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80 Gig MP3 Player
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I don't know who has anywhere near enough MP3 music to need an 80G drive, but for those who want one Reality Media has just released the GIDI Digital Jukebox. The company is based out of Belgium and offers the unit in three different box styles including one for the dash ($715) and one for a systems rack ($795). The company will also sell you the guts alone to build your own player. The key is the company's Single Board Audio Computer (SBAC), which is a pre-programmed for digital music."
Isn't that much music, especially if you're talking higher quality MP3s.
Why is it so hard to believe that someone would want 80 gigs of music storage? Is it difficult to believe that someone would have several hundred CD's collected over the years and want to archive them at a decent quality in a jukebox? I know I've run out of space on my 40 gig drive and am going to adding another just for music..
air and light and time and space
The cooler product is mentioned at the end of the page. Finally Rio put a radio in their CD-R MP3 Player. Yeah!
:)
Who needs 80 Gigs of MP3s, give me a portable radio add on anyday.
I can get rid of all my audio CD's. As long as the 80gigs of HD space isn't an IBM Deskstar, I think I'll be okay.
actually when I was in school, we had just about filled up a 40gig drive.. we were looking at getting another drive, but it was too close to the end of the year so we just mirrored it.. :)
I have well over that in MP3s. It's not hard if you are a fan of lots of different types of music, believe me.
Of course, if M$ were to do it and somehow tie Pa$$port into it, I'm sure RIAA would fall all over it.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I love the idea of these players but what happens when a new audio format takes lead? I want a player that is upgradeable.
"You can kill a man, but you can't kill what he stands for. Not unless you first break his spirit."-Smoking man,X-Files
Is how do you navigate through 80gb of content? Sometimes you just want to listen to whatever music in the background while you work, or whatever, and its a lot easier to throw in a tape or cd that you know has something you like. Unless these players with > 2gb of storage come with *extremely* sophisticated playlist management where you can store and recall a large number of customized playlists, their value for casual listening is rather low. Of course added benefit on this unit is you probably only have to copy the music once and just leave it away from computers...
Didn't EMpeg (a british company that I _thought_ got bought out by Rio) have an 80GB in-dash (and I suspect component model as well) mpeg player over a year ago? A guy I knew had a 20GB version in his truck that was pretty slick, and when I checked, they went up to 80GB. That being said, they were pretty expensive at the time...well over $1K.
It would be *very* nice if other manufacturers followed suit, but I'm not holding my breath... (It would also be nice if the sources were GPL, but I'm not complaining.)
-CT
Enough storage to rip an entire CD colection at 196 kbps... Better sound without worring about space...
If my iPaq had all this space...
What ? Me, worry ?
if your equipment's half way decent, everything down to cables make a difference. I used to think that as long as things were digital, it's all the same. Now, I can say that it definitely is all the same. Even my bro. who is into features and not sound quality will admit he can hear a difference between cables. I did a blind test with him guessing which cable or CD player I was using and he guessed correctly every time!
People who go to MP3 are selling themselves short. Except in cases of portability or pure background, the closer to the original, the better.
Ok, so how do we navigate through this thing? I mean my minidisk player holds 20-30 songs and its a bitch thumbing through them all. Now lets see, 1500 songs is roughly 6 gig (a decent sample due to its randomness of songs selected) meaning that we could put... well alot of music on this thing (roughly 20,000). Thats great but... it would be quicker to rebuild my pc everywhere I go to access all that. I'm sure they have a gui and a fine one but still... who wants to go through 20,000 songs one-by-one?
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Never submit a story about a newly descovered security hole in unix/linuxsecurity holes (and here) about linux generally get ignored.
"I don't know who has anywhere near enough MP3 music to need an 80G drive"
well thats because you dont know me, my archive is pushing 120g right now & im adding to it as we speak
I could see this really take off in a commercial environment, like say, for restaurants. Put one of these into a traditional juke box form factor and voila! Instant Americana.
You can get a similar unit, and put whatever hard drive you want in it, for less. It's called the Neo, it's been out for quite a while, and is a decent piece of work. It connects to your computer via IDE, comes with connections for your car and a remote display so you can install it in your trunk, under your seat, wherever, if you can't fit it in your dash. You can get it with a 60GB drive for $549. Learn more at http://www2.funmp3players.com/. It's firmware is upgraded on a regular basis too. Be aware that only the people that have problems post to the message board there, don't let it deter you. (=
As for hard drives, I bought an 80GB drive solely for MP3s ($179), and it's a little over 40GB filled with my CD collection ripped (at 192KBPS). I can forsee 80GB being to small in a couple of years.
ScrO!
Wow I can't even think of 40 gigs worth of songs I like let alone 80 gigs just for bringing around with me. 80 gigs for a portabe?? wow
Snoozer.
They have a cradle inside that holds 2x 2.5 inch laptop drives. Several owners have units that have been upgraded to 96gb (2x 48gb drives)
Someone (IBM I think) just released a 60gb laptop drive, so it's only a short time until someone has a 120gb eMpeg player.
Additionally, a digital radio tuner is available, so the eMpeg can be a complete replacment for the head unit in you car. Oh, and it's removable and has additional outputs so you can take it inside and connect it directly to your home stereo.
And it should be noted that the eMpeg firmware/OS (Linux powered as if you didn't know) is constantly being upgraded and new features added. How many other car stereos can say that? (or that they have built in Ethernet)
Production has ceased, but the units are still available (until stock runs out). And the prices were just cut: I think the 10gb Rio Car is now $799
for more info: check out http://www.riohome.com/CarAudio.htm
-Mp
I dont know how come so many companies are still persuing this when the RIAA is hell bent on stopping anyoen from ripping CD's be it your own CD or not. whats the point of investing $800 for something that wont allow me to rip and play the CD I just bought. BTW, any CD I purchase that does not play on my CD I return as being faulty. no sence in purchasing something I can't use, regardless of what is says on the lable
"80 Gigabyte should be enough for everyone"
/Andreas
This pisses me off too. The anti-piracy busybodies where I work have been up my skirt a few times about my bringing MP3 files from home to listen to at work. They have no problem with music on the job -- they're just convinced that MP3 is a "pirate-only" format because there has been so god damn much news about Napster and pirates.
I personally archive any CD I buy IMMEDIATELY as a high quality (256kbps or -r3mix) MP3 because CDs are just too damn fragile. I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times) because they developed serious skips/scratches before I started encoding everything to MP3. And YES, I do share my MP3 files sometimes. More than once I've sent a song to a friend in e-mail with a subject like "HOLY SHIT, I just bought a CD and *kicks ass*, LISTEN TO THIS!"
And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it.
These could be wonderful times -- we have the ability to reproduce information endlessly, so no information, be it music or paperwork or video or photos or whatever ever has to die or disappear -- and instead of preserving and sharing all this bounty of knowledge, we're even being prevented from perserving our OWN data for PERSONAL use by the likes of Microsoft, RIAA, SDMI, and all of those damned MP3 BUSYBODIES!
Yes, I need more MP3 space, my CD collection online is now up to 48 gigs and growing by two CDs a week! GIVE ME 80 GIGS OR GIVE ME DEATH!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
There's got to be a better way, like a modularized HD assembly with basic USB or FireWire conectivity that you can lug to your PC and back to the car. Sure would beat those MP3 car players that do CD-R's.
They should make one with a quarter slot and a bill-scanner: Drop in a quarter to play the song, plus a $5bill in the slot for the RIAA's cut.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
well I hope that that wasa just in jest but I guess i'll reply to that. Yes some of the times you could get an animal pregnant but it will spontaniously about in a very short time, say maybe within a couple of hours!! So don't worry about getting your dog pregnant!! hehe well that was fun, another post of animal cruelty. Unless your the average white guy
Bad spellers of the world untie!
You know, the more that I think about it, the less that I would call myself a music junkie, right now I have about 7 gigs of music, I thought that was a lot, but with some of the pople here having 7 times that, well i'm just plain pathetic in that regard. OOh well guess I'll have to start downloading music that I don't care about to be an uper geek
Bad spellers of the world untie!
was Cliff asleep this whole week?
I didn't see any information on what inputs or outputs this thing supports.
How do you get the files onto the device? Does it use firewire or USB and show up as a removable storage device under your OS (Windows/MacOS/etc) Can you rip a CD directly on the device, like that product we heard about from HP a few days ago?
First, taking music off a CD and reformating into MP3 results in some degradation. Much more importantly, however, just because music is digitally stored does not mean it will be audiophile quality. Storing bits of data is one thing. Converting them to high fidelity audio is arguably much more difficult. Go to Circuit City and listen to your favorite CD, and then go to an audio shop and listen to a good CD player such as the Rega Planet 2000 through a good amplifier and speakers. If you don't notice a huge difference, next go to the Beltone dealer nearest you and have your hearing checked.
For one company's solution to the problem of computer-based music, go to www.12dax7.com. They produce a preamplifier that uses the USB port, high quality DACs, and 12AX7 vacuum tubes (!) to produce a decent audio output.
I have a slightly different idea from the 12dax7 on the drawing board (and hopefully doable for about 1/3 the price!)
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I've got 143 GB to date....
I may just need a beowulf of these....
Hmm, that day must have snuck up on us because If I didn't know better, I still ripped a couple of brand new (prerelease) cds last week.
The day u can't rip cds will be the same day the United States stamps out terrorism and Micro$oft ends warez trading. It's an abstract war than can't be won. the Riaa brings down one p2p, 8 more pop up, or someone finds out about IRC or USENET or some other flavor of mp3 trading.
As for being unable to rip cds, if someone really wants to rip cds and can't even get CD paranoia or someother l33t program to rip the tracks, whats to stop them from recording directly from the Audio Out? As long as there is one geek out there willing to do the work, mp3s are still going to be around.
Please tell the name of the band who recorded this song. The last time I heard it was on the punk rock college student station out of Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles in 1990 or 1991.
ThinkGeek has a 20 gig version of this already. See ithere.
Today's grammar lesson:
"you're" : short for You Are.
Example - You're an idiot.
"your" : possesive.
Example - Your dog is brown.
If your mp3's are encoded at 128k, that is about a minute of music per Meg. There are 1024 Megs is a Gig. So, 80 Gigs will give you close to two months straight worth of non-repeating music.
You can encode at twice the bitrate which is just about as good as you can get on mp3. You will still have a month of non-stop listening of CD quality sound!
I used to DJ nightclubs, so my CD collection, then combined with my wifes..converted to MP3's is way over 100 gigs. So I can see someone needing that kind of space.
Im really not interested in any of this until i can get a decent ogg vorbis player.
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3......
spokenword, world, latin, rock, 2000s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s,
80 gig of music __PER MONTH__, easily. When you'll find the time to listen to it all is another story.
"Math is hard."
We have well over 100GB,.. and that doesn't include ripping entire CD's, for many CD's we only rip the songs we like. If we ripped every song from every CD, it would probably be a 300GB collection at least. So for those of you thinking 80GB is a lot,.. think twice. It only took me about 4 years to go from a few songs ripped from a few CD's taking up a few MB,.. to what I have now which is a MASSIVE collection of music, built mostly from ripping mine and my friends CD collections. I have at least 4 friends with 1000+ CD collections. Currently they are mostly played through my Rio 60GB car stereo (or most of them at least) and a custom Linux based jukebox based on mp3sb.
"I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times)"
:P !
"More than once I've sent a song to a friend in e-mail"
"And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it."
You should feel guilty. Haven't you heard of FDSFFAS?
Friends Don't Send Friends Fiona Apple Spam.
:P?
I don't know who has anywhere near enough MP3 music to need an 80G drive
While this undoubtably has the capacity to fit a moderate (300 - 500) CD collection a few times over I'm sure the extra capacity would easily be put to good use.
I imagine you'd even fill it with MP3's of CD's you didn't particularly like just to accomodate things like parties/entertaining etc. (afterall that is the point of a jukebox)
Then there's the possibilty of burning at much higher bit rates etc.
80GB is definitely not a problem
Why use the mp3 format when you have 80 gig. With that much space it would be easy to just copy over a WAV file and have high quality music stuffed into a small package. If done right, it could be quite the CD killer.
I guess it depends on what compression, but at the rule-of-thumb compression of 1 meg/minute, 30 gig is 30,720 minutes of music, or 21+ contiguous days (64 days of 8 hours).
Maybe your work days are REALLY long?
Hey if you want to hear the exact same music day after day, you can save a lot of money by not buying any CD's - An FM radio is all you need.
Frankly I never listen to any of my music collection anyways - AM Talk radio is where its at.. Of course to archive all that talk radio I'm going to need a lot more than 80 gigs..
air and light and time and space
Obligitory google cache link cause the site's hosed:w ww.reality.be/demo/sbac/+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:IJYiCWaUCWc:
Course, pictures are slow if at all, but if you want to there's http://images.google.com/
This is cool and all, but I'd like to see a wireless network interface built into a dash unit. There would be nothing cooler than refreshing your available playlist by just driving in front of your house.
well, if you ever read my sig, you would know that my spelling really suck a big fat doggy wang!!
Bad spellers of the world untie!
...and counting. The dedicated mp3 server at my student apartment building. really great to have around. Cheers,
Mike.
-
If you're archiving your own music and have the luxury of choosing a format to store music in, don't use MP3! FLAC is a lossless, open, LGPL-in-implementation format that's wonderful for archiving. A few years down the road, when you have more storage space, a higher-tech, cleaner audio system, and are wishing that you hadn't used MP3 because you can now hear the artifacts, FLAC will still be in original CD quality.
Disadvantages: Most people aim for about 10 to 1 compression with MP3...FLAC only gives you 2 to 1. You'll have to decide whether the cost in space is worth have a lossless duplicate of the CD.
A person I know has been archiving all their data in FLAC on their Linux box, and has been raving about the results.
whoah. here's some advice, buddy: buy bullet, rent gun.
as far as trading playlists on the 'net, hasn't been to reliable because you can't guarentee someone will have a certian song or that the filename/ID3 tags will be the same...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
i hit 80G of mp3s and pr0n when debbe does dallas was new
/. posting space
/home
/tmp
/usr
/var
/www
/proc
/mp3
/pr0n
... putting hand back down
--stripped filesystem for
$ df -h
Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
248M 38M 190M 17% /
992M 25M 888M 3%
373M 2.0M 341M 1%
1.9G 914M 912M 50%
1.9G 1.1M 1.8G 0%
6.4G 836M 5.1G 14%
4.0K 4.0K 0B 100%
758G 722.3G 35.7G 95%
144G 92.7G 51.3G 64%
$ w
6:16PM up 326 days, 20:47, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.06, 0.01
92G of pr0n
gotta love fibre channel drives and vinum. this machine is a real *bitch* when the power cuts out tho. i'll give the guy who invented ups's a bj. saved my damn pr0n collection many-a-time here in brownout city, az
Audio mp3-encoded at a quality of 160kB/s translates to a little over 1 MB/min in file size. A CD of about 60 minutes gives you about 60-70 megs of mp3.
An 80GB hd would hold over a thousand CDs.
~ (80 * 1024) / 60
Now if we're talking legit, that'd be over $15 grand in new RIAA-priced CDs.
Looking at it in another way, that comes out to be about 50 solid days of recorded audio.
I'd rather see it for a cheaper price than with hordes of unnecessary space.
Any time you link to a company that has an affiliate program, make sure that you link using your affiliate code.
</humor>
And, no. That is not a real affiliate ID.
Check out pjrc's board
This site is slashdotted, so I can't really see what they've got. I did find in google's cache a copy of the image on that page though.
It looks like this player does not have much buffering to speak of. So it wouldn't be very useful for a portable player. This one looks like a commendable effort, but I'd recommend PRJC.com if you're doing a portable player - large SDRAM means you can spin down the drive. Plus it's open source!
Because 80 GB is only 150 CDs. I don't know about you but 150 CDs is not much of a "super" collection. 80 GB is about 1100 CDs encoded at 192 kbps (little k folks; it really is 192,000 bits per second). That's getting up there. Or, think of it as 20,000 mp3 files. Okay, don't because you could never listen to that many before you died, your drive died, or we all died in some cosmic explosion.
Why is it that companies insist on charging so much more for larger drives? The difference between the 20G model and the 80G model is 264 dollars - There is no way the drive itself cost that much more. The same thing was true of the eMpeg - the bigger drive was almost a thousand dollars more there. Until marketers of MP3 devices start to price rationally, savvy customers are just going to ignore them. Profit margin doesn't mean much if you can't get revenues in the first place...
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Every time I click the fucking links in slashfart, I get goatsex. Besides, the link was kind of hard to see in Konqueror. Besides that, I was kind of dense. And still am.
Let's be greedy, and assume that the stations encode their music in such a way that each song takes 10MB. There is still room for 8,000 songs. That (from my very subjective viewpoint) seems like a lot more variety than any radio station I have heard in a really long time.
I rip all my files at 320, normal stereo, no filtering. Why? So I can reencode them to other, future formats with a reduced change of significant loss. I recompress to VBR (~150Kbps) for my laptop for listening to when I'm on the road. In five years, I'll probably be ripping to MPEG-4 TwinVQ for my mobile music, and will be able to carry around my whole collection on a few % of a laptop.
Wouldn't 256 work just as well? Probably. But Buying a second drive is a lot cheaper than worrying about having to rip 800 discs again because they were ALMOST good enough.
My video compression blog
If you are serious, we should trade pgp keys later this week.
I have slightly less (10%) than you and thought I had the most in the world. You humble me.
You can build an MP3 and MPEG jukebox by simply adding an IDE hard drive to the Sampo DVD player model DV631CF. The player has a built-in CF card reader for displaying photos from digital cameras. Disconnecting the CF reader and connecting a hard drive enables the DVD player to play MP3 music, MPEG video, and JPEG images from the drive. The players menu system provides the interface. Check out the conversion at http://www.area450.com .
One of my workplaces has 80GB of HDD in their jukebox. They buy scratched/useless CDs so that they own the right to play the songs, then rip the music from good copies.
They're going to up it to 160GB soon. Ripping at least two CDs every day soaks up a lot of disk space.
There were some insightful comments in other articles from musos with the opinion that they almost and/or literally give away the albums in order to spread their name (they get SFA for the ones sold through RIAA channels, maybe 5% typical, 10% on special occasions, so from a $Oz39 CD they normally get $Oz2, or maybe $Oz0.20 a track on average), and make their actual living from concerts and merchandise. I think this process is something that the hard drive manufacturers need to look into fostering. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What I really need is, a 80+ giga mp3 plus hi-end headphone amp-integrated in a small case. Thus I can enjoy my high quality 300 ohm HD-600 more.
with 80giga, you can use lossless compression. eg. monkey's audio or FLAC. without running out of space.
At work we have put together a communal MP3 archive, and it's at 76GB right now, and still growing.
We've got about 180GB of space total, so we're not even close to filled, but at this rate I would say we'll have it filled up by the end of 2002 if not sooner. Last I checked (at 72GB or so) we had over 15,000 songs that were a total of about 45 days of continuous uninterrupted, non-repeat music. =)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
From Linn Hi Fi: Check it our here. This is a bit heavy.
Looks like it's serial or USB. Anyone know for sure?
If so, Yikes. What can we know:
10 min to transfer 5 GB over FireWire;
x 16 to fill 80 GB - 160 min
x 33.3 if you move from 400 FW to 12 USB
Sooo... something like 88 hours to fill via USB? That's half a week.
Bet that iPod's looking pretty practical right about now?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You can also assemble your own mp3 player pretty easily and put whatever hard drive you like on it. I was just re-reading the old "Hackable Christmas Presents" story from not too long ago, and saw this link:
http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/
The board that's sold here only cost $150. And 80 gig hard drives only go for $139 on pricewatch.com. You would have to make your own case, but so what? Plus, the firmware is GPL'ed and flashable. What more could you need?
$800 just seems way too expensive to me.
most receivers have 100's of features and one of them happens to be a DA converter. Even though you spend big cash on a receiver, there are so many different components none of them costs much separately.
I had Yamaha's best surround receiver (spent $1000 on it two years ago.) Using the DA converter off of my "cheap" CD player hurt my ears. I ended up "downgrading" from my 300 disc changer to a $1000 single disc changer and what a difference it made.
My brother who counts features above quality was not only able to correctly identify the CD player in a blind test, was also able to determine the difference between interconnects. We had two copies of the same disc and played them on the same players at the same time. I factored out volume level differences, even favored the 300 disc changer. There was just something missing when switching between the two.
Now, my CD player is a Denon 1650AR which weighs about 26 pounds and has two power supplies (a separate supply for the DA converter.) The reason the CD player makes such a difference, is that the sample rate of a CD is low enough that it will sound crappy unless you know how to smooth the signal and how to compensate for errors. Also, not all DA converters are created equal in terms of dynamic range. My 300 disc sony probably cost Sony about $30 to make and about $400 to me. I doubt the quality of the DA was anything above a low end portable CD player. Looking at the Denon, I know it cost considerably more to make it and the sound difference is phenomenal to the trained ear.
sorry, couldnt resist.
there werethree of us in our office that ripped our rather large cd collections.
we are up to approximately 140gb.
when you have so many mp3s, new problems arise.
every jukebox i have ever tried gets rather unhappy when you feed it that many files.
we built our own web-based system for playing, built around a relational db and it was pretty neat, though a total hack job.
now we are building in our spare time a system that is jini based and has distributed services for playback, indexing / importing, and perhaps ripping and re-encoding as well as a few other things.
its all controllable by a web browser. players are independant of the remote control, as well. everything is distributed. this gives you the ability to control players running on other machines, such as set the playlist for the machine running down the hall, and control its volume. what use this has i dont know, but its kinda fun.
It won't be much longer before they start slapping a small color LCD on there and instead of mp3s, we'll either be watching tons of music videos or, even worse (for the MPAA), bootleg feature-length videos.
::Colz Grigor
Let's not limit ourselves by thinking all we need is audio. With hardware getting this powerful and inexpensive, the possibilities are endless.
--
I wonder if you can save as different formats, allowing it to become a gigantic portable hard drive.
Cause as well as MP3's, I'd like to store other things like maybe MPG's, JPG's, and other files. I doubt I'd fill up the space, but its a relaxing thing when your computer hdd is only 2 gigs. Plus, since its hardware decoding, the sound won't jitter like when I play MP3's and work on graphics on my computer.
By the way, what do you use for a hard drive in an automotive environment? Temp -30 to +50C, with heavy vibration. That's a tough spec. Are there drives that can thrive in that environment?
*waves hand at RIAA and proudly says "fuck you buddy!"* :)!!!!!!! naa na na na boo boo hahahah suckers.
Like many people, I have a lot of MP3s downloaded off the net. I've noticed that 90% of them have either no ID3 tag at all, and of those that do have one its wrong, inaccurate, or has other problems that make it unusable.
Is there a way to fix this easily? At least make sure the artist and title are right?
Every time I click the fucking links in slashfart, I get goatsex.
/. that extends beyond the end of the status bar. The most common ones I've seen start with rd.yahoo.com, but there are others.
Yeah, I know, I always close one eye and only open the other to just a slit, and I prepare a CTRL-ALT-Backspace to force an X restart in case it's one of those links that opens a thousand goat sex windows (seriously!).
If you look at the link in the status bar (at the bottom of your browser window), you can usually tell. That one I posted looks legit, and of course you'll recognize the goatse.cx domain. It's the 'secret' ones that are the pissers. I'm suspicious of any link on
-l00ny_bstrd
--
buy, now.....
My niece (oh yes) recently opened a dinner-café here in Belgium (yes, the place where this thing comes from, also the country with most pubs per inhabitant...).
She has exactly what you describe. I have seen several suppliers of such system at last years Horeca expo. Most firms even come update the music collection every two weeks or so (some kind of subscription).
I can't imagine that such systems don't exist at the other side of the ocean.
120 chars is not enough!
...a hunch people will be looking at this, expecting to call me a moron. Yeah, yeah, I read 80 GB just like you did. But I gotcha, didn't I?
I know 2 Neo owners, and they both hate it. It's clunky, the firmware is buggy and is never upgraded, and I don't think it'll ever support anything beyond mp3. This product definately has room to replace the Neo in the marketplace. It's a different solution from the Empeg/RioCar, or PhatBox, so it doesn't really compete with those.
http://www.reality.be/demo/gidi/ - Click on "The player". By the car unit you see:
"8 updatable playlists of up to 64 titles each"
Hmm... Couldn't you do that with a 2G drive?
But then my speakers are 2 nice Cabasse and the amp is an Cyrus 1 (50W are enough 8)on my SB live with Monster Gold Connects...
Of course, on a small pc speaker (2 for 20$) the difference won't even begin to show...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Who cares what the RIAA has to say about it? It's made in Belgium, and not subject to these daft US laws that are coming out.
Cheers,
Ian
Less gigs, less cost!
So how much effort do I have to put in before I become disgusted with my 10Gb of mp3 and can't listen to it any more?
I can't believe that they're charging over $700! I mean the iPod only costs $399 and it looks cool!
Tee-heee...Sorry I couldn't resist.
-D
The PJB-100 is far superior, though far more expensive.
I've heard 2 different stations (both classic rock) do the gimmick of 'play everything in the playlist in alphabetical order'. The station in Oklahoma City took about 10 days to do so, whereas the one here in Atlanta took 21 or 22 days. I dunno how good mp3 compression is at high bitrates nowadays, but some quick back-of-envelope (ok, so I did it in bc, but) calculation comes up with 9250 minutes or around 6.4 days worth of space for raw wav files in 80G.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Not listed i their Hacks section and I've only found a brief mention of the DESIRE to do this in the Forums area. If you could provide more guidance as to where this is being done I'm interested!
Thanks!
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