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."

Comments

Why?

[PopeAlien]

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..

Re:Why?

[dimator]

I know I've run out of space on my 40 gig drive and am going to adding another just for music..

I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.

Re:Why?

[vrmlguy]

Hey, I listen to all of the files on *my* 30 gig drive. I've got a few really big playlists that get shuffle-played every day while I'm at work.

Re:Why?

[Reality Master 101]

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?

Re:Why?

[Tackhead]

> I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.

Over several years of collecting MP3z and/or ripping/encoding your own CDs, yeah, you will listen to everything in your collection, at least once.

If you're ripping your own CDs, you won't know the rip/encode was "good" until you've listened to the MP3.

If you're l33ching MP3z, you won't know you "got" the song (that is, you won't know that the idjit posting the file did his job of previewing the MP3 before he uploaded it) until you've listened to the MP3.

Thus, any serious MP3 collector will probably have listened to every piece in his or her collection at least once, and arguably multiple times.

Re:Why?

[Reality Master 101]

Maybe I have tin ears, but I've always found 128kb to be fine and I listen to a lot of instrumentals (including classical).

Re:Why?

[geomcbay]

When it comes to self-proclaimed "audiophiles" I'm one of the first to call them out on being totally full of shit about a great many things and laugh as they buy extremely high-end equipment to improve the dynamic range of music by a half of a percent that they will never hear... However, I must admit that while 128kpbs is fine for most music (assuming you use a good encoder, of course, which can make a huge difference in relative quality even at the same bitrates) some music falls apart at that rate and I do notice distortion to a level that annoys me.

However, I've yet to see any proof that going above 192kpbs does anything for the vast majority (99.999999999% of the planet) who aren't blessed with perfect ears.

Re:Why?

[mixmasta]

> I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.
---

Just like the %80 of my CD's I dont listen to. CD's collect take up REAL space AND collect dust. I rip them and then sell 'em back to the warehouse when I'm done. =)

But .... Forget MP3!

Dont waste your time ripping 80G of mp3 just to have to do it again when hardrive space quintuples in 2 years.... like I did.

Forget mp3 and all the other lossy compression types. They are/will be a complete waste of time when 1-200GB hard disks are selling for $200 sometime next summer.

I'm saving all my files with lossless compression with the flac format: http://flac.sourceforge.net

A cheap 80G drive should hold quite a bit, and I'll never have to rip the files again since they will expand to perfect digital copies when played.

Trying to save the world time....

Re:Why?

[Kharny]

You might not have that many cd's, but i personally own about 500 cd's and 400 records. Especially for recording records, this is very nice. Adding a 80 GB drive in my audio rack is better then connecting a pc to it. Primarily because i think a pc in the living room looks ugly.

Re:Why?

[Tiroth]

Try listening to something with a large dynamic range, like Orff's Carmina Burana. On a decent set of speakers/headphones you'll rapidly see that even at 320kbps the psychoacoustic modeling appears detrimental to soft sections of the music--there is simply a lack of definition. I surmise that some of the things the encoder thinks you won't miss are in fact quite audible.

I'm well aware of the inane things "audiophiles" often believe, but I think there is a lot to be said about uncompressed CD audio, at least for certain kinds of music--and I'm quite certain my ears are far from perfect.

Re:Why?

[anarak]

What your audio set up? I had a friend who thought the same thing when until he stop listening through shitty computer speakers.

New Rio Volt

[sacherjj]

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. :)

Re:New Rio Volt

[Anonymous Coward]

http://joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/254.htm l

Re:New Rio Volt

[ChuyMatt]

...give me a portable radio add on anyday.

Ok... I suppose if you are in, maybe, anywhere other than the poor south that would be OK as a requirement for an MP3/cd player. But as for us who live in the culturally and airwave deprived areas (such as AR (NO, that is not Arizona)), it is a waste of circuitry and money. It all depends upon your situation with this thing. All I CAN listen to and not go insane is my ever changing/growing MP3 collection. I think that this would kick butt, especially with families. Think about it, you have 80G to store all of the music liked by a whole family, including, i suppose, playlists. Rather cool idea.

Re:New Rio Volt

[big_hairy_mama]

80 Gigs == how many different songs? I'm too lazy to count, but it's many many thousand. So would you rather listen to the same top 20 on the radio over and over (not to mention commercials), or twenty thousand of your own hand picked songs? I'll take the latter (although my collection is only up to 2K songs at the moment)

Re:New Rio Volt

[vkt-tje]

You think airwave deprived is bad?
Belgium is devided in two communities: the Flemish (Dutch) speeking and the Walloon (French) speeking part. Since "culture" is one of the things that is managed on a "community" level, there are different bodies licencing radio frequencies north and south of the linguistic border. In Brussels (bi-langual by federal law) both agencies hand out licences.
The result is that allmost all frequencies are double booked (except those used by national, government paid for, stations). The result is that you can not get any singnal clear (again, except for the shitty state radio stations). I think this is far worse than an empty spectrum.
Maybe this is the reason why a Belgian company made this box?

Re:New Rio Volt

[sacherjj]

So would you rather listen to the same top 20 on the radio over and over (not to mention commercials), or twenty thousand of your own hand picked songs? I'll take the latter (although my collection is only up to 2K songs at the moment)

Why is this an either or thing? They added a radio to the MP3 player. That means I get both. Why do you assume I have to listen to music on the radio? Maybe I am somewhere and want to catch the President's address, or a football game, or well music. :)

You loose absolutely nothing by having the radio added, so tell me why that is a bad thing? Your comment would only be relevant to: "I decided to trade in my Rio Volt for an FM radio."

Finally

[resonator]

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.

school..

[moronic1]

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 need 80G

[spanky555]

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.

Re:I need 80G

[tahpot]

hey! spanky555... if u're reading this... email me: tahpot@hotmail.com (re: mp3s)

why isn't there anyway in /. for me to find ppl's email addresses that have posted?

Re:I need 80G

[tahpot]

rofl, u anonymous coward! :P

How long until RIAA makes a statement about this?

[Embedded Geek]

If this device takes off, I'm sure one will follow.

Of course, if M$ were to do it and somehow tie Pa$$port into it, I'm sure RIAA would fall all over it.

Why only mp3?

[Radnimax]

I love the idea of these players but what happens when a new audio format takes lead? I want a player that is upgradeable.

Re:Why only mp3?

[kilgore_47]

If you'd bothered to read the article you'd have noticed it isn't only mp3.
It can also play WMA files!
( pause for laughter )
Seriously, though, if it can play two formats it can probably be flash-upgraded to do others, I'd imagine.

Re:Why only mp3?

[kaimiike1970]

I would love to be able to put .shns on it. Considering they are lossless and only compress to half the size of .wavs, 80GB wouldn't go very far... (200-250cds? I have twice that many).

Re:Why only mp3?

[recursiv]

> 200-250cds

eh, I would say that's sufficiently far to be very far.

Re:Why only mp3?

[ikeleib]

There's MP3 and there's uncompressed.

That's simply not true. Many of the portable players out there understand several formats (WMA, AAC, MP3, etc).

problem with large storage mp3 players

[ultrapenguin]

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...

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Embedded Geek]

This may already be done somewhere in MP3-land, but...

What if, instead of merely swapping MP3's, you swapped playlists, too? The trick to navigating a big mass of music is programming it in interesting ways. I know that I usually wind up just playing the same CDs over and over out of laziness and only cycle in new stuff when I get bored. To avoid the equivilent with this player (hitting the same hot buttons or menu sequences or whatever), you would upload a playlist that someone else found interesting (Hendix followed by the stuff he influenced, Miles Davis followed by Kobain, etc). Essentially, you'd be doing the job a radio station programmer does, but at an amateur level.

Seems like a good idea - that's why I gotta think some of the MP3 sites aleady do this.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Reality Master 101]

What, you don't think a single line display with some buttons is going to cut it for potentially 10,000 songs? :)

Seriously, it could be done. If you had a drill-down interface that let you skip to first letters, then second letters, etc, it's possible it might be practical.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[ultrapenguin]

this is exactly what I was referring to.
Unless this unit (or at least the radio station version of it (rack mount)) comes with a external display + mouse + keyboard so that you can roll your own playlists for it, it's going to be rather difficult to use.
And no, I don't think ANYONE has that much time on their hands to sit in front of a one-line LCD display picking music for a playlist. 80gb of storage definitely requires a external monitor + keyboard to be able to make some sense out of all the music.

Or how about this, make it run Linux (maybe it does already?) then you can ssh into it, and make all playlists with vi! Then on the one-line display you only pick from say, 40 playlists instead of 40000 songs. All the playlists could be stored in a separate directory, as plain text (m3u or something), and LCD display can be switched between songs/playlists mode. Hopefully this kind of functionality is already present in this unit in one way or another.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[krogoth]

The first thing I would do with something like this is get the highest quality MP3s I can. At 128Kbps, I could easily fill my nomad jukebox with trance mixes that go from merely cd-size to 3 hours (!). I now download at 160 to 192Kbps, so although it's still a lot of listening time available, I'll outgrow my nomad jukebox soon.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing probably doesn't run on linux, but you could easily make your own rack-mount mp3player box for a lot less than $800.00. The most expensive part will be the enclosure, MB, power supply. Supermicro sells some nice enclosures that already have all of that stuff (plus NIC), and all you need is a CPU and a hard drive.

Of course I may be _way_ off base, I haven't read the article. Honestly the idea seems sort of stupid to me. Why would anybody want to buy a mp3 player box that sits in an equipment closet? The point of using a rack is to organize your equipment and save space. And usually the rack gets put in a closet somewhere nowhere near your computer with speakers.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[brer_rabbit]

I've encountered the "navigation" problem with my ~6000 song mp3 collection. I was going to use something like grip/digital DJ but I'm more interested in rolling my own solution (no offense Mike, your tools are good). I think it's the geek in me looking for a project. So far I've got a SQL database and the beginnings of some perl for ripping/storing CDs/metadata. I had the benefit of scripting ripping software at a previous job where we ripped 1,000 CDs and enconded via various mp3 encoders and vorbis, so I've got a good foundation to build on.

In the end, I'm shooting to hook up my Vaio laptop to the home stereo. Combine that with NFS over an 802.11b wireless network and the digital optical output (skip the laptop's inferior soundcard) and it should be a pretty decent system.

Oh, navigation. That's what I meant to be talking about...besides having verbose filenames/directories, allowing the if you provide the database with 2 or more genres (or genre/subgenre) navigation isn't terribly difficult. Plus if you represent genres as some sort of adjency matrix you could implement a random play mode that wouldn't jump genres too harshely.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Tarkwyn]

A good point - I would imagine that you could upload playlists to the box in the same way as you upload the MP3 tracks. That way the only on-the-fly control you'd need would be your standard audio controls + an add and remove playlist facility.

Here's hoping they've got a decent way of getting the tracks on the box in the first place.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[AaronStJ]

Is how do you navigate through 80gb of content?

Very easily. Ok, I've only got 8 gigs of mp3s, but navigating through my collection is still not a problem in the least. I just have a directory structure that goes something like C:\music\Band Name\Album Name\mp3s. Compilation albums go into C:\music\Various Artists. It's just like any large physical album collection I might have, only it alphebetizes itself. Navigating through my mp3 collection has never given me any difficulty. And if I ever get a lot more bands' mp3s, I can just categorize the Band Name directories in Genre directories.

As far as I've seen, most portable mp3s players haven't been able to catch onto the value on a directory structure. With the tiniest bit of discipline and a directory structure, organizing a very large mp3 collection is not difficult at all.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[benwb]

My solution:
By an extra 80gig hard drive for your computer, along with an audiotron. Make sure that you're home network has an 802.11b access point attached to it. Insert a compact flash ethernet card into your windows ce device. The audiotron had a pretty nice web based interface for doing things, but if it really sucks on the small device set up a shoutcast server on your computer and develop some custom screens. You now have a remote control that works from any room in your house with a 320x120 screen.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Van Halen]

Yup. I don't know what that funky C:\ stuff is, but mine's basically /mp3/Genre/Artist/Album/Song.mp3. I just dump the output of 'find /mp3' to a text file for faster searching. Then my mp3 player perl script will search that text file for regular expressions to play whatever I'm in the mood for. If I want some weird playlist, I can probably concoct a regexp to cover it - if not, just build the playlist ahead of time and feed it to the player script. Works like a charm!

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Steve Hamlin]

That's what I do also - works well enough for now, and is simple to keep track of.

The problem, though, is what do you do when you want to listen to a random mix of all current hip hop? Or all European trance with lengths over 20 minutes?

This is what more advanced tools can do. Metadata, outside of the mp3 id info, with a good interface, can allow more complex listening patterns than a simple filesystem-based approach

One of these days, I might actually use one :)

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[BuGless]

The Empeg has solved this rather efficiently.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Pyrosz]

Direct from the product page for the SBAC (Single Board Audio Computer). This is the same board setup as in the assembled product you can buy or you can get this board to make your own setup (very cool!)

Use your Palm with our free software or one of our dedicated lcd screens to remotely control it.

Uses FAT32 file system.

Multitasking allow you to browsee titles while the music is playing

Connect this board to any IDE hard drive, and turn it into an mp3 player.

The optional remote control give access to an easy to use menu for all functions.

The KIT consists of the main CPU board with MP3 decoder and IDE interface, the LCD display with its own CPU

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[jhines0042]

I've done exactly this. Rolled my own player in Java (still in experimental phase, but 100% functional).

Currently I am listening to "Hey Jude". It was last played on 10/20/2001 at 8:02:08 PM. In fact, according to my Database the song that I haven't heard in the longest time was last played on 10/11/2001 at 6:44:01 AM.

Since I leave the player running 24 hours a day 7 days a week I don't always hear every song that gets played, but I assure you that I always have good music playing.

And you won't ever hear "Rage Against The Machine" followed by "I Shot The Sheriff". It is smart enough to avoid songs that are that dissimilar.

<muttering to self>Never listen to all my music... yeah right</muttering to self>

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[brer_rabbit]

And you won't ever hear "Rage Against The Machine" followed by "I Shot The Sheriff". It is smart enough to avoid songs that are that dissimilar.

nice. How did you accomplish this? I've got my ideas [ie- basic graph algorithm stuff], but it's always nice to see what someone else did.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[Rude Turnip]

Its future may be uncertain, but BeOS still provides the best way to store your MP3s and Ogg Vorbis files. The filesystem (BFS) is rather like XFS, a 64 bit journalling filesystem that lets you attach attributes to files, much like a database.

Unlike XFS, however, BFS gives you live queries. ie...have a query window open with some search results based on the "artist" attribute, change another file's artist attribute to what you were looking for in the query and it will instantly come up in the query results window.

I use a program called RipEnc to rip CD's to MP3 format. Using a combination of the CDDA filesystem where CD tracks become WAV files and the FreeDB database, RipEnc stores all your mp3's in the folder heirarchy of /mp3/artist/album/songs.mp3. It also inserts the ID3 tags based upon the FreeDB results. *And* it puts the same info from the ID3 tags into each file's attributes.

The benefit to all of this is that even though your songs get stored in a reasonable folder system, they can really be anywhere on your hard drive and you can still pull up any combination of songs using filesystem queries.

In addition to RipEnc, two other handy utilities for playing MP3's on BeOS are MP3 Flashlight and Be in Your Stereo. The former is a small query app that lets you do MP3 specific attribute searches (instead of using the general query tool). You can then play the results or committ them to a playlist. The latter lets you stream your music over your network using a sophisticated web interface.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[jhines0042]

I have a database.

Each song has several datapoints known about it.

Mood, Tempo, Genre, Situation, LastPlayed, Preference, Album, Artist, TimesPlayed, TimesRequested

Randomly pick the first song.
Then when it is done, choose the next song based on a fitting algorithm. That algorithm should be based on how "close" one song is to another. Closeness is defined as how many of the traits are similar. Measure this distance for all songs and sort them. Choose one that is near the front of the list.

My algorithms are getting actually pretty complex for doing this and I want to keep them to myself somewhat for now. But that is the general way that things work.

The effect is that of wandering around a hyperspace of your music. Each song lives in one location based on its properties and you are limited in how far you can wander in any one step. But over all you can eventually get from "Pink Floyd -- Shine on you crazy Diamond" to "The Beatles -- Love Me Do" without any jarring transitions. In fact, that happened today with my software in 8 songs.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[brer_rabbit]

My algorithms are getting actually pretty complex for doing this and I want to keep them to myself somewhat for now. But that is the general way that things work.

yeah they're complex! My previous job was at Cantametrix, one of the things we did was a similarity model for music. This involved extracting attributes from music (tempo, melody, and tons of low-level stuff), throw that in a database, and run a similarity model on it. The best part was it was completely automated, humans never had to hear the songs. It worked decently, but the company eventually switched focus to doing song fingerprinting (which wasn't as big of an about face as you'd think). Something like that would be great for a jukebox. anyway, we could take this to email if you'd like. Seems this subject isn't drawing many more posters.

Re:problem with large storage mp3 players

[jchristopher]

I just bought a Genica hard drive based player. You can create winamp or winamp compatible playlists on the PC, and then choose among those playlists on the portable device, eliminating the problem of how to find the music you like on such a large device.

eMpeg had this over a year ago

[doug_wyatt]

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.

Re:eMpeg had this over a year ago

[dan the person]

The cheapest empeg is $699 where as the cheapest Gidi 'micro server' is $451, the the gap isn't that huge.

No doubt this GIDI thing uses cheap 3.5inch hardrives to get the price down, so they're probably not going to hold up to in car use.

The Gidi doesn't appear to have a proper user interface either, just a small LCD display and a steering remote control.

Still there definately a market out there for cheap solutions.

Re:eMpeg had this over a year ago

[frog51]

The Empeg (RioCar) also copes with new formats - Ogg Vorbis will be probably be added by the guys there if there is enough call for it. They have said that although they aren't producing any more, they will still support and develop.

And the visuals are lovely.

And you can play Tetris on it, although you have to turn your head on one side:)

What they don't tell you

[CmdrTroll]

This is even better than it sounds. One of my buddies bought the do-it-yourself kit and he found that they send you full source code listings for the entire unit (under a "do not distribute" license of course), which allows you to erase and re-burn the firmware EEPROMs. Very handy. He has already experimented with recompiling them to change some of the prompts and things look encouraging.

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

Re:What they don't tell you

[All Dead Homiez]

Have you looked into AS31? Not sure on the license but source is available (I suspect it may be GPL). AS31 and several other Linux based tools including an 8051 simulator are available here.

-all dead homiez

Re:What they don't tell you

[Reality Master 101]

Whatever happened to Heathkit? They used to rock when it came to supplying do-it-yourself electronic kits. It looks like heathkit.com does primarily educational stuff. It's a shame. It guess there isn't much room for soldering in a surface mount world, but it would still be cool if more companies had kits like this.

Re:What they don't tell you

[PoiBoy]

Unfortunately Heathkit quit producing electronics kits about 10 years ago. However, EBay usually has quite a few older Heathkit amplifiers up for auction at any time. Their audio equipment was very high quality considering the reasonable prices of the kits. There are a lot of companies nowadays producing other audio electronics kits that are also very good, though.

Cool...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

Enough storage to rip an entire CD colection at 196 kbps... Better sound without worring about space...

If my iPaq had all this space...

Re:Cool...

[Anonymous Coward]

You listen to 196 kbps bitrate? How's that sound when compared to 192 kbps? What's the storage requirement difference?

umm... I question...

[powerlinekid]

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?

Re:umm... I question...

[firebus]

read their site. it seems they've patented a concept called "directories" that lets you use a tree like structure to recursively subdivide your music files into different groups...

Re:umm... I question...

[Monkey-Man]

it seems they've patented a concept called "directories" that lets you use a tree like structure to recursively subdivide your music files into different groups...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

just my $0.02. . .

Re:Why? Commercial Jukebox.

[bmeteor]

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.

Neo

[ScrO]

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!

Re:Neo

[FistFuck]

I dig my Neo.

I do lots of long distance driving and with 40 gigs of music/audio books you can't beat it. I use Rsync to sync to my master MP3 collection, whicih keeps me from having to manage it too much.

Sure the menu is a litle weird, but why would you want to navigate a menu system while driving?! Build a few playlists on your PC first if you really have something in mind.

The latest firmware isn't buggy at all, it's an easy download from http://www.ssiamerica.com.

As far as indexing the tracks, I have roughly 7800 mp3s and it takes about five minutes. ...only when I change the filesystem though. Five minutes out of my multi-hour trip won't break my heart.

80 gigs?

[snoozerdss]

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

Re:80 gigs?

[snoozerdss]

I a moron for some reason I thought it was a portabel player :( sorry!! bout that ;) 80 gigs is still alot though unless your a DJ

Actually, eMpeg (Rio Car) units are upgradable

[The Optimizer]

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

why when you can no longer rip cd's

[Brigadier]

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

Enough for everyone

[Nau.dk]

"80 Gigabyte should be enough for everyone"

/Andreas

Re:Enough for everyone

[gaylenek]

And so was 32 kB of RAM to quote past thinking! I know someone who has almost filled a 75 GB drive of high quality mp3s.

One good sized CD collection, starting at about 100 CDs could fill 80 GB without a problem. Trust me.

God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[aussersterne]

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!

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[ekrout]

I'm curious how well emailing your 256kbps mp3s to friends works. Those files must be almost 10MB for a 5 minute song. Most people with email accounts probably have a quota of less than 7MB, if that.

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[aussersterne]

Works great. I routinely get 50-60MB .zip files as e-mail attachments, do my part with them, and then forward them on to production or someone else. E-mail is actually a great filesharing tool if you're not stuck at home with a 56k modem...

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[Tack]

The problem with sending files over email is that base64 bloats your attachments by 33%. This amounts to quite a bit when you're dealing with those 60MB attachments you talked about.

However, as a medium, email is very convenient for moving files around. If only it weren't for that 33% bloat, it would be perfect.

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[ekrout]

Kmail lets you select which radix (base) to use when attaching files. If you're into the whole *nix scene, you should definitely give Kmail a try.

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[theevilsquid]

HECK YEAH FIONA!!! :D

just so this post can be on topic:
i totally agree w/you :D... cd's just aren't practical.

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[Dr. Awktagon]

tip: always convert files to base-50,000,000, pretty much any file can be represented by one digit. :-)

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[Van Halen]

Actually one digit in that base could encode about 25 bits of information (technically more, but less than 26), or 3 full bytes and some change. If you have a way to compress (without loss) any file into 3 bytes or less, let's hear it! ;-)

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[ddent]

>> GIVE ME 80 GIGS OR GIVE ME DEATH!

*ZAP*

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...

[karnal]

I've had one or two cds die in el cheapo portable players (Read - poor college days) that for some reason over time, the whole motor/laser mechanism would become loose, and cause the CD to scratch against the "body" of the player.

Other than that, though, I haven't had any go bad. I've got a friend of mine though, who treats them like they've got protective sleeves on them even when they don't. 9 times out of 10, I can't even get his to rip for him.

It's all in the respect.

The problem is...

[The Bungi]

... getting data into this thing, especially when securely mounted on my car. Not that I'd complain or anything - this thing is monstrous. But I find myself downloading to my 20GB MP3 player time and again because I just found this great new song that I want to listen to.

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.

Re:The problem is...

[geekoid]

Actually, a wireless connection to your home system.
You pull into the garage, your computer checks its playlist vs the cars, and makes any changes on the fly.
Of course even at 10Mb downloading all 80 gig at once would be time consuming,but that would just be an annoyance

Re:Why? Commercial Jukebox.

[kilgore_47]

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.

Re:What's a better

[NovaD]

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

WOW!!

[NovaD]

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

Some missing information...

[amuro98]

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?

Audio Quality?

[PoiBoy]

Being able to store 80 GB of music in MP3 format may be useful to some, but how good does it sound?

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!)

Re:Audio Quality?

[bOtCartman]

FYI, CD's are digital, so when you play them on your stereo it is still converted from digital -> analog. You could jut hook your computer to an amplifier and use it as a part of your normal audio system. There are some soundcards that can produce quality that you distinguise from a good CD player.
By the way an audiophile listens to the music not the quality. You're saying that you can't enjoy listening to old records while most DJ's still use vinyl.

Re:Audio Quality?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Audio Quality?

[PoiBoy]

You said ... "By the way an audiophile listens to the music not the quality. You're saying that you can't enjoy listening to old records while most DJ's still use vinyl."

It's impossible to really listen to music if the quality is poor. Listening to some jazz music through a boombox is nothing like listening to it through a good stereo system with a nice wide, deep soundstage, flat frequency response, etc. And, yes, I do listen to vinyl, and some of my records are quite old.

Re:Audio Quality?

[Sunda666]

nope, thats wrong. the correct is:

"Audiophiles are the ones who listen to the audio eq, not to music"

;-)

Re:Audio Quality?

[srvivn21]

Respectfully, I must disagree. A $1000 CD player probably will sound better than your $250 Pioneer. It just likely won't sound 4x better. Having a decent amp, preamp and speakers is nice, but all they are doing is making the signal they receive louder. If they receive a crap signal (and I am not saying that your Pioneer is putting out a crap signal), you are going to hear nothing but loud crap.

For the record, I spent a grand total of less than $1000 on the whole audio portion of my HT setup, and it sounds good enough for me.

Re:Audio Quality?

[asv108]

I agree, generally if you paying for a $1000 dollar CD player, your getting really good D>A converters. As long as you receiver has SPDIF in, why not buy a standard $300 CD changer and plug in to your receiver digitally? I'm sure there may be extremly minor differences in quality which can only be heard by the poor sap who paid $1000 for a CD player.

Re:Audio Quality?

[Lumpy]

when it comes to common sense than that would be true. But today EVERYBODY uses the same basic hardware. Home Theatre Magazine reviewed 30 DVD players and 30 CD players. The highest marks on DVD players was to the latest APEX dvd player... best video best sound, it beat out the B&O , $1500.00 DVD player hands down, the apex unit is $229.95.

In Cd players the mentioned that if it doesnt have digital out, dont buy it. otherwise there was no perceptable difference from the $199.00 unit to the $3200.00 cd player they tested. (They also mentioned that audiophiles that use Scopes to check for better specs are either stupid or rich as only a dummie would pay huge dollars for something that you cant hear.)

It's sctually very interesting to research Audio and so-called audiophiles... several audio masters, the great men that designed the awesome audio of today remark that a great majority of "high-end-audiophiles" are just spoiled rich kids that really dont know anything, and are coloring their hearing because they spent $50,000 on their stereo... A human cannot hear the differnce between Silver no-ox cables or 12gague lamp cord in a home stereo or commercial audio install. and many of the perceptions that people swear by are either artifical coloring of the audio (Ala Tube Amps, they sound different) or reflections.

research the audiophile world, it's pretty funny and will give you new insight on how to snicker when a salesman trys to say that that $2700.00 Nakamitchi is the only choice in high end audio.

Re:Audio Quality?

[srvivn21]

The really funny thing about your statement is that I have a HT mag subscription. I just haven't had the time to read it in over a year... *sigh* They joys of being responsible.

I'll have to go back through the collection and look for that article. It sounds like a really good read.

I DO!!

[11390036]

I've got 143 GB to date....

I may just need a beowulf of these....

Re:SINCE WHEN you can no longer rip cd's?

[Desus]

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.

Re:80GIGs

[jkavanau]

80Gb isn't that much music? Let's see, 320Kb per sec is considered archival quality... so
80000000/320 = 4166.67 mins of music, or 69 hours. If you say the average song is 3.5 minutes long, then that is about 71,000 songs. That is a bunch of music at least to me.

Re:80GIGs

[PoiBoy]

Um, no. 4166.667 minutes / 3.5 minutes/song = 1190 songs. Moving up to archival quality recording and suddenly 80 GB isn't so huge.

Re:80GIGs

[jkavanau]

Must have messed up the math some where. 1190 songs is still a whole lot more than I currently own, although I'm sure theres some with more.

Barbie was right...

[mph]

"Math is hard."

80GB aint all that much

[anewsome]

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.

Re:80GB aint all that much

[Bryan_Crowl]

What other homemade solutions are out there aside from mp3sb (which seems to be the best ive seen so far)

Re:80GB aint all that much

[tgrigsby]

And you paid *how much* for all that music? Just the music, please....

Re:80GB aint all that much

[anewsome]

Hmm,.. how much money for those CDs I bought? Well probably a lot I guess. I own less than a thousand CDs myself, the other CDs to make up my mp3 collection were really borrowed from friends, etc. I have some friends with rather massive CD collections.

Please support FDSFFAS!

[jfisherwa]

"I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times)"
"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? :P !

80GB is not more than enough (it is nice though)

[Nathdot]

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

Mp3

[lavaforge]

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.

Re:80GIGs

[jkavanau]

yaya, so I divided the number of seconds into the 3.5 instead of the number of minutes. No need to make fun of my math skills, I'm sure you make a couple every once in awhile.

Long work days..

[PopeAlien]

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..

kaaamaaa hoooo

[Nate Fox]

Obligitory google cache link cause the site's hosed:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:IJYiCWaUCWc:w ww.reality.be/demo/sbac/+&hl=en
Course, pictures are slow if at all, but if you want to there's http://images.google.com/

Wireless

[lavaforge]

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.

Re:What's a better.. good grammar!

[NovaD]

well, if you ever read my sig, you would know that my spelling really suck a big fat doggy wang!!

172 GB...

[stixman]

...and counting. The dedicated mp3 server at my student apartment building. really great to have around. Cheers,

Mike.

Don't use MP3 for archiving!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Don't use MP3 for archiving!

[GooseKirk]

I've thought about this, but I came to the conclusion that I'd rather use a high-bitrate LAME MP3 encode (like the dibrom -insane setting). It's still significantly better than 2 to 1, and completely transparent with everything I've checked so far (with moderately good gear and midrange Sennheiser headphones, but not the ultra-wanker audiophile stuff).

As far as I'm concerned, a good LAME encode is still the best solution for music - the resulting MP3 will work on any platform, the sound can be perfect, file size is reasonable and speed is terrific. Until we all have REALLY high-speed bandwidth and practically unlimited storage and can store things uncompressed, I'm sticking with MP3.

funny

[beuk]

... I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times) ... And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it.... 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! ...

whoah. here's some advice, buddy: buy bullet, rent gun.

iPod does this to an extent

[Tokerat]

If you "sync" an iPod, it loads all the songs in the library and then your playlists as well, which is sort of what you're talking about...

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...

You're new here, aren't you?

[srvivn21]

Any time you link to a company that has an affiliate program, make sure that you link using your affiliate code.

&lt/humor&gt

And, no. That is not a real affiliate ID.

If you like this one...

[seanadams.com]

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!

Disproportionate

[byrd77]

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...

Re:Disproportionate

[SnakeStu]

...savvy customers are just going to ignore them.

Savvy customers may not be their target market -- not a few major companies rely on customer stupidity and write off the savvy minority. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but I'm sure you can come up with your own examples of companies that don't care if they lose the business of the few smart enough to see through their smoke & mirrors.

Enough for several radio stations...

[srvivn21]

From the article:

A commercial rack unit, this player is targeted for radio stations and the like. When you realize that 80GB can probably hold the entire active libraries of most stations...

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.

Re:Enough for several radio stations...

[ibbey]

You apparently listen to the wrong station. Try KEXP. Guaranteed to have enough vareity for all but the most pretentious listener (check out their review page for a better idea of the vareity).

Plus, they are, I believe, the only station in the world that broadcasts an uncompressed stream (true CD quality. Unfortunately the uncompressed stream requires WMP).

Re:Enough for several radio stations...

[tainio]

Maybe you should tune in some seriouse channels.
How about Sveriges Radio. Last time I checked they had 1911000 records to choose from.

heck, I'm not even sure if 80gig would be sufficient for the playlist :P

Re:Enough for several radio stations...

[poot_rootbeer]

Even the smallest radio station has far more than 8,000 songs' worth of music in their library.

Why the same 30-50 songs are always in rotation each week has always been a mystery to me. Probably involving the RIAA and sums of money changing hands.

Re:80GIGs

[AnotherBlackHat]

Several math errors here

That should be 80 Gigabytes. At 320Kilobits per second, it's 2 million seconds, 33K minutes, or over 500 hours.
At 3.5 minutes per song, it would be about 9500 songs.

Re:Why? - future proofing

[benwaggoner]

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.

Work has an 80GB jukebox, upping it soon

[leonbrooks]

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. (-:

Re:Work has an 80GB jukebox, upping it soon

[Mr_Buxton]

Same here we have just increased the size of our storage space to cope with the ever increasing mp3 collection which now stands at: 1010 artists, 2499 CDs, 30877 songs. or if you assume a 37.5 hour working week - we have over 53 weeks worth of Music in the MP3 library now...(2007 hours 39 Minutes and 12 seconds to be precise!) 80GB pah!

I do...

[Ranger Rick]

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. =)

Interfaces?

[jpellino]

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?

Why not just build your own?

[juju2112]

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.

Re:80GIGs

[Uzbok]

Somewhat off-topic, but . . .

They're making an MP3 player that has 80 times more memory than my computer.

Hmmm . . . I really feel like setting Ol' Stupid on fire now.

Who else read this with a wistful sigh? Who else suffers the shame of a crappy home PC?

mine is bigger than yours

[chrisperfer]

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.

Why only Audio?!

[Colz Grigor]

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.

Let's not limit ourselves by thinking all we need is audio. With hardware getting this powerful and inexpensive, the possibilities are endless.

::Colz Grigor

--

other u s e s ?

[altan]

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.

Hard drives for cars?

[Animats]

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?

Is there an easy way to fix MP3 metadata?

[swb]

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?

Re:80GIGs

[vkt-tje]

If you can read slashdot with it, it is NOT obsolete!

Re:Why? Commercial Jukebox.

[vkt-tje]

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.

Car unit can only access 512 songs!

[Vince]

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?

I think I can...

[da5idnetlimit.com]

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...

Re:I think I can...

[karnal]

You know, in my opinion, all SoundBlaster cards should be drug out and shot. I was actually in the market for a new PCI soundcard, and from all the reviews I looked at, those cards were at best mediocre, and at worst, downright horrible (especially AD-DA conversions, which is typical for the home user who records occasionally).

I did happen to pick up a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz; and while I could do without all of the frills in their software, it's not bad. I could instantly hear a difference through my Klipsch Promedia 2.1's.... Basically, they have a lower amount of "noise". I believe it was rated for 85-89db....

Re:How long until RIAA makes a statement about thi

[mccalli]

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

Re:80GIGs

[Black Rabbit]

...and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Listen, Learn?

[Gibbys Box of Trix]

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?

PJB-100

[drac]

The PJB-100 is far superior, though far more expensive.

Re:80GIGs

[gray code]

Dude...you've got 1 Gig of memory in your system...and you're saying it's obsolete...

I've got 512 Meg in mine and was feeling pretty satisfied, but now...
;-)

Depends on the station

[bee]

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.

Really? Can you be more specific?

[BLKMGK]

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!

Re:80GIGs

[Uzbok]

Sweet Hallie Selassie, where was my brain? I meant my hard drive has 1 gig.

No, if you're talking memory, not mass storage, I've got a whopping 16 MB. Whoo!