Slashdot Mirror
Where are the non-SDMI MP3 Players?
"So far I have narrowed my search to 3 choices. I want it to sound very good and be able to play music encoded at 128kb or higher.
The Rio Volt 250 is a CD based player so the SDMI thing doesn't really apply. The Creative Labs Nomad II" proudly displays this as a feature. The Samsung Yepp doesn't use SDMI, but something called SecuMax as stated in the Nomad II technical specs on Amazon. And this little tid bit on the Samsung Yepp homepage confirms that SecuMax is just like SDMI.
Now I'm not looking to download any illegal music from the Internet. I simply want to listen to my CD collection on the train to work or while working out. And there is freely downloadable music out there. If I were to download a song at work or a friend's house, put it in my MP3 player I then wouldn't be able to transfer it back to my PC at home to add to my collection. Where is 'fair use' when the artist is giving away their music for free? And I don't have the link, but what of the recent surges in so called 'secure' CD's that one can't rip into MP3's? Where is the 'fair use' there? Or are we supposed to purchase multiple copies of the same music in different formats?"
Anther point for the iPod.. No nasty copy-protection. :-)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Try the archos jukebox (http://www.archos.com )
A hard drive based solution, comes at 6GB-20GB flavors, works under Linux (I'm using it with the usb-storage module), and I got it for around £150 (british pounds).
Great for transfering data as well: Windows finds it as a normal drive, and I can mount it under linux (vfat).
Cheers,
Stefanos
might be a little more bulky, but you dont have to worry about a memeory chip going bad, and you can pack around 150 songs at a higher bitrate on a cd and know what you have in the player.
as for copying "back" to your collection, if its such a big deal to steal the music, borrow the CD and rip it yourself.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
For the FireWire-equipped PeeCee (or Mac, obviously), you can not only carry your music collection (or at least a large percentage of it) around with you, but can transfer the files to any suitably equipped machine. The music files are in an invisible directory on the iPod, and are easy to find.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
The original Rio PMP300 will let you take files out of it, as long as you don't use the software that came with it. If you use the *nix rio tool by the Snowblind Alliance, you can put any file in the rio, and take any file out of the rio, and use it as a generic storage device, albeit not a very good one because SmartMedia is expensive. The limitation on pulling stuff out of it is only in the rio desktop software.
C'mon people, we won't be taken seriously if we can't even learn the jargon.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Its old, so you probably can't buy it new, but the RIO 500 rocks. It uses SmartMedia, has no copy protection, and came with 64MB built in. The smartmedia cards are now pretty cheap, so its not too bad to buy lots of these tiny cards. It has pretty good battery life (a little less than 10 hours if you are actively - triggering the backlite - using it). It runs on a single AA, is rugged, and light. It has nice sound quality (the earphones that come with it suck though). I recommend one if you can find it.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
If your worried about SDMI, then the CD based ones ar the way to go. CD's fit an INCREDIBLE amount of music on it (most fit more then I would need for the six hour trip down to my parents house.......), they are reliable, cheap and best of all, if you decide to buy a regular CD on the road, just pop it in and your jamming. I plan on getting one soon. I know, they are not as sexy and small as the solid state ones, but you can't beat them right now. to get 650 megs of storage on a small mp3 player is impossible as well as expensive unless someone figures out a way to use or build cheaper chips.
Gorkman
Let us not forget: Fair-use means that it is not illegal to make a back-up copy, or to timeshift, etc, if you can do it.
Fair-use is not a doctrine that states the owners must make it *easy* to copy, or even possible.
Now the DMCA makes it a little bit sticky inregards to being able to copy stuff for fair-use, but even pre-DMCA, there was no contract between seller and buyer that the seller would make it easy to copy.
The Apple iPod does not have any "anti-piracy" features built in. Specifically, it states something to the effect of "Piracy is a social issue, not a technological one" on the packaging. You can use it with Windows (via Mediafour's XPod) or Macs, and probably soon with Linux. If you use the iPod as a portable drive on a Mac, you can simply copy files back and forth at will. But if you use iTunes to sync, the MP3 files are invisible. Some information on this is available here, and here's a simple utility to access the invisible MP3 files.
Also, the iPod supports a variety of encodings. It should support up to 256Kbps (or is it 320Kbps?), variable bit rate, joint stereo or normal stereo, because that's what iTunes supports. The 1000 songs it advertises is for 160Kbps songs.
Basically, "fair use" means you won't get in trouble for a little sharing, but it doesn't mean it'll be easy.
In addition to the subject at hand--are there any recomendations for car-based mp3 head units?
The Empeg was quite nice--but expensive. Aiwa makes a unit that plays MP3's from
CD-R's, but I've heard horrors about it. Has anyone had experience with an mp3 head unit that
isn't rumoured to suck?
-Kris
If "SDMI Compliant" means "can't copy from player to PC", then this is a 100% non-issue. Even the original Rio 300 (which I have) doesn't let you do this. Furthermore, I can't really think of a reason you'd *want* to. Why would I want to move only 64MB of mp3's over a slow-ass parallel port connection, when I can download all 6GB of my mp3's from home at 128Kbps? Or just burn some favorites to a CD and bring that to work?
The only way player-to-PC-copy would be really useful is if you had a hard-drive player, and I believe some of them (Archos Jukebox?) can do that.
OTOH, if "SDMI Compliant" means something else, then it might be a bigger problem. But if the thing plays standard MP3's, I don't see how there's much to worry about, as there's no way to "trust" an mp3, and thus no way to restrict the player, IF in fact it plays standard files.
I agree with the parent that Archos seems to have the best MP3 devices at the moment. In particular, though, I would recommend staying away from their cheaper "Jukebox 6000" and "Studio 20" products, in favor of their "Jukebox Recorder" machine.
Highlights of this thing?
- Works great on any OS that supports USB storage devices; when attached, mounts like any other USB hard disk. Will store anything you put on there.
- Hackable; will take any 9.5mm 2.5" laptop hard disk. I replaced the stock 6 GB disk with a 20 GB mechanism without any problems.
- Unlike the cheaper models, the Recorder (which goes for around $300-$350 these days) does real-time MP3 recording from analog line-in, digital SPDIF, or an onboard mic!
- Digital in doubles as digital out when not recording.
- The Recorder has a MUCH, MUCH BETTER interface than the cheaper jukeboxes, with an 8-line screen that during playback shows ID3 info (or directory info if file is untagged), elapsed/remaining/total time, left and right VU meters, and labels for the three soft-button function keys.
- Also, the recorder has greatly superior sound compared to the cheaper jukeboxes, with base/treble/loudness/balance adjustments and plenty of volume.
And of course, no SDMI anywhere in sight. The iPod looks nicer, and firewire is cool, but with a 20 gig disk in mine, I've got 4x the capacity of an iPod in a package not much bigger, with digital i/o and real-time mp3 recording abilities. Oh yeah, 10-hour battery life, too, using standard replacable NiMH AA cells.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Nomad v1 mp3 player and a few 32mb flash memory cards. It holds a total of 64MB and is completely SDMI free. With the replacable memory cards, you can have different genres of music for driving/working out etc.
Additional features are an FM tuner and a voice recorder.
Here's the link.
And of course since they are a couple years old, you can pick them up cheap!
The player itself is of good quality; it sounds great both on headphones and plugged into my car stereo. It includes an equalizer and a backlit display. Unfortunately, the OS itself is a bit spartan; there's no way to save the playlist through a power cycle, and the random play function resets itself on every powerup. I suspect these issues may be resolved with a newer version of Dadio, and for now I just randomize the playlist before loading it onto the player, as tracks are sorted in load order.
There are several interesting features of this player. The first is that it takes Iomega's 40MB Clik! (now Pocket Zip) disks, which run about $10 each retail. It acts as an ordinary USB mass storage device, which means you can copy any files to/from it without restriction, and also use it to exchange ordinary data files. (Unfortunately, as always with Win98, you can't just plug in the player and copy files; you have to install the drivers first, despite its being a perfectly generic USB disk drive. Completely plug-and-play in Linux, though.)
The 40MB size of the Clik! disks is a little annoying, but the ability to carry 5 or 6 of the disks around in the media wallet without significant expense makes up for that, and I'm able to store much more music (with the hassle of changing disks) than I was with my Rio 500 expanded to 128MB. Additionally (and this is the reason I bought the player), it will support Ogg Vorbis as soon as the format reaches 1.0. (There is a beta firmware that supports it now, but it won't play files encoded with >beta4.) Ogg Vorbis will let me easily degrade bitrates without re-encoding, and at 96kb/s .ogg I will be able to store quite a bit on 1 disk.
One interesting problem: When hooked to the line-in of my car CD player, there is an audible hiss if I have it simultaneously plugged into the charger. As soon as I disconnect it from the charger, it disappears. I don't know if I wired the stereo strangely or what, because it's not there with headphones. Weird.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
This shows the real problem we are in for: the enemy controls the hardware. We can always make our own software solutions, but as long as making hardware requires large scale investments we can be sure that it will be under their control. Hardware MP3 players are not the only place where you can see this, another example are the new CDs which cannot be read correctly by CD-ROMs - making a CD drive that ignores the broken error correction codes would be completely possible, but as futile as laws like the DMCA are against us, as well they seem to work (if they are even necessary) against hardware makers.
This is why having hardware specific for each task, which is often discussed as something good, must be something we cannot allow to happen. Instead, we have to continue to ensure the existance of systems like PCs where things are done in software, which WE can control. We even have to look into moving more PC functionality into software, now that we have processors strong enough for it, as I worry that things like graphic accelerators and sound cards will be future platforms for entertainment industry UHT (User Hostile Technology). The more that is done in software, the more freedom is had by all.
In the short term, it might still be possible to find dedicated MP3 players that are not UHT (such as the burned CD ones), but in the longer term I think handhelds with strong general purpose CPUs running Linux (preferably decoding OGG of course) is the only real choice. In the longest term, there is a real risk (see for example the "SS"SCA), that general purpose programmable hardware will simply not be allowed, and we will have to hope that an illegal underground market for hardware that is not user hostile will appear...
I've owned a Nomad Jukebox for almost a year. When I first bought it, the firmware would not allow you to copy files from the device to you computer. But as soon as the first firmware upgrade was release, it did away with this. It claims to have support for SDMI, but only on files the are encoded in particular formats with particular digital rights management software. Mp3s are safe.
In fact, the latest firmware upgrade now allows you to move any type of file onto the Nomad and back, so you can use it as a portable harddrive!
(Let's keep Creative Labs lack of SDMI enforcement just between us. We wouldn't want certain powerful industry lobby groups *cough-RIAA* to come down on them.)
I have been using a Jornada 540 series Pocket PC for a year now as an MP3 player, and recently upgraded to the 568.
I get 12 hours of battery life playing MP3's and you can purchace 512 megabyte CF cards for it. Makes an *awesome* player, and can do videos as well as all the PDA stuff.
A bit expensive, but a neat toy.
--
Ian
The units themselves are tiny (most of them are in the 80x16x75mm range) and weigh almost nothing (the Sharp MD-MT770 weighs 128g). The discs are infinitely re-recordable and cost about $1.50 each.
Depending on the level of compression you record at, shock protection can be up to 160 seconds. Most units have rechargeable batteries and can also use an extra AA for backup yielding incredible battery life -- the MT770 for example can play up to 49 hours on the highest compression level (35 on the regular SP mode).
One of the coolest advantages they have over mp3 players is that you can record concerts at virtually CD quality sound. Plug a microphone into the in-jack and you can bootleg with ease. Most of the latest recorders feature manually adjustable recording levels (while recording!), automatic 3/5/10 minute timestamping, audio syncing and optical line-in (which means you can optically record mp3s from a computer equipped with optical-out). Some of the Sony recorders (MZ-R700DPC for example) ship with external D/A converter that connects the MD's digital input with your computer's USB port, which makes recording all internet audio formats quite easy.
You can shuffle tracks around on a disc on the fly, delete them, insert new ones and of course there are the usual random/repeat play modes.
You can get an entry-level MDLP (2x/4x recording) player/recorder for around $215. Compared to paying $90 for each 256mb flashcard, they are really cost efficient.
I have a Sharp MD-MT77 which I am quite happy with. I make 5 hour playlists in xmms, plug the recorder into my soundcard's line-out and make mix MDs. 5 hours is a lot of space to work with -- and the quality is quite decent. At 2x (160 minutes), recordings sound virtually like CD quality.
Check out minidisc.org for more information, or minidisco.com for a run-down on most of the available models.
---
"Colors blind the eye
Desires wither the heart."
-- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"
Remember that the first portable MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300, (first announced in September 1998) was entangled in nasty lawsuits, as covered in this slashdot article from 1998.
I daresay these nasty lawsuits contributed to Diamond's demise. None of the consumer electronics companies want to spend the cash battling the recording industry in court, so every one of them toe the line. I'm sure the recording industry has pounded the crap out of several small companies who've tried it -- and when Ogg Vorbis is finalized I'm sure the recording industry will try to pound the crap out of anyone making hardware Vorbis players as "Piracy Devices"
The closest thing I've seen is the Apple Ipod which lets you either store music for listening to, or store files for moving to another PC, but not to listen to the files marked for moving to another PC as far as I know ...
o/~ Join us now and share the software
http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/
Links to site on building your own custom built in hardware player. Check out the links to the other sites too.
My wife gave me a Philips Expanium recently. I'd say the pros outweigh the cons. The sound is good, I don't get too much skipping, and when I insert a disc, the scan process will look for mp3s on any disc. I have old archive discs where I have zip files and misc. data mixed with my mp3s, and I have no problems listening to these discs.
My biggest gripe is the display sucks. I would like to have a scrolling text message, but instead the display gives you a number for the directory (album) and file (song).
It's a bit bulkier than the nifty little solid state devices, but I have 301 They Might Be Giants songs on the disc in my player right now. The mini players with large memory cost more, while the Expanium sells for for only 90 US dollars.
I picked up a 20 hour rechargable lead battery at Radio Shack (part number 23-505) and replaced the headphones with a Kenwood KPM-510 headset. I usually keep the thing in a bookbag anyway, so the bulk doesn't bother me.
Short summary: problems with the Archos but it was nice, like the NEO but not as a walking-around player (using it in the car), the iPod is simply the best MP3 player yet created, by a long, long way (assuming you have a Mac).
Longer version:
I have used all three, and currently own the NEO Jukebox and an iPod (as primarily a Mac user, obviously, although I use Windows PCs at work, usually). None of them are SDMI-impaired.
Archos:
I bought the Archos (6 gig) originally (this summer), and loved the size and form factor (although it was surprisingly heavy). However, the HD frizzed out several times and finally I had to return it after I got sick of the reformat/reload/repeat cycle. If they've fixed some of those problems it probably would be good (and the recorder seems nice). Support was questionable at best - I eventually got responses, but they couldn't do anything about my messed up drive.
NEO Jukebox:
After that I bought the 20 gig NEO Jukebox, and was generally extremely happy with it. It's a little large (about the size of a portable CD player, although thinner than most), but surprisingly light, and the bells and whistles are nice - it comes with a remote control and a nice interface, and replacing the HD is almost as easy as replacing the batteries on any walkman. I actually use it for work a lot to transfer files via USB, since it mounts very easily as a USB hard drive. It pretty much never skips, and looks cool with a nice blue backlight.
The only problems I had with it have been:
1) Slowwwwww transfer rates via USB (transferring even 5 gigs takes around 4 hours, let alone filling the thing - my ripped CD collection is about 2/3 done and is approaching 15 gigs).
2) Lousy battery life - I usually get 4.5 hours max, which means that if I listen to it on el to my current contract, I run out of power by lunchtime.
3) Pain to transport and recharge. During the summer when I was commuting weekly to Texas for a contract, I had to take the large charger every time, which was annoying. It's heavy and bulky. And on a day-by-day basis, there's just no way.
4) Problems mounting in OS X. This may be better in 10.1.1 - I haven't tried it yet.
Support was middling - no response ever when I emailed them, some moderate responsiveness when I phoned.
iPod:
When I first saw the price tag on the iPod, I thought they were n-v-t-s nuts. Then I actually went in and actually looked at one, and I realized I had to have one, and that I can't believe that it is so damn cheap. Salient points:
1) Firewire. This thing loads fully in about 5 minutes. I just say what I want each morning, take a shower, grab it and go after it syncs up.
2) Size. It is *tiny*. Literally the size of a deck of cards. And light. I throw it in my coat pocket on my way to work and forget it's there.
3) Design. The interface is fantastic - even better than the quite good NEO interface. It looks and feels incredible. I don't know anyone (even Mac haters) who hasn't immediately asked "where can I get one?" about three seconds after holding it in their hands.
4) Portability. If you travel at all, this thing blows away every other MP3 player. It's not even close. You need exactly one small cable to recharge and sync, and the iPod itself is so small that it basically is a non-issue.
5) Battery life. This is a big one - I have used the iPod all day for most of the last couple of weeks, and have never even gotten as low as a half charge. It says 10 hours, but I would guess it's more like 15 at normal use.
I have basically nothing negative to say about the iPod.
Basically my plan is to use an FM transmitter to use the NEO in my car, which should be perfect. I'll load it with my whole CD collection overnight about once a month, and otherwise just leave it there.
So there it is. Hope that's of use to someone.
I have installed 1.21d. SCMS is the bozo-bit-based copy protection scheme used by consumer digital audio recorders (DATs and CD burners, mainly; it's mandated by the Audio Home Recording Act for any digital audio recorder, and this thing qualifies). SCMS has very little practical effect on this device for 2 reasons:
- One, the SCMS system allows one digital copy from an original copyrighted digital source (e.g. a CD), which is all you really need in most cases. It just won't let you record digitally from a digital copy made with an SCMS device (e.g. it would block recording from a CDR copy of an original CD, if the CDR copy was made with a consumer standalone audio CD burner).
- Two, disabling SCMS on the Archos Jukebox Recorder is trivial, and doesn't require messing with hardware or firmware. When recording, set the "Artist Name" string to HFSCMSOFF. That's it. Re-enable with HFSCMSON, or just by resetting the device.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
RioVolt makes the best MP3 players -- they're rated the highest and their CD-MP3 players allow you to get more memory for your buck to store MP3's on. The CD-MP3 players bypass "digital rights management" and basically allow you memory for as many songs as you want -- all you need do is buy another CD-R or CD-RW. I personally use one CD-RW as a temporary storage place for songs I currently like; then I put the complete compilation of an artists songs on one CD-R or maybe two CD-R's. I have all the songs by Madonna on one CD-R, all the songs from Lords of Acid on one CD-R, and all the songs of Beethoven...well, that takes a few more CD-R's -- but you certainly can put all of his most notable works on one CD-R. Lets compare prices and options. Prices for MP3 players were taken from the parent-company's website, prices for one CD-R/RW were calculated from prices from 50 and 25 packs, respectively, from Amazon.com.
Item [Price]
Latest RioVolt [$180]
Nomad Jukebox(20GB) [$350]
1 CD-R (700MB) [$0.40]
1 CD-RW (650MB) [$0.80]
So, it costs you $350 for 20GB of music-memory from Nomad. Lets see how much you'd have to spend for 20GB if you used RioVolt:
Assuming 20GB of CD-RW's:
$180 + (20GB*1024MB/GB / 650MB) * $0.80 = $205.21.
Assumng 20GB of CD-R's:
$180 + (20GB*1024MB/GB / 700MB) * $0.40 = $191.70
Thus, you save from $145 to $158 dollars by choosing RioVolt over Nomad. Its a no-brainer, regarding which product you should buy. Yes, Nomad allows you to alter the contents of your collection...so does RioVolt, if you use CD-RW's: and you'll still save 145 bucks.
Put another way, if you wanted to spend $350 dollars for an MP3-playing device and the memory/CD's to store MP3's on, you get:
(a) 20GB of storage space from Nomad
(b) 134GB to 290GB of storage space using RioVolt and 213CD-RW's or 425CD-R's, respectively.
This is not a practical comparison -- as few people want to carry around 425CD-R's, though some of the larger CD-booklets would let you do such. This is simply cost-analysis.
Lets go back to the analysis of how much you save by using RioVolt and an according # of CD-RW's to get to 20GB. If you use RioVolt and 32CD-RW's to get 20GB of memory, you save 145 dollars. But lets be a bit more accurate -- you can't carry around 32CD-RW's in your pocket: you need a CD-folder. A Steel CD case capable of holding 60CD's, costs 20 dollars. So you actually only save 125 dollars by choosing RioVolt and buying CD-RW's to get to 20GB. Now, would you rather walk around with one Nomad Jukebox, or with one RioVolt, one steel 60CD case, and 125 extra dollars in your pocket? Your choice.
P.S.: 125 dollars is enough to buy you one GeForce2 MX for your laptop.
----------
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If Linux supported HFS+, it should be possible for it to talk to an iPod. AFAIK, Linux only supports the older HFS. (I'm no expert on Macs, having only a Quadra 610, but I'm guessing that the difference between HFS+ and HFS is a bit more than the difference between FAT16 and FAT32.)
Here's a more general FireWire storage question. I remember reading something about the intelligent nature of FireWire devices; for instance, you're supposed to be able to hook a DV camcorder directly into a hard drive and dump video from tape to disk. What filesystem would be put on the drive to enable it to work in this manner...or is this a capability that isn't implemented in actual devices?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
There actually is an open-source MP3 player. It's not a shiny polished product like a Rio, but I can say with 100% confidence that is has absolutely no SDMI features, since I designed it!
Ok, mod me down for shameless self promotion now.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools