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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.
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.
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!
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
3 inch CDs = 185 Megabytes.
Bush's education improvements were
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?
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!
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
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.
"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?
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.
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!
I'm pretty sure he meant, "a MiniDisc and completely ignore the compression artifacts."
Education is the silver bullet.
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
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
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.
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....
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
Yes, they would slow down.
-bugg
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...
So? If you're copying to your minidisc player, just do a straight .wav recording rather than decompressing an illegally-acquired MP3 (which is still lossy....) Unless you're assuming everyone's MP3s are ill-gotten. People who actually buy music might find minidisc players useful.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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!
Free Mac Mini
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.
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...
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!--
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....
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
Actually, it is these anti-skip buffers that give the CP/MP3 player hybrids the battery life that they have. They spin up the disc, fill memory with data, then stop spinning the disc. So, at that point, it is operating more like a memory-only MP3 player. When the anti-skip memory gets down to below, say, a minute, the disc spins again, it reads more data, then stops it again. Without doing this, the battery life would be much shorter. Heck, the RioVolt CD/MP3 player does 15 hours (2 AA batteries) while the Rio600 memory-based MP3 player does 10 (with 1 AA battery).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
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)
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.
Free Mac Mini
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.
Who needs to swap out a song if you have room for all the music you need? Swapping is something forced by the tiny memories of typical MP3 players. I have a player that uses full-size CD's and can store 10 hours of music at 128 KBPS. If I had infinite resources I'd have a Nomad or something similar and have every CD I own available. I don't see the point of memory-based players that can only store a dozen songs or so.
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
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;
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.
Theoretically I suppose you could just cut them down... but you might have a problem if the laser moves past the edge.
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
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.
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?
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 don't recall English having any gender issues. All the crazy continental european languages though.. I always wondered in French class just who decided that all cats are female and all dogs are male :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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!