Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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 ($179), and it's a little over 40GB filled with my CD collection ripped (at 192KBPS). I can forsee 80GB being to small in a couple of years.
ScrO!
"80 Gigabyte should be enough for everyone"
/Andreas
This pisses me off too. The anti-piracy busybodies where I work have been up my skirt a few times about my bringing MP3 files from home to listen to at work. They have no problem with music on the job -- they're just convinced that MP3 is a "pirate-only" format because there has been so god damn much news about Napster and pirates.
I personally archive any CD I buy IMMEDIATELY as a high quality (256kbps or -r3mix) MP3 because CDs are just too damn fragile. I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.