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eDigital MXP100 with Voice Control
An anonymous reader writes: "Here is a lengthy review of eDigital's 1GB flash MP3 portable that is as much a review on Lucent's remarkable speech recognition technology VoiceNav as it is on the player. VoiceNav offers speaker-independent recognition, meaning it doesn't have to learn each individual user's particular speech patterns like IBM's ViaVoice. Just say the name of a music track into the player's microphone and VoiceNav pulls up and plays that song. In ideal conditions the reviewer was able to twice run through a list of 14 song titles without fail. This included titles with "non-real word" band names like Sum41 and U2. Neat technology that could make its way into PDAs soon. The player is a pretty good one too, using IBM's Microdrive for storage."
wonder how well it would work on, say, the side of a highway. if it worked well this would be a nice little toy for those of us who run (or bike) around.
Kith Kaddith Lizard Man Extraordinaire
I guess I have too many obscure mp3s, but how can the voice control differentiate:
Daydream Boat.mp3
Day Dreamboat.mp3
Alpha Betray.mp3
Alphabet Ray.mp3
Mont Anagram.mp3
Montana Gram.mp3
...
I want something under $100 with under 64 MB flash but it has to be small so I can take it jogging.
. . . otherwise, there'll be a special broadcast on radio, cable, and embedded in trojan MP3s one day. It'll be Jack Valenti's voice saying "Don't play non-SDMI compliant content anymore." :).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
For me, the biggest attraction of MP3 players is the ability to have no moving parts. This makes it truly portable and useful in more situations that what we had previously. So, my question is, how reliable is this IBM microdrive? How robust is it? If I'm training for to run a marathon, is it going to survive all of the pounding?
The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as .ogg's.
.ogg support required only a few days of extra development time, you'd see it.
.mp3 and .ogg.
Alas, I wish there were some incentive for player manufacturers to add the support. There are two ways I can see for this to happen:
(a) Make adding it as trivial as possible. If adding
(b) Increase the market share that OGG Vorbis has. This one is trickier, mainly because of the slim market that a good, lossy codec serves. What do I mean? Well, audiophiles aren't going to want to listen to any compressed format (though these dinosaurs claim their hissy records are better-sounding than Super Audio CD), and Joe Sixpack isn't going to notice any difference at all between
Having done numerous sound quality tests of OGG Vorbis and MP3 on my own equipment, I can say without a doubt that were all things considered equal, OGG would win out. Unfortunately, OGG has had a very late start, and is up against lots of other competitors who are all "good enough" for the average person, so its supporters will have to reduce the barriers to its use before anyone will care.
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The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as .ogg's.
Actually I think that the only thing stopping OGG Vorbis on hardware players is the lack of a free fixed point decoding library. Right now you can find free floating point decoding libraries, but not fixed point. Most of the processors used in hardware players do not support floating point operations. The CPU's only have an integer unit. When a fixed point library is released, I think that you will find Ogg supported everywhere that MP3 is, since it should be trivial to add, and will only take up a little more ROM.