90. You can make a cd in 5 minutes by typing one command. I don't know how you make minidiscs, but I'm sure it's not as easy. Also, you can't pop your minidisc in your computer and copy the files to your hard drive.
Another note: many people (myself included) can't tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 file and a 160kbps. Some people can't even tell the difference between 256 and 128. In any case, with a 3" CD you get at least 30 more minutes per disc than the Minidisc, and at most, 100+ more minutes.
I think the advantage of the eXpanium is that it has the small, lightweight advantage that flash-based players have, with a capacity that is closer to CD-based players. It's a good balance. I'm really looking forward to the eXpanium being released; I just hope that the price is reasonable.
Great! SO now I can rip all my CDs and burn them to... smaller cds... seems kinda underwhelming.
umm
The prob with compact flash and smart meida is the formats arent proprietary but the vendors write data in such a way that it is hard to interchange the cards (Sony and Kodak for one example) plus they are expensive (im outside the US)
Memory Stick is a proprietary format belonging to Sony - as yet i dont believe there has been any other vendor making either a memory stick product or a memory stick - thats as proprietary as you want.
PS Proprietary is when a tech is one companies only - the amouont of products on the market means very little if the company hasnt made it an open standard.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
is it possible to play 3" cds in cd players that don't have trays, like some car cd players? i'd imagine there would be some kind of device around the cd to make it look big but i've never seen one before...
CI Hosting is using Pokemon graphics and characters illegally and in infringement of Nintendo's copyright
Yes, but which Pokemon? I'm not all that familiar with the series.
"I've never seen a CD player incapable of playing them"
And how would they go about secretly updating your machine. Secret police that break into your house at night?
Well, not really - MPZip MP3 8CM CD Player
y er s&subcat=mpZip
$139
It's been around for quite some time.
http://www.easybuy2000.com/store/?cat=mp3%20pla
And its 8cm, not 3 inches.
What can I say, tim-mah!
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
if a device has flashable firmware (like some current MP3 players do, including the iomega Hip Zip which is the only one I know of to handle .ogg at the moment), why not? There have been seemingly acceptable .ogg players for quite a few months; when the playing software is better, an update could be flashed in ...
:)
Besides, it's a hypothetical. *If* it played ogg, I would try to preorder. It doesn't yet, but that's the hypothetical part!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Come on? You don't need exclusive use of oggs? .ogg files", right?
Oh, wait, you probably meant "if only it played
DVD's have higher density than CDs (I think) and allow dual layers. It seems like a 3" DVD would probably hold more than a full CD. Is a 3" format part of the DVD spec? It seems like you could get the best of both worlds, small media size and good capacity.
Don't know much about the Memory Stick or Smart Media, but Compact Flash has a simple ATA interface. I know Kodak cameras write to it like a regular disk, and I imagine Sony does as wel, so I don't see how it can be so hard to interchange them.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that all the CF in the world gets made by SanDisk anyway, and SanDisk sells them to everybody so they can put their own branding on. But I could be wrong...
How does the CD-ROM/burner/player tell the bizcards apart from the others? The barcode or number in the center?
That answered "female" for Gender. (I'm male, and no I'm not trying to be funny)
But the way I see it, is that they're probably trying a wide range of people, and given the fact that there aren't nearly as many females as males, i gure I have a better chance at getting selected as a female.
I found some 200 MB 8cm CDs at Future Shop a couple of weeks ago. Rainbow coloured, no less. There doesn't seem to be any agreement on how much data you should be able to put on one of these 8cm CDs... some of them only hold about 150 MB.
I think the Business Card sized CD's are the most cool, I have one infront of me here, I got it from some dotcom type just before the big crash, "shame about the business, nice card though, what is your meant company do again? Ahh... 'B2B Infomediary Synergy Solutions' of course."
They contain about 50meg, great for handing out, and the novelty makes your business card standout, which is vitally important if that's the only think the company has going for it.
It's not less dense. It's just that constant speed drives read the data on the outer rings at a faster rate. Get it?
give me rewritable 3" cds and i'll be happy with this.
Ritek makes a 8cm CDRW. A quick search on Google turned up this place for online ordering. I'm sure if you looked around, you could find them much cheaper.
"Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter"
Do you remember these adaptors? They were 1" wide rings of plastic that had tiny clips on them so they could grasp a 3" cd and pad it out to 5". That should work fine for these slot-loaders; they certainly did on our old car-cd slot loader, anyway.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You can get a 120mm adapter for them. They only cost a few buck and looks like a 120mm cd with a big hole so you can fit your 70mm disc in the middle.
Look at you tray-loaded cd-drive on you computer, you will often see a cut out for you to place 3" CD's on
Really, what's the draw to burning the music back to a disc? The great thing about these players (not that I've got one... I wan't ogg support) is that you can easily swap out a single song or multiple songs.
With burning your ripped music you may get more songs on the disc (even a small one) than a standard audio disc but you suffer audio degredation as well as a harder time of changing your playlist. The other portables have it right in this case, a memory solution is better as it's a lot easier to manipulate the current music selection.
You still have to "record", don't you? Like hook something to the input, play it, and record onto the MD? I think that's why mp3 players are more popular -- you just burn/transfer.
Being Slashdot, I'm quite disappointed that no one saw the obvious mathematical glitch in this statement. A 3" CD should be quite a bit more than 185MB, because a 5" CD is 650MB. 3" being 60% of 5", no less than 390MB should be expected. But the pigs creating this "media" have diliberately hampered the storage capacity of this media.
Why?
Obviously, it's because this media is going to be deluged with copyright efforts that make the uncrackable SDMI codec seem to be the equivalent of the 31337 "Rot-13" encryption.
We should be wary of this media, for any media that requires over 200MB of encryption shall be dangerous to our liberty!
Who gives fuck-1 if it plays ogg. Mp3's are free. Screw your groupthink and just use the industry standard
i recently purchased a nice new digital camera by sony...instead of using stupid mem chips that cost a ton it uses 8cm CDs (note this mem chip cost is certainly offset by the price of the cam...over 1k usd) the cd's are fairly cheap and readily available. Frankly i would say that a player that uses these in order to be a smaller player does have some inherent advantages. One has to consider that its also probably just an attempt by phillips to place more demand on a product they market which has very small demand IE. the 8cm cd's. If they really want to produce a smaller player with full features that implements the 8cm cd's then its a great idea. If it's just an attempt to create demand for their otherwise limited use cd's by producing a substandard (sound quality, reliability , etc) then it wouldnt impress me a bit, only time will tell
This is not news, as there are several of these players out right now. I've been in the market for one for about a month. Supply is very limited as is information, so hopefully Philips (yes, one 'l' not two) device will spur more interest. Check out this link for info on the media and players. Unfortunately, most of the ones listed in the article are unavailable or hard to find.
Personally, I find them better than standard MP3 players because for half the money I get 3 times the storage, plus I can swap out disks easily. These things are actually very available. A computer show never goes by where I don't see them. And the size advantage is nice in some cases. I fly a hang glider and I want something small that I don't have to make extra room for in my harness.
Now if only it supports a flash ROM so I can write an ogg vorbis decoder for it.
I bought a cheap $60.00 cd player from Fry's Electronics the other day that plays regular AudioCD's and also can read DATA cd's with MP3's in the root directory. Works great.
Ryan
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I picked up some of these awhile ago also... I was thinking that I could put some demo tracks on them and people would have a hard time forgetting the "guy who had the little disc".
Maybe that's why I never burned anything on them...
prosebeforehos.com
Now, it's possible to do in other hardware, like a DSP or (unlikely) a general-purpose CPU. The second is not really going to happen, MP3 and Vorbis decoding take too many cycles for good power-consumption. A DSP chip would be a possibility, since they tend to have much heavier number-crunching abilities. But the dedicated chips are still the most common.
Short of using reprogrammable hardware (like a CPLD/FPGA), I doubt that we'll see upgrades like this for most portables.
But if the Ogg people want to release a full and comprehensive specification (it's an open format, but it's not properly specified, you have to read the sources) then I'm sure somebody would make a core for it (I'm tempted myself, but I never quite managed to figure out enough of the spec to get my software decoder working).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Coby MP-CD500
http://www.cobyusa.com/cdpersonal/mpcd500.htm
There were a bunch of different brands that had the MP3 capability.. I was shocked. But this one was of the cheepest that didn't like brittle. Ryan
Honestly, I don't think you want players that are updatable (the Philips site says that Rush, their solid state player, is), because you'll never know when they'll try to sneak down the latest User Hostile fuckware with an upgrade, being the slaves of the evil industry that they are (no, they probably wouldn't make a player suddenly stop reading MP3s for some encrypted format, but they could stop reading files with certain watermarks (the SDMI plan)).
Forget hardware players - they are too easy targets for control by the powers of evil. Liberation lies in software players on generic handhelds - which can play OGG files without having to go begging to some company like Windows users...
How about saying 8 centimeters if it is 8 centimeters?
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Actually, you could go the opposite way of these power-hungry "x50 speed" CD drives, and read the CD at around 1/4 normal speed. The data rate is low enough that you'd get away with the massively reduced power requirements, and probably a lower-power laser too...
Don't make the mistake of shoving one of these small CD's into a slot loading iMac. They don't like it, not one bit, and there a real pain to take apart in order to remove the CD. When one of our tech guys tried to remove it from one of our Macs, he managed to totally destroy the drive itself...
--It's Pimptastic!--
Go ahead, sign up. It's just an advertising gimmick and a great way for them to send you SPAM. Trust me. I signed up for another one of their "beta test" promotions and that's all that happened. Power to the Potato.
Just because it's ATA doesn't mean it's compatible. It's just a way to write large amounts of bytes to some sort of media. We use filesystems on such devices in order to have some file organisation, and every company can have its own.
As soon as it is available, we will have a product review at www.designtechnica.com Come check out our site!
I would rather use my NJB anyways. It holds over 100 hours of music (non-upgraded, regular compression) and preloads about 7 minutes at a time into RAM. Not for all uses, but then i'm not the kind to run around like i'm on fire :)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Any cd player with a tray will take them - they work in all types - my company uses them constantly for presentations and suchlike - they are small in size and cost effective in bulk - dont know about slot loaders but a friend of mine says his sony slot loading CD Rom plays them fine.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Then at least 50% of all portable CD players must play mp3s!
I love science.
> I saw some 3" CD-R's [...]
> [...] same as ten 5-1/4" CD-R's.
dude, it's 8 and 12 centimeters. The CD
was developed by Philips in the Netherlands,
therefore it's metric (like everywhere
but in the US of A)
I guess what I don't understand is why Phillips thinks that people will want one of these more than a Sony MDLP player/recorder?
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
In most cases the MP3 players last a lot long on batteries than CD players. They can fit more in memory and don't have to spin the disc constantly or as fast. Compare the memory it takes to hold 8 mins of MP3 to 8 mins of CD audio...
My wife has the RioVolt and the battery lasts MUCH longer when playing MP3s.
My pioneer slot load DVD-ROM wouldn't grab onto the 3" CD. Infact, I almost lost one of my 3" recordables inside it trying it. :-/
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
What about DVD audio? A 3" DVD could hold a conventional length album at 24bits and 192khz. You can't burn them at home, but record companies could mass produce them. For people who want something that sounds a lot better than mp3's or even CD's and are willing to tote around a little keychain full of 3"er's, that would be perfect. In addition, this technology is ready NOW. Why are we still wasting our time with full size cd's at all? If they really wanted to go out on a limb, they could make a 2" DVD audio disc that had the same storage capabilities of a 5" CD. Isn't that what they had in Robocop?
Definite no-no unless you want to accelerate the wear and tear on your drive. :)
I have an AVC Soul and its firmware is upgradable. You download the the upgrade, burn it onto a CD, then "play" the CD, which upgrades the flash. The AVC Soul supposedly has the same guts as the Rio Volt, so I imagine the firmware is upgradable on that joint, too. .ogg. Does anyone know if its done in hardware or software?
I'm not sure how these devices are architected, but if the mp3 codecs are in ASICs, rather than the firmware, it would be difficult to add support for
I have to agree that mp3 quality doesn't begin to match CD sound, and sadly the AVC Soul is not a great CD player. When you play a CD, the sound is a lot flatter than what I get on my discman. I use it primarily on the subway, so its a non-issue for me, but I was a little disappointed.
mp3/CD players are a cool toy, but they're not ready for primetime. It takes about 20 seconds for it to boot up, whether you are playing a CD or mp3s. It's clearly designed as a computer gadget, rather than something for music enthusiasts.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
Still I don't understand the advantage of this over memory cards based MP3 players:
- Small Player: the last are smaller
- Lower Power Consuption: Having no moving parts, normal MP3 players have lower power consuption
- Low Cost Media: As you have said 2 disks should be enough so it's not a big problem as memory cards are rewritable
This is the trouble with Ogg Vorbis. It isn't supported by these things. If they had rewriteable firmware, it would be possible to hack support into them, but as far as I know, not many of them do this.
I would rather use my CD player anyway. A real CD sounds better anyway. It is also a simple matter to make an expendable copy of a CD so the original isn't in danger of theft or damage.
The camera also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player.
Q
you also have to remember that it was a first generation device. They even came back and admitted that if they had the chance they would have changed a few things from the jump, such as having the ability to turn off the memory buffer so the battery can even last longer. And you also have to admit that when it came out a year and a half ago, there was alot worse out at the time.
Ironically, they seem to be the most reliable CDRs around. The manufacturers of the crappy ones, being so focused on making crap CDRs, they aren't getting into this, apparently. OTOH, I've only burned about 30 of them, but they are 100% reliable and the CDROM drives read them at full speed (no slowdowns and timeouts like the crappy ones).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
To me the advantage of CD-based MP3 players has always been that they can store massive amounts of music they can store -- 700 megs (or more if you get more expensive CDs and/or overburn) on a CD that costs pennies. Being able to pop a CD containing 5 to 10 CDs' worth of music into my Rio Volt is the main reason I bought it -- no lugging around more than a couple of CDs, and I can use it in the car without endangering other people on the road by flipping through CDs when I should be driving. By cutting the storage capacity to just over a quarter of that, it's sort of eliminating the point of using CDs. Iomega had the same problems with the HipZip -- no matter how cheap the media is, nobody's willing to put up with the problems brought on by optical or magnetic media unless they get some big storage payoff. (Admittedly, at 40MB the PocketZip disks are significantly smaller, but so are the disks' physical size, and you didn't have to invest in a CD burner if you didn't already own one.)
That isn't to say I don't wish Philips well with this -- my last (pre-MP3) CD player was a Philips, and it's taken quite a beating and still works as well as the day I bought it. I'm just afraid the market for this sort of thing isn't going to be very warm.
Also you can place compact flash in a carrier, and put it into a standard PCMCIA slot.
I have to wonder what the battery life of some of these CD/MP3 player hybrids are. The TDK player listed on ThinkGeek says it has an 8 minute anti-skip buffer when running in MP3 mode - that's got to suck some serious juice.
Anyone have any experience with these?
That and half of what I want in my MP3 player for is no mechanical parts to skip or break.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
(You can also download legal MP3 music files from the Internet to your hard drive).
I think they're trying to cover their ass here, of course, I think most people buying this thing would believe that there is no such thing as an illegal mp3 file. BTW, I'm going to buy one asap.
qon wrote: "The [Sony Mavica [he] just bought] also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player."
...
... admit your mistake, and switch to 8cm CD-R/W instead of those idiotic things
That would be great!
In the hopes that the following companies have AI engines scanning Slashdot for cool-product ideas, I want to alert
Samsung? -- c'mon, more Korean 'tronics are always good!
Sony? -- you already have the darn drive, now just start putting it in more devices!
Iomega? -- you're *so close* with the pocketZip, but so very far away
Aiwa? break in, break in!
Pioneer? People love the DVD slot-drives. Followup. Capitalize on your reputation for decent affordable audio stuff, and all the image advertising you've already invested in!
Apple? You have smart designers, at least some of whom would like to have their names inscribed on the inside of a nice-looking miniCD MP3/ogg player! And people would like some apple peripherals!
Unknown brands? Break in, please!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Um, it's Philips with one l, as in the url.
You can find these cd's at about a buck a pop.
1 CD = $1
That is double the cost of a Standard CD (if you buy in bulk), but it is much MUCH cheaper that compact flash disks. A Sandisk 192MB Compact Flash will go for around $200, brand new.
Compare, one 192MB compact flash for $200, or 200 180MB disc's for $200.
If you haven't gotten the point, then poop on you.
I think that the idea of the smaller disks is both a bad idea and a blessing. The smaller disks allow the player to be smaller (which is nice because you would be able to carry it just about anywhere you wanted to). But the smaller disks also would make it difficult because like many others have said you couldn't hold as much information on the disk. Being someone who likes music, believe me, I would rather carry around the bigger player which holds more information than a smaller player and about 4 more disks. That's just me I suppose. Less space but more costs. What 3 small disks would fit a single CD? Why go out and buy more disks when you could have it all on one? Also because of it being "newer" the price most likely be skyhigh compared to the "older" models. But then again, to each their own. Those who want the smaller one will buy it for their own reasons, where I will just stick with the larger models... ~Snflwer98
"I have lost my way in life, because I have lost my mind. I would go and search for it, but I'm afraid of what I'd find
Quote from Philips Site:
Play your current CD collection through the PC's CD-writer using simple software to compress the music into MP3 data format and place it on your hard drive ready for compiling. (You can also download legal MP3 music files from the Internet to your hard drive).
Trust me i can also download Illegal songs to my hard drive....
Freecom's Beatman mp3 player supports Mini-CD media. What's the big deal with Philips' products? Does slashdot now forward press releases of large (paying?) companies? Please don't...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I'm not sure if this is a stupid question. But if you cut a 3" or 6" CD into the same shape, would it work the same?
In case any of you are wondering, they do 3" CDRW discs too, which contain 200MB.
Sounds like a great reason to be a beta tester to me! Not only would you get to try the thing out, you'd also be able to give them the feedback that it should play .ogg files. It's quite possible, even likely, that Phillips could add .ogg playing capability with a firmware change. If somebody told them it was a desirable feature, that would greatly increase the chances of it being included.
IOW, sign up, sign up, sign up.
[goes to sign up]
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
... in a noisy subway, in the car on a noisy highway, etc. This is not supposed to be a complete stereo system, it's a portable music player, and designed to be used that way. Can you honestly claim you can hear the difference between 256kbps and 128kbps over the noise of your engine and the engines in all the cars around you? Hell, I almost never notice any problems with 128kbps using earphones at the office.
Dataplay is the size of a quarter with 500mb storage since it's based on DVD technology. It's suppose to come out in the fall. Looks better than the Philips one, IMHO.
Unfortunately those microdrives apparently suck up juice like an Athlon. Except the Athlon's powered from a wall socket, and the microdrive isn't.
One of the main reasons that this type of player doesn't have .ogg support is because the only .ogg format decoders currently available require floating point math. This is no good for the low cost DSPs or embedded processors (ARM, MIPS etc) which typically power this type of device.
Starting a project to write an optimised fixed point .ogg decoder would be far more useful than joining the beta program and moaning :-)
Give us the brand/model. I'm having trouble believing that a manufacturer would pay to license mp3 and add in the extra circuitry to decode it.
have you recently checked the prices of removable memory (Sandisk / Compaq Flash)?
Actually, Lexar (or something like that) makes memory-stick compatible accessories and memory sticks. The prices on the Sony sticks seem to have dropped since they came out (although I wasn't paying that much attention)
give me rewritable 3" cds and i'll be happy with this.
--- it's pelvis to be cube
I've still got some of these lying around from when Coke distributed them for free with 12 or 24 packs of Coca Cola cans.
Is VBR supported?? I consider buying one of those, but I have a large collection of Mp3s encoded in VBR.
I have heard tell that the iomega hipzip plays ogg vorbis and uses iomega click disks (40MB.disk I think)Can anyone verify this?
If you're angry at them breaking the law and treating you in an uncivilized manner, maybe you should fight back lawfully and in a civilized manner, instead of acting childishly.
If you can convince the marketing drones at any portable player company that there would be 25000 purchases immeditly upon release if they could also play ogg, it will have a higher likelyhood of getting done. If marketing wants it, they will build it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Easybuy2000.com has sold these for about 6 months. Not that they're wonderful, but the full size eXpanium wasn't without its problems. If you really want an MP3 CD player (and they're damn cool) go with a RioVolt (or Easybuy's full size player, which is a RioVolt in different casing for $30 less) or a Pine D'Music. They don't play .ogg files, but they do play WMA and VBR encoded MP3s. Plus those cute little 3" CDs are only 170 megs, which is an order of magnitude smaller than 700..
REAL men use 5 1/4" cds, not these girly 3" cds!
I actualy have a use for them! But I can't find them at any local store and most websites are foreign. csfacc@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/csfaccI use my 3" Memorex(r) Pocket CD-R for backups.
I bought them in mini jewel cases and they came with a little insert so they would fit.
The 3" plastic jewel case is a little bigger than a 3 1/2 floppy.
These little cases fit perfectly in the CaseLogic floppy case.
I can carry around 12 mini CD-R's.
I like the form factor. (and they're cool)
-- Andy
They worked great, hold about 160mb data with only one catch: they don't work in front-loading CD-ROM drives like the ones you get in iMacs. My fear was that PC manufacturers would follow the iMac lead (like they did with the awful purple clear-plastic everything with a case) and start bundling front-loaders with wintel machines. This would render our disks (and these nifty new mp3 disks) useless.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
sample jokes for this: "my, what a little CD you have" "i guess if it still spins..." "it aint the size of the CD, its the RPMs of the drive" (reference to the boat analogy thing) ok i'm done.
|---------------|
practically an AC
Buy a 50-pack of regular CD's without the casings. Put the stack in a lathe. remove a few inches...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I guess you mean 180MB.
I felt the same way, until someone pointed me to r3mix, where there are many pointers on getting the best possible quality out of lossy compression. Using LAME with the --r3mix flag set, variable bit rate min 112, I can hear no difference from the source media, and I have very good ears. Try it; you'll save a ton of space, and be happier with your sound.
-- Jeff Paulsen
i saw an advertisement for this camera on a bus stop last month and was intrigued. (it's a GadgetGuru.com review: "Sony MVC CD-1000 Digital Camera Uses 3-inch CDs To Store Images".)
combined with this story, it definitely seems like Philips and Sony had a recent mutual epiphany about portable storage medium efficiency. whether their bets pay off or not- there seems to be a lot of pluses and minuses, it's definitely a renaissance right now for these little 3" critters!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And I wouldn't mind getting a cheap DVD-R drive either, but it ain't gonna happen that soon.
What he said! ;) xeno just summed up a lot of the things I like the small CDs for.
The thing I like best about the new Sony cameras (using small CD-Rs) is that they ought toencourage more people to include drives in their portable devices for them, and even better, for CD-RW. I'd like to see 3" CD-RWs at a dollar apiece -- I'd sure pay 10 bucks for 1.8GB of convenient storage in 180MB chunks!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Nearly every MP3 player I've seen use standard Compact Flash, Smart Media, or Memory Stick media -- all widely used standards used in everything from digital cameras to PDAs, and hardly proprietary!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Think about it - to join the beta test you have to fill out a relatively large survey that most people, when presented with, would ignore and pass off as market research. Philips has a damn good thing going for them, all they do is give away 50 of these units for free, which probably costs them nothing, and they get zillions of suckers like us to fill out their free market research hubub. Hey, it's cheaper than a focus group, non?
----
Bryan Samis
http://www.thesamis.net
I like the idea, but how much are them cute lil' 3-Inch CD's gonna cost? If it is the same as standard CD's I'd have no problem, but if the smaller discs costs more I would view it as a ripoff.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Freecom make one called a Beatman, I have one and it works very well. http://www.freecom.com/ecCategory_one.asp?ID=8009& type=DRIVE%5FIN
The skip protection is quite good; I had to run to catch a bus the other day and after 15 seconds or so of jiggling it all around (gettin jiggy with it? ... sorry) it only skipped for half a second or so.
For those who want rewritable media, you can buy rewritable miniCDWRs that this device will read.
I don't personally see the real use though - of all my sony minidisc friends I think that they would rarely change a minidisc once they had made their compilation.
Also - you can burn a MP3 player onto the disc and then use it in any PC, without having to have MP3 software already installed.
V. cool.
Mike.
that's not a pokemon
Whats the big fuss about ? 3 inch MP3/CD players have been around for quite a while now, for example, the one from
The smaller discs seem to be getting all the luvin' lately. Nintendo is using the same sized disc, but DVD, for the GameCube. Matsushita (better known was Panasonic to us Yankee's) developed the technology for them. It can hold 1.8 gig's. I sure wouldn't mind getting ahold of portable MP3 player that could use one of them :)
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Quoted from Article:
Phillips is turning to the use of those cute little 3 inch CDs that have been around forever, but never really used for much. Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapterThat's a great idea! I thought those things were gone forever. I loved their size and found the shape appealing, but always found their capacity to be annoying. Finally, a solution!
Quoted from reply:
They never took off in the US, but I've never seen a CD player incapable of playing them, including slot-loading CD players.I have exactly two. Ill-fated 3" CD singles - one of Lloyd Price, the other of Fifth Dimension. Bought 'em back in the late '80s, when the cassingle and the 45 RPM record were still about neck and neck. (And there were still some 8-tracks for sale in that store.) They were a pain in the butt because they took up as much space in your CD collection as regular CDs (I keep them in ordinary CD jewel boxes for protection).
I did find a benefit to them. I had an Discman D-33 portable CD player, and I'd occasionally play those CDs in it while I was walking to school. They made the CD player skip far less than ordinary CDs (these were the days before buffered CD players), and I loved them for that.
I guess it makes sense, when you think about it. Ignoring the center hole, A 5" CD has 19.6 square inches of 1mm polycarbonate plastic. A 3" CD has 7.0 square inches of the plastic. (pi x (d/2)^2)
Ratio-wise, the 3" CD is a little less than 1/3rd the area of a 5" CD, and since they're the same plastic, it would make sense that it would weigh about 1/3rd a regular CD.
Why would the lesser weight reduce skipping (and therefore make *any* portable optical disc more practical)?
A CD player has a motor which spins the CD from 500-800 RPM, depending on where on the disc it's reading. The motor is under the computer's control, and has to be a small motor to reduce power consumption and allow the disc to change speed quickly.
Of course, gyroscopic forces affect any rotating mass, and when you move a playing CD player, the effects of the gyroscopic force on the speed of the disc are dependent on the mass of the disc.
If the CD spins too slowly for the CD player to keep the playback buffer full, it will skip.
Because of the speed adjustments to maintain a constant linear velocity during playback, I think there'd also be less battery power wasted trying to make the motor overcome the greater range of disc speeds it would encounter with a 5" disc.
Finally, nothing involved with doing this isn't mass-produced already. You take an ordinary portable CD player, shave the pickup rails down to 3" size, stuff it into a small case with CD-ROM electronics and an MP3 player. Nothing to it, just a really great new application for a forgotten format.
Then, the only thing that I'd lust after is 3" recordable DVDs. All the benefits of the 3" CD-ROM in a player, but think of how many MP3s you could get in your pocket with that.
Okay. Maybe not the only other thing I'd lust after, but well up there.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It sucked. Took about two minutes to load (search for all the songs and store them in memory) a CD full of mpeg tracks. If you turned it off, you had to wait all over again.
The volume, when turned up all the way, was not load enough. It did not display filenames or anything; everything was a song number inside a directory number.
The whole interface seemed flaky. You couldn't skip forward/backward in mp3's; if you paused mp3's sometimes the time counter continued to advance. It put 2 second gaps between songs automatically.
The only things good about it were that it took cd-rewritable and had great skip protection.
These experiences make me quite skeptical about this new version...although you can get those half size cd's cheaply at cdrexpress.com, as well as black cd's (like the playstation game).
Got friends?
Forget the eXpanium. iRiver, the actual manufacturer of Rio Volt, is currently developing the next generation of Rio Volt that includes FM tuner, future CODEC (ogg, mp3pro,etc) support through firmware upgrade, and remote with LCD that can display ID3 tag info. The new Rio Volt II will be able to display more text information, multiple language support (english, european characters, Japanese, Korean, Chiese), and ID3 v2. Rio Volt I already support Winamp m3u playlists with the latest firmware upgrade and in a near future a new firmware with mp3pro and ogg support will be released. The bad news is iRiver's distributor in the US Sonic Blue has not annonced the plan to sell Rio VoltII in the US.
A lot of folks have asked "why?"
The advantages of a smaller disk include a smaller player (fits in your pocket, unlike the current raft of full-size CD/MP3 players), lower power consumption (it actually does take a lot less energy to spin up a ~40% smaller diameter disk), low-cost media (3" disks usually cost about US$0.55 in lots of 50 and US$1 in lots of 10 or less), requires no new software (!!), and low production cost of the player (since none of this is new technology). Out of about a dozen cd burner I've used, every one supports 3" CDRs, as well as all tray and most slot-loading players.
This player and two disks will almost get me thru most of the workday without hearing a repeat, I can play the disk in my computer without any hardware-specific software or drivers, and the trivial cost of the media make it quite nice for sneakernet music swapping. Are you going to swap or give away your CF card or MiniDisc? I didn't think so. Who knows, maybe this will bring the cost of 3" CDRWs down.
Low tech? Yes. But a very nice application of low-tech.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
I burn off files from my PC ever so often in a sort of pipeline: Internet -- My Documents -- Slow big USB hard drive -- CDr. and I've used the smaller CDs for the last eight volumes.
test
Sony has had a camera out for a few months now that uses a smilar looking media... however they claim it holds 156MB.
here
That's Philips with one L -- the two-L version sells petroleum products. The Company is quite touchy on the subject.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You may beable to store around 3 albums onto one CD at 128Kbits/s but to be honest I'd rather just have a 1 gig IBM microdrive then have to carry around 4-5 of these CD's.
I saw some 3" CD-R's at the electronics store, and I just had to have them, they were so cool-looking. They hold 180Mb, and five of them cost about the same as ten 5-1/4" CD-R's. A year later, they're still sitting there...I haven't found a use for them yet. They sure are neat, though.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Here is an 8cm Player that lists Supported disc types: CD-DA, CD-R, CD-RW.
Where can you buy the CD-RW ones?
K-Well Enterprise Co Ltd
KW-MP3(C) 8cm Mini Disc Portable MP3 / CD Player
Dimensions (L x H x W): 980 x 950 x 180mm
Weight: 157 g (drive only)
Distortion rate: AudioCD and MP3/CD playback
Supported formats: audio wave and MP3 codec
Disc diameter: 80 mm
Record format: ISO 9660 or Juliet
Supported disc types: CD-DA, CD-R, CD-RW
Disc capacity: 180 MBytes
Max number of tracks: 50
Max audio disc capacity: 21 minutes
Graphics display 19 (W) x 8 (H) mm, showing track number
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
Three inch CDs are popular in Japan. They never took off in the US, but I've never seen a CD player incapable of playing them, including slot-loading CD players.
There are two main reasons why Ogg Vorbis isn't used in hardware players yet:
1) There aren't any single chip decoders available.
2) If you used a powerful CPU instead of a decoder chip, there isn't an integer-only implementation.
Most hardware manufacturers are still hung up on using single chip decoders instead of doing the smart thing of putting a powerful embedded CPU into the box. This ultimately limits flexibility, and means they have to use a pathetic little micro controlling everything to offset the cost. Worse still, the decoder+micro combination often draws more power than an embedded CPU.
A good example of a powerful embedded CPU is a Cirrus 7212 ARM, which runs up to 74MHz. You'll find it in products such as the Creative Nomad and Rio Receiver. It's cheap, extremely powerful (mp3 takes about 30-40MHz), low on power draw, and has just about every hardware interface you could want built in.
However, you'll never see Ogg Vorbis in a consumer audio device until there's a integer-only version available. Very few embedded CPUs have floating point in hardware, and there's no chance it'll run real-time with emulation. The surprising thing is that integer-only versions of DSP code tend to be not only faster but also more accurate - it would be interesting to see how fast an x86 processor runs the integer version compared to floating point.
I found them at the local CompUSA for $7.99 US.
-- Andy
Phil... who?
Meet me and we will see whos laughing then my little swet pea - youre a wimp and a loser my little turd master. Some Nazi you are scared to face one jew - that will get you kicked out of the National Fat Dumbshit Racist Front wont it ralphie ? Or is it the Klu Klux Klan your in - a white sheet would suit you
IM NOT GOING AWAY RALPH
Anyway - it's great. I'm no audiofile, but to me it sounds fantastic, as good as my friends cd walkman, and of course much better than tapes.
In the UK CF or smartmedia are about 60quid for 128Mb - whereas these are a pound a disc (=180Mb). I did't realise just how small they the player is until it arrived.
One advantage they have over HD players is that it's easy for novices to put on the music they want - just pop in the mini cd with the album (out of 3 or 4) you want and press play. Don't get me wrong HD players are cool but they'd have to have a pretty clever UI to make it easy to find what you want amidst 20gigs worth.
I wish I'd bought a Beatman for myself now!