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Portable MP3 Player w/ Unix Support?
oobeleck asks: "With my birthday just around the corner and my 8 mile runs needing music, I am thinking of asking for a portable mp3 player. What is the Slashdot community's experience with MP3 portables. What has the most support, what should I stay away from. I have been eye-balling the Diamond Rio 600/800 model. Any opinions on the Rio? I want something that works good with Linux/OpenBSD. Thanks for your help." Ask Slashdot last ran such an article back in April of 2000, I'm sure bigger and better MP3 players have been made since then. Which of today's players would you all recommend?
Looks like Archos has actually revamped this product, because mine doesn't look like the one displayed at the above link. Has anyone used one of these particular models before and can tell me if they've improved on the problem bits that I've mentioned?
If they have, I'd surely recommend this model to anyone who is in the market for an MP3 player.
Would like to heartily second this recommendation. I only have the 6-gig model, but having a portable FAT32 hd is incredibly convenient. If you can mount a Windows drive, you can mount this in your silly Linux thingee.
Durable: I drop this thing at least once a day, it's over a year old and still going. It recharges in ~6 hours for ~6 hours of playback. If you strap the case to your back (as opposed to keeping it on your hip), you won't have as much problem w/ skip, but you will look like a complete dork.
The problem Cliff is experiencing appears to be unintentional jostling of the stop (off) button, so careful how you position it when you run.
[o]_O
Out of all the things I have purchased and never used, my minidisk player is NOT one of them. I love that thing.
:-) ) and record and listen. I've later converted it to mp3 on my computer and have shared them with my freinds. I've done the same with SSX tricky. SSX tricky has a juke box feature where all the songs are played. The sound quality is fantastic!
They are pretty cheap now, I paid 80 bucks for my Sony MD walkman (bit of an older model now). The tapes are cheap too.
One of my favorite things to do is record video game music off the stereo. I'm able to pop in GTA 3 select Head radio (better variety of weird noises between songs
I recently purchased a really nice microphone for my MD player. Now I can sample sounds all over the place and use them on my computer to make music. Great if your into that sort of thing.
Oh plus the tape adapters for the car work great! I'll never understand why they haven't caught on more with consumers. My friends say the same thing now after they have seen all the uses I've gotten out of it.
But there is iPod for Linux.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Second on that one... I own the SP250 and like it very much. Besides doing an admirable job of playing standard CDs, MP3 and WMA files (it's played everything I've tossed at it), it's got an FM tuner.
Another important feature: upgradable firmware. Few players have this. If you get the SP250, be sure to upgrade the firmware to 2.05 (available from Rio's SP250 page under the "Support" section), which adds a lot of neat stuff and fixes common complaints about the OS. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard for some enterprising soul to hack the firmware and get Ogg support.
Also: It comes with rechargable batteries, and the player doubles as a charger.
The only thing I don't like about the SP250 is the fact that it takes a little too long from the time you power up to the time you actually start hearing music. The SP250 "remembers" the information for the last 5 MP3/WMA CDs that you put into it -- so it doesn't need to do the time-consuming scan on them -- but it still takes several seconds of eternity from disc insert to disc play.
I have a zaurus SL5500. I haven't gone jogging with it and it doesn't have any ergonomic controls like a thumb wheel to control volume. That aside, it still is unix friendly. I transfer data by two methods, put the CF card in the CompactFlash adapter and then mount that as drive on my Linux laptop - rip, copy, eject!
At home I have a 802.11b network, plug in the
CF 802.11b card and the Qtopia desktop application will work with the IP address - upload, manage, roam!
Besides that, it has a healthy developer community, Sharp supports open source efforts and it's a PDA! I'm sure that a 256MB storage card is enough for your 8-mile run! Short of a solid state device I'll only invest in an iPod.
Since you're planning on using your player for running/strenous activity, be very sure that whatever you buy is well made and water-resistant!! Sounds obvious, but believe it or not this actually disqualifies at least half of the players out there.
.its VERY small and light, has 128 megs, relatively inexpensive, and I've heard good things about its durability. That might be one for you to consider.
Using myself as an example of why you might want to listen to my advice, I bought an mp3 player with more or less the same goals you did, with the addition of wanting it cheap. So, I ended up buying a jaMp3 from KBGear. One trip to the weight room was all it took. I'm a big guy and I work out hard; the sucker died the first time out from (I believe) getting sweaty.
Anyways, I'm currently looking at the Samsung YEPP-30sh. .
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I use my PJB100 about 4 hours a day. It has a linux kernel module available (but possibly not maintained) and a very nice open source command line tool (thanks folks!). I've never used my pjb with anything other than linux and haven't had any problems.
;-) Not that the original Compaq guys didn't do a good job, the thing NEVER crashes.
Pro's:
upgradable hard drive - I'm putting a 40 gig in this weekend, up from 20
rechargable lithium ion battery (internal)
battery lasts ~7-8 hours if you don't modify the playlist too often
sounds better than most other mp3 products I've listened too.
linux, mac, and windows clients
the firmware is very very stable
Con's
The company that makes it is almost invisible
The firmware is stable, but also never gets upgrade
(and worse) the firmware is closed source
Its not as pretty as the ipod
It does not have a regular filesystem, which limits its potential use as a usb harddrive
USB isn't as fast as firewire (ipod)
It's expensive
It could be smaller. Jogging? You would need to hold it or have a fanny pack. it's too heavy for a belt.
It comes with a car cigarette adaptor
The table of contents is constrained by a max size, which makes multiple playlists impossible when you've got 20 gigs worth of songs.
All in all, I love my pjb100. I use it almost every single day on the bus and at work and it boosts the quality of life much more than any other gadget I can think of. Still, I wish the firmware was OS so that somebody smarter than me could add features
You can purchase it at http://www.mp3factorydirect.com
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
Here's what I suggest. Go to eBay and get a rio 500. They're going for $50. Here are some of the reasons why...
1) Full VBR and all bitrate MP3 support
2) Great command line linux utilities to transfer mp3s. Fast and easy to use.
3) upgradable firmware (the latest versions add some great features)
4) SmartMedia support
5) Long battery life
6) it's $50
7) lasts forever
8) never skips or fades
9) fast USB transfer. It only takes 2-3 minutes to change music with the linux utilities.
I put a 64 meg card in mine (giving me 128 megs of space), and with a good encoder (such as LAME ABR) 3 cds worth of music will sound just fine.
I've used mine for running and working out for years and it's showing signs of wear, but still working great and it's still as solid as the day I bought it.
2) The screen is kinda small
3) It crashes on VBR MP3s sometime. Not too often but enough to notice
4) Turning it on is irritatingly long. You'd think it's just a few seconds, but...
You need RockBox. The purpose of this project is to write an Open Source replacement firmware for the Archos Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio and Recorder MP3 players.
Get it now. It, um, rocks. Really.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
You're stuck with realtime speeds loading music on the media. It takes 74 minutes to fill up a disk with 74 minutes worth of tunes. The other problem is that I have home mp3 server with my entire collection on it. No batch copy, no drag 'n' drop just a phono plug. Try me again when I can do a :
/dev/minidisc /mnt/minidisc /mnt/minidisc
mount -t vfat
cp -r tunes/
and fill a disc up in 5 minutes or less.
The NexII can be fussy about the CF cards you feed it - branded ones are a good idea. Don't be tempted to flash it up to the 1.42 firmware unless you actually NEED to - Frontier Labs pulled it from their site for a damn good reason (namely that it bites). Stick with 1.4 or thereabouts.
Also note that the current versions of the NexII firmware will list and play back mp3s/WMAs in the order they were written to the CF card, so copy them in the "right" order - if you're a Windows addict, my little utility called copynex will copy files across in sensible order - I'm assuming linux users can figure out their own solution (shell/perl scripting, rewriting their OS to copy files in the desired order, etc.) ;-)
They've been very good on delivering on their promises so far (and even giving you things you wouldn't expect -- the 5-CD memory was added in a firmware upgrade) so it's a good choice if you want to move to Ogg in the future.
actually for less money you can get a solid state 1GB CF card that will drain your batteries at least 40-50% slower. It also has 0% chance of being ruined by mechanical shock. After seeing those pictures of the guy from ground 0's D30 and then seeing the pictures recovered from his CF card I have figured out that CF is basically indistructable.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.