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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."
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 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...
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
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!
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 $799
for more info: check out http://www.riohome.com/CarAudio.htm
-Mp
"80 Gigabyte should be enough for everyone"
/Andreas
This pisses me off too. The anti-piracy busybodies where I work have been up my skirt a few times about my bringing MP3 files from home to listen to at work. They have no problem with music on the job -- they're just convinced that MP3 is a "pirate-only" format because there has been so god damn much news about Napster and pirates.
I personally archive any CD I buy IMMEDIATELY as a high quality (256kbps or -r3mix) MP3 because CDs are just too damn fragile. I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$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 $5bill in the slot for the RIAA's cut.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
First, taking music off a CD and reformating into MP3 results in some degradation. Much more importantly, however, just because music is digitally stored does not mean it will be audiophile quality. Storing bits of data is one thing. Converting them to high fidelity audio is arguably much more difficult. Go to Circuit City and listen to your favorite CD, and then go to an audio shop and listen to a good CD player such as the Rega Planet 2000 through a good amplifier and speakers. If you don't notice a huge difference, next go to the Beltone dealer nearest you and have your hearing checked.
For one company's solution to the problem of computer-based music, go to www.12dax7.com. They produce a preamplifier that uses the USB port, high quality DACs, and 12AX7 vacuum tubes (!) to produce a decent audio output.
I have a slightly different idea from the 12dax7 on the drawing board (and hopefully doable for about 1/3 the price!)
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
"Math is hard."
"I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 other homemade solutions are out there aside from mp3sb (which seems to be the best ive seen so far)
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
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.
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.
--
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?
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:)
...and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
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.