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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!--
> 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)
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.
1) MD hold less information (~ less music)
Yes, than regular CDs. However, they hold 140M vs the 160M the 3" CDs-- not much difference.
2) MD are harder to record onto
Actually, CDs are harder to record to for me. Want to know how hard it is to make an MD? Step 1: insert CD into deck; Step 2 insert CD into deck; Step 3 press CD->MD button and wait.
3) MD will not play in CD-MP3 players
Yes, and CDs won't play in MD players. So...?
4) MD players are more expensive
Which ones? I paid $150 for my RioVolt and $100 for an MD player.
) MD do not allow you to control audio quality -vs- bandwidth tradeoff
Not true any longer as has been mentioned. MDLP allows you to get either 2X or 4X the normal time.
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)
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.
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.
That's Philips with one L -- the two-L version sells petroleum products. The Company is quite touchy on the subject.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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!