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The New Nomad Jukebox, And Handheld Oggs

Posted by timothy on from the pretty-pictures-pretty-sound dept.

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!

6 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Another /. "infomercial" ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting



    is this a messageboard or a product endorsment and evaluation site ?

  2. Ogg Vorbis Player by j09824 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a bunch of excellent, free graphical Ogg Vorbis players for X11, and they even work on small screens and handhelds. Why ever would you pay money for something like tkcPlayer?

  3. Where is my code for this? by bagder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Archos MP3 player series at least have this ambitious crowd of hackers working on replacing the firmware with an open source alternative:

    http://bjorn.haxx.se/rockbox/

  4. I hope they support it better than the original. by biafra · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I purchased the original 6GB NJB, and although it does work well as a MP3 player there are a lot of bugs that Creative will probably never fix. Some of these bugs sound simple to correct (eg. no line wrap on long song titles), but I now suspect that firmware development for the first NJB is done (last update sometime last year). I'm not sure when I will learn my lesson and stop buying creative products. They used to be a really great company and I have bought thousands of dollars worth of their products over the years (from several of the original soundblasters all the way to Live5.1 bla bla bla's, video cards, you name it). In the past few years I've just started to feel like support beyond their latest gizmo is not a priority for them. Oh well my next MP3 player purchase is a few months away so we'll see how the reviews are....

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    :wq
  5. Re:Statically linked FPU emu by mcspock · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is incorrect; the strongarm 206mhz processor in the zaurus is not fast enough to decode ogg real time using floating point emulation. It's close, but not quite.

    Pocket MP3 players typically use a cirrus 7212 74mhz arm processor, which are much faster than you describe (decode at less than 60% of the cpu). Also, as a side note, decoding 192kbps is easier than decoding, say, 96kbps; you just spend more time pushing the data through.

    --
    -- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
  6. Re:first Ogg? I think not by mcspock · · Score: 2, Interesting

    where did you get this beta firmware? it was never released outside of a controlled audience. monty and jack (jack works on the vorbis project) were allowed to have a copy; iomega granted permission for both of them to have a copy of the firmware, but no rights were given to redistribute it. this was primarily an advocacy item.

    i built and burned the images with vorbis support as part of this arrangement. there were also demo players furnished to iomega, and for a while they were discussing releasing a tested approved firmware update with vorbis support, but that fell through.

    so i'll ask again, where did you get that firmware image from?

    --
    -- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.