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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!
I think the next improvement should be a cynic inside the machine, who would scold you appropriatly if you were listening to N'Sync, or congratulate you for picking Radiohead.
"I only speak the truth"
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.. between this and nomad v2? Basically it's got a firewire port and lithium ion batteries. Some more details available here.
After rolling through all three (or whatever) faceplaces, the unit ends up looking naked; there's no way I'm going to plunk down $20 + S&H for a new set.
Yeah, right.
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.
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?
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)
Even though you have to download software seperately if your a Windows user, Apple's 10 GB iPod is by far and away better.
There is no way any objective person could think this unit is superior.
It's got a 10 GB HD, 32 MB of Ram, the battery life is 10 hours, you can store your contacts on it, you can use it as a hard drive, you can even *BOOT* off it. There are also 3rd party apps to extend the functionality.
And still it's less then half the size of this thing!
For me, that's a key feature This thing is way too big for my pocket (the Nomad is *still* discman size!). It's just not practicle, whereas my iPod fit's in my shirt pocket (and isn't nearly as heavy).
The iPod is so small, and it's interface so simple and elegant, that I take it everywhere, even just nipping down the to the shop. I know I'd think twice before taking this thing outside with me.
I guess it depends on how much you like music.
- If your a big music fan, then your better off with something cassete player sized (ThinkGeek has one, though bigger that the iPod, it has slightly more storage, and still of a practicle in-your-pocket size)
- If your not a big music fan and only want something for long journeys then this could be the unit for you. But if you are, you'd be better getting a discman for 30 USD instead...
Even though the player is payware, I'm sure it's worth it. It sure looks like it from the screenshots.
/FS community. They have developed Aethera, Kamera, KDE Studio, Kivio, and Kugar, all of which are available under the GPL for free.
theKompany is a good company which has done a lot for the KDE
Support the companies that support Free Software. Buy something from theKompany.
The iPOD also has the size advantage - ie it will fit in your trouser, or shirt, pockets without any problems. You are going to need cargo pants for the RIO. Size makes a big difference when it comes to usability, and for most intents and purposes the 10Gb configuration of the iPOD is plenty for many people. I don't have either but I would rather put my money down for the iPOD, especially since it looks good.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
they're playing "modern talking" on the tkc player. they *must be evil*
;-)
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/
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/
I don't understand. The posting starts off saying, "The best portable MP3-player has become better!" and then goes on to talk about the battery munching USB wielding Bigger Than A Discman Nomad.
Was there an editorial problem? Shouldn't we have heard about it when the story broke? "The best MP3 player on the planet just got even better." It's small, it's got battery life beyond what I thought possible and the transfer rate over [IEEE 1394|Firewire|iLink] is pretty good.
Of course, that announcement was like a month ago.
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.
I use mine all the time for transporting gigs of data about the place.
My Journal
Depends on your needs. I'm finding that the 20 gig hd my Neo has isn't large enough and plan to throw a 30-40 gig drive in. The 10 gig cap and the fact that it won't work well with my computer makes the iPod not the best player for me.
I have EphPod working on a WinNT 4/sp6 machine, and have MediaFour's Xplay working on a win2k box. (Still waiting for development to firm up a bit on linux communications).
As for iTunes management, that's only if you have it be the primary machine. You can move music around without having to have it on the machine first.
Go to MetaMage.com and get EscapePod to move mp3s off the iPod to iTunes.
Or, get iPod Free File Sync...
Or, get PodMaster...
So, there are a range of options you haven't tried to make managing your music a little more flexible.
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....
:wq
I thought Ogg wouldn't play on an ARM based device because the decoder supplied by Xiph used floating point, and the ARM processor has no FPU?
Did someone make a non-FPU version of the decoder? Or does the kernel on the Zaurus have FPU emulation enabled?
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The fact that it holds 40 megs per disk has nothing to do with the fact that it can indeed play OGG files.....(BTW -- 40 megs is a lot if you are listening to audio books at 24K)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Size matters!
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
Beg your pardon, I misunderstood your needs.
I am using SMB but not in conjunction with an iPod. I haven't tried dropping a folder of music files onto the iPod from an SMB-accessed share.
In all other respects, SMB is working great for me, but this is one I'll have to try. Sorry to hear it isn't successful for you-- I'm going to see if I can't replicate the problem, myself.
Think of it this way, minidisks are actually very old - over ten years since their introduction. It's very possible to apply recent technologies, similar to what is now common in DVD players, to increase their capacity. Such a disk would make minidisks very competitive with the iPod and such.
Willy
The HipZip, unfortunately, never officially supported Ogg and the firmware for HipZip that plays oggs only handles up to beta 4 files. It may well never be updated at this point due to an unfortunate pissing match involving the company that supplied the firmware for HipZip (iObjects/Fullplay).
So, yes, it can certainly be argued HipZip was first. HipZip certainly proved that an embedded processor had the necessary power (the early beta files were even more expensive to decode than current Vorbis files). However, Iomega never officially acknowledged Ogg support.
In terms of official company support, theKompany/Zaurus are definately the first handheld, and the first handheld to play all current/future OggVorbis I files.
Monty
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.
It seems fairly evident that the phrase "open standards" has nothing to do with money, but with "trade secrets" and proprietary formats that a company can legally prevent others from using.
While the words free software can mean software that can be had for no money, making it "free of cost", the phrase "free software" usually refers to Free Software. Free Software can be a free download, or it can cost money to buy it. The point of Free Software, is that once you have it, you can do just about anything you want with it, even share it with your friends. A Copyleft like the General Public License (GPL) is a kind of Copyright, which ensures that everybody you give the software to has the same freedoms that were given to you. Even if all of Ogg were totally under the GPL, they could still try to sell the software for money, just like you can, one you have a copy.
There is no reason why you can't make money off of Free Software or open standards. For more information on Free software, check out http://www.gnu.org/philosophy
Dave@mediafour said in the mediafour.com/fourms that there would be an anouncement monday (04/15) about xPlay.
It may be a final release or it may be TP6, I've been a user since TP3 and have had access to my iPod since then, xPlay just keeps getting better, so when xPlay 1.0 or TP6 comes out it should be even better.
You can even update the firmware with xPlay now, what more could you want?
Try out ephPod -- in its latest version, it surpasses Xplay easily -- you can even get headlines synced to your iPod.