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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."
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.
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...
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
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!
-all dead homiez
and be sure the audio shop uses that $30.00 a food no-ox wires, they sound better......NOT
99.995% of the audio you hear is the preamp-amp and speakers. NOTHING at a general store is decent. Hell my 1986 Bose 301's sound 70% better than any bose 301 in the stores now... My La-scalas sound immensely better than anything sold at any electronics store.
dont even try to say that a $1000.00 CD player sounds better than my $250.00 Pioneer. I remember the audiophile scams when CD's came out... The Acoustical Lens to corect the horible wavefront distortion that CD's have.... pure BS to try and sucker someone into buying a $1500.00 box.
Buy a decent amp, preamp and speakers... dont waste big bucks on a CDplayer or DVD player... only the uneducated buyer thinks that more expensive is better in the CD or DVD realm.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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/
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.
If your home computer is online 24/7 (which is presumably is if you're on broadband) t's cooler to use SAMBA, AFS (or here), Coda, InterMezzo, NFS, or the unfinished Lustre. If you're not big on effort, set up an http or ftp (or gopher!) server. That way, you have an automatically up-to-date menu of your mp3s, where you can access all your music any time you can connect to the 'Net.
This box is just itching to be a Coda server.
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!
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.
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.