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Cassette-Shell Sized MP3 Player/Recorder
octa-g writes: "USA Today tech reviews is featuring a nifty little cassette sized MP3 player that records analog audio. 'The Digisette Duo-DX can copy cassette tapes in a dual-well tape deck or boombox. Or you can make recordings by connecting an output cable from a stereo source to the Duo's earphone port and holding down the Duo's play and fast-forward buttons.' The ability to record audio straight to the player, or to record some of my old tapes/LPs to MP3 without a computer or other recording equipment intrigues me." This sounds like a good way to add fast-forward to the old car radio.
The RIAA is likely to say that only terrorists would be likely to get such a device...
This product (or one exactly like it) has been on the market for years now!
How is this "News for Nerds?!"
Still, the interface is a new thing, particularly being able to control it through standard FF/RW/Play controls on the tape deck.
-T
Here is the product's actual website.
"Honey, can you fast-forward NPR to 7:00 am? I want to see what my commute is going to be like tomorrow..."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Cool! Now if they can just make an track player in the shape of a CD, I'll be back in business, baby...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Their full review
Your car has a digital audio cassette system? The mp3 audio is naturally digital because there is no way to record an analog mp3. The system outputs analog audio because that's what ever cassette recorder expects to hear. Seems pretty simple doesn't it?
I read the internet for the articles.
Anyone have any idea how this little bitty (and pretty cheap) thing does real time MP3 encoding? From the article:
I'm I just out of it, or is that pretty impressive?
-Peter
I jog a few miles a day, and I'm thinking about getting an MP3 player because the radio reception where I'm at stinks (and having nothing to concentrate on but actually running makes a mile seem like an eternity). The iPod seems like a good solution, but I'm hesitant to get one because it uses a hard drive and I'm worried that the jostling will damage it in short order.
The guy at the Mac store in my local mall said that it's not a problem and that people use the iPod for workout tunes all the time, but I'm not sure I believe him.
Experience, anyone?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Give it a look
The Rome that you linked to is seems better in that, you can FF/RW from the tape deck's controls. You also can have an LCD display. Finally, the review complained about the buttons being flush mounted, the Rome offering overcomes this issue.
The only thing missing from the Rome offering is the abillity to record which will be important to some and not to others.
This thing was on TV back in June...
r y/0,24330,2398475,00.html
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/products/sto
Link
When the original one of those was released me and my friend were wondering if we could make a copy which was powered by the cogs moving the tape.
We needed one of the Amulet chips which were silly low power and no power consumpton between playing samples.
But instead I decided to make one powered by a hamster.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
What if it could simultaneously record and playback?! How about TiVo for radio?
A VHS video casette which has a slot to place a mini DVD.
It will play DVDs through your video maachine.
And it would have to be powered using dinamos from the turning of the tape.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
"Another feature allows the Duo to act as a recording device. Just insert the Duo into a cassette recorder and press the record button and it will convert an analog source into MP3 audio."
Well, given that mp3's are relatively small, and radio broadcast quality is relatively low, then time shifting shouldn't be too difficult to do (especially when you got ram cards that can do 128 megs and be a bit larger than a stamp and much thinner than this cassette). Wow, that would be quite the product. Put it in your car, turn on the radio and the timeshift cassette. Let it go for like 5 min, and just listen without commercials. Or record your daytime radio show. Or record that one song that you just cannot find the name or artist of (since the station i listen to never ever ever announces who sung it or what it was).
Damn, now if you could get a radio that did all this out of the box... that would be worth buying.
Of course, now the RIAA is going to be annoyed by time shifting.
...when you can just hook up a tape deck to your computer and record to an actual cassette.
crazy dynamite monkey
Is it just me or do i speak for everyone when i say STOP RELEASEING THIS RETARDED FLASH MEMORY BASED MP3 PLAYERS. i do NOT want to hear the same 10 songs over and over. The best you can get in flash right now is 256mb i think, and you will pay out the *ass* for that much flash memory. I think the iPod and the nomad proved that hard disk based mp3 is the way to go, because i won't touch another mp3 player for the rest of my days unless it's at least 5 gigs.
ok i'm done ranting..
- tristan
roland has had a portable 4 track digital studio on the market for at least 2 years now that is about the size of a walkman.
please, when you wish for something, go shopping before wishing that it existed, as they usually do already exist and are quite affordable..
the problem is that the roland device records in uncompressed format so you either need lots of cards, or very large cards. (Or if you are going on a 12 hour recording session.... bring a real recorder or a laptop with a 8 channel 24bit pcmcia card.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
SO now my tapedeck can eat my MP3's too!
The question now is whether the RIAA will lobby for the right to remotely cause your tapedeck to eat your mp3s....
Only for national security, of course!
I use a cassette adapter to listen to mp3s (and the rest of the audio coming from my computer) and the sound is crystal clear. The low quality of sound you are refering to comes from the magnetic tape itself, not the tape player, so this player should be capable of high quality output. And as the previous post stated, it holds 96 MB and is upgradable to 160... Which is pretty decent. Read the article, maybe you would have caught that.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Have you ever used one of those cassette adaptors to play you cd player through a car cassette player? They suck. They work by having a cassette head placed next to the one in your car player and magneticly couple. The frequency response sucks and with some players you get lots of flutter and wow if the thing doesn't seat properly and moves around. If the adaptor isn't lined up just right, the thing sounds worse than an 8 track. I can just imagine how bad it will pickup for recording. An FM radio link would work much better.
Not so!
The RIAA is secret planning a new music delivery system which is implanted directly into your skull! With wires connecting directly to your brain, they will use a digital representation of sound waves to trigger nerve cells to fire and thus reproduce the sound with crystal clarity.
Satellite delivery of digital music data will beam directly into the small dish-shaped implant in your forehead (the dish may be spray-painted flesh-tone to account for ethnic asthetics).
Incorperated into this system is a sophisticated digital rights management system "BrainSTRAIN" (Brain Secure Transmission And Integrated Metering). Should you fail to pay your BrainSTRAIN bill, the system, will beam country music to your, gradually increasing the volume until a payment is made.
FORTUNATELY there IS a solution developed by Canadian hackers who have not yet come under the loathsome grip of the U.S. DMCA legislation.
Using sophisticated Canadian engineering technology, an advanced signal-blocking device utilizing common, off-the-shelf hardware has been fabricated for cranial signal blocking.
Referred to by experts as a "TinFoil Hat", this technology may be all that can save us from corporate broadcast tyranny.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
This has reminded me of a question I wanted to ask here but didn't think warrented a whole "Ask /.". I have a standalone MP3 player that goes into my amp, and I have an intercom system in my house that can be tuned to AM and FM. The stereo isn't close to the the receiver for the speaker system, it's about 30 feet (9 meters) away. I've found FM transmitters for cars that allow you to listen to portable CD or MP3 players (or anything that has a phono jack), but none that have the range I'm looking for. Does anyone know of a model that does this, or are there FCC type problems?
-no broken link
This is a very interesting device, however it will suffer from lack of many features that other players of this type provide. Here is an idea - since this player looks like a cassette, provide an optional cassette case - a box that holds one cassette, but this should be a very special cassette case, it would interface with the mp3 player through some port, and will have an LCD pannel and some better controls on the case.
You can't handle the truth.
I have one. Plusses: It works. It sounds great. It's cool, and it's faster than burning CDs. It also plays WMA, which does sound (to me) better than MP3s. If you don't have a CD player in your car (and my car limits me to a choice of a couple expensive trunk-mounted changers) this is the way to go.
The minuses are that higher-bitrate recordings limit you to about 80 minutes of music, unless you get the expanded memory (the newer ones might come with more memory). Recharging the battery is a little inconvenient. And I wish it played Oggs.
I wrote parts of this stuff
here, I was intrigued enough to look it up.
digisette
Microsoft® Windows® 98SE, ME, 2000, XP Operating System, or Macintosh OS9.X or OS-X and iTunes 1.X or higher
Pentium (or compatible) 166MHz or higher PC
Also, is $200 a bit high for an MP3 player/recorder that only has room for like an album and a half. Afer all, a 5gig ipod is only $299.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This actually is a great idea for one reason...being able to digitize all the stuff I have on old casettes. Up til now, the only feasible way was to take a line out of the headphone jack, connect it to the mic in/line in on my soundcard and try to get the levels right in my recording software (this was NOT easy to do). I can take all those bootlegged concert tapes (legal ones, mind you :) and put them in mp3 format. Wow.
This will make it 10 times easier, and for that reason alone it's worth it. Being able to take mp3s in my car is another great feature but with CDRs being so cheap, it's not nearly as important.
--trb
First of all there is the issue of using flash memory based MP3 players. Unless you're willing to buy added flash cards and pay out the nose for them, it's not the way to go. If I only want to listen one CD's worth of music, I'll burn one and whip out my old Discman. 64mb just doesn't cut it anymore and if you get flash in 256 your poor credit cards is getting raped for a boat load of cash.
Better options for MP3 playing is the MP3 CD-R(W) and a portable player. For around $100-150 plus the cost of the CD you can jam 300-600+ minutes on a blank disk depending on media type and the compression you use.
--OR--
There is the option I went with. I picked up a Nomad 20gb Jukebox for $230. It has 20gb of space on it (I have nearly 500 songs at 256k and I still haven't hit 25% of drive usage). It can record to MP3 on the fly by using the line input on the unit itself. It has front and rear speaker outputs so I can hook it to a set of Harmon Kardons with the sub and front and rear satalites and get really killer sound out of it. The only drawback that I had with the unit was no real way to carry it, but that was solved with my leatherworking skills I picked up in the SCA...made a custom leather belt pouch to hold it, so problem solved.
Now granted there are those out there that prefer the iPod, or other hard drive based systems, but hte theroy is the same between them. HD is cheaper than Flash...hands down. For my $230 I got 20gb storage. Flash memory for that same amount of storage is going to cost you say $300 for a sony mp3 player that comes with 128mb with it PLUS you would need to purchase 159 additional memory sticks at a cost of $17,600 ($110 each). For just what I'm using in storage (5gb) you're still talking about $4400 in memory sticks alone.
I don't know about you but if I had that kinda cash I'd be spending it on a Plasma TV rather than MP3.
The gizmo in the article is nifty and all, but is it going to be worth it or will it fall the way of the MP3 player springboard module in my Visor? IE Sitting in the box that it came in waiting for someone poor fool on E-Bay to take it off my hands?
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
If this thing is interacting with the tape drive mechanism in the tape player anyway, why don't they add a small generator to recharge the batteries while it plays? Obviously, I'm asking this more in the interest of technical coolness than practicality, but it would remove the need for a separate wire going from the cassette player to the cigarette lighter socket for long-term play.
I owned one and it worked great in my wife's Honda CRV, but in my Honda Accord, the tape deck wouldn't properly align with the heads on the mp3 player. I tried plugging the cassette adapter into one of those Sony cassette -> cd adapters and it worked fine. Of course, that kinda defeats the purpose of an MP3 player that can be used without an adapter.
The only other thing I didn't like about it was the flimsy battery door. That would definately be a tape job after a few months of use.
Here is my review of it on Amazon.com
I was excited to see that the Digisette improved from it's orginal design and made a better tape like MP3 player. Unfortunately, on my Honda 2001 Accord, the tape deck won't align properly with the head in my cassette stereo, causing lots of static and distortion. It's not the player itself, because it works fine in my wife's Honda CRV. Actually, it works if I use an old Sony cassette adapter plugged into the mp3 player.
Im not an electronic engineer, but I think if Digisette would make the head on the mp3 unit bigger, it would have worked fine. I compared the head of the mp3 to the Sony cassette apadter I had laying around and the Sony head is much bigger.
Digisette support was very helpful and had me try a few fixed, but none fixed the distortion and static.
As far as the controls and stuff, everything worked fine. Like I said, if you have a 2001 Accord, I wouldn't recommend it.
Live web cams
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Recordings you have made do not count.
I seriously doubt they can really hear the difference.
I'm not talking about heavily compressed 96bit mp3's. I'm talking about CD, or DVD audio quality.
So, what you're saying is:
- You don't want to make your own recordings, because that's too much effort for you.
- Because you can't hear any difference, it can't possibly be better.
- You don't actually want to contribute to the discussion about the article because you'd rather troll instead. Clearly the fact that you think mp3 should be excluded from the test is because you know the quality is lower than you'll get from metal tapes.
or did you have a comment that was actually relevant?Ah! So you're one of those kids who grew up the the CD-era. Fine. I suppose you think VHS is better than Betamax too. Or are you too busy thinking that DVD is the dog's bollocks without actually noticing all the hideous artifacts everywhere?
</rant>
Who cares if the tape can fast forward. I want the car to "fast forward". 0-60mph in, oh, 4 seconds or so will do just fine.
Too bad CD's are at least 3x more expensive than they should be. If they came down to around $8-$10 a piece, I'd be inclined to actually buy the stuff...mostly to replace what I had as a kid on tapes..also to replace the stuff I had stolen.
Do I own the music or the medium when I buy a CD? Why can't I go to a store with only my receipt and get a new CD when one becomes ruined or stolen, or god-forbid, a new format comes out and I'd like to take advantage of it with the music I have already purchased.
Nifty little device, but it wouldn't have a whole lot of use if the RIAA would get its head out of its ass.
Skip? Not hardly. As much as I use my Nomad I still use my MD player for when I'm out on my bike on the trails. It uses less power and as for skipping, I've never seen it skip and I take some serious trails on my bike.
You are correct about the limitations of the transfer speeds, but I don't worry about it. Everything I have is on CD and MP3. I only write TO the md player and I can do that at 16x speeds so it's not that much of a bother.
Either one by themself is good, both together rocks.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
What about the RomeMP3 and MP Wow players? Do they work with Linux?
Why is this news? Using an analog input to circumvent copy protection is hardly ground-breaking technology. Making an MP3 player that emulates an audio cassette isn't at all new. Nor is it a particularly good idea. It sounds cool -- an MP3 player that you can operate with the controls of your car cassette player. But it doesn't work all that well in practice. Auto cassette players vary a lot in the way their controls work, and you usually can't use all the features of the MP3 player. Plus you have to do without that handy LCD readout.
All in all, I'd much rather have a conventional MP3 player with a pseudo-cassette adapter. I only bought the Digessette because it had other good features that outweighted the silliness of the basic concept.
The advantages of a solid-state device over a hard-drive jukebox or MP3/CD player are: 1)It's immune to skipping (even with buffering, this happens occasionally with my RioVolt), 2)It uses less power and thus has a longer battery life, and 3)It's smaller.
My ideal would be a combination of a CD reader unit that could transfer files to a portable solid-state unit (so that you could carry lots of material and access it all without a computer, while preserving the solid-state advantages). However, the industry would probably crap it up with Digital Restriction Management.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.