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The New Nomad Jukebox, And Handheld Oggs
Tha_Zanthrax writes: "The best portable MP3-player has become better!
The people from Tbreak.com have recieved a Nomad/Creative Jukebox 3. They have yet to write a review but have put up some detailed pics on their messageboard. It's a bit smaller, but the best improvements are the firewire-port and the 2 (!) internal batteries for 22 hours of operation. Too bad I recieved my Creative JB2 last week ..." If you have a hankering to play Ogg Vorbis audio, though, it looks like the first handheld ogg player has finally arrived in the form of a (payware) app for the Sharp Zaurus called tkc Player, available from theKompany. Where's there's one, there will be more. Woo-hoo!
.. between this and nomad v2? Basically it's got a firewire port and lithium ion batteries. Some more details available here.
For a mini-disc player/recorder that not only "supports" mp3/ogg/wav/etc, but will also play them in their original format instead of converting it to an ATRAC file (such as the new Sony NET mini-disc players). No matter what happens to the price of CF cards, it will be a very long time before it can compete with the cost of a single 700MB mini-disc. These hard drive driven portables and such would have a hard time competing in terms of cost of unit + media, weight of the player, and size.
I think the major break-through is that this implementation uses a "fixed-point decoder".
I believe the major problem with ogg was that it was very floating-point intensive, which doesn't suit the processors used in mp3 players and PDAs. theKompany must have developed or implemented a non floating point version of the decoder, thus enabling it to be used on the Zaurus without a huge cpu hit.
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You can find more details about the tckPlayer here - it can be bought as a single stand alone app or it can be bought in a package of 9 applications for (for Zaurus) for $74.95 (details are here)
Hetz (Heunique)
Archos model 500277
Jukebox MP3 Recorder 20 - 20GB HD (USB 2.0)
PriceWatch lists it for $315
Jukebox MP3 Recorders / USB Hard Drives
Can both record and playback MP3s
USB 2.0 is standard on newer PCs
another source for news on Nomad JB's has some info too. http://www.nomadness.com/
And they've shrunk it. It's still bigger than the iPod by a good amount, but it appears to be less-than-CD-player size (see the site)
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Yes. Xiph. They have two decoders. One is free but requires floating point. The other is commercial and only needs integers (and judging from some of Monty's posts, it sounds like the integer player even includes some hand-crafted assembly code specifically for ARM).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is incorrect; the xiph integerized codebase is pure C. There is another integerized vorbis decoder which only plays up to beta4 content available at http://ivdev.sourceforge.net, but this is not endorsed or supported by xiph.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.