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Compaq Brings Back iPaq Music Center, Drops Price
scaramush writes: "After initially pulling it from the market, Compaq has re-released the iPaq Music Center, complete with a $600 price drop (was $999, now $399). The size of a 17" standard component, the music center features a 20 gig HD, or as the copy breathlessly enthuses, "Enough capacity for nearly 400 audio CDs or 5,000 individual songs". Slashdot has covered similar devices like the Rio Central, which (at the moment) costs $1500. Will this price point be enough to lure users?" The site doesn't mention whether there will be any onerous playback-restriction technology included as a free bonus.
Sometimes the markup on these devices is ridiculous. No wonder they weren't selling in the first place, the people who would be interested in this device are the type of people that would know if they were getting hosed on it.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
I wish Sonic Blue would continue making the Rio Receiver. It's a cheap (About $150) device that works well for most computer people that already have their mp3 music on a computer. No need to convert CDs to an internal HD like this. You just stream the music from your computer to the Rio Receiver over HPNA or Ethernet. It works very well and you can have up to 8 of them streaming from one system.
If Sonic could bring them back for $99 they'd sell a ton. All the ones people find sell very quickly now and the prices on Ebay are going up....
w/something as powerful as the ipaq, rather than trying to cram as much space as possible into it wouldn't it be cool to have a service to connect to w/it a la mp3.com or roadrunner rhapsody?
maybe 802.11 could use some more developers?
The future isn't what it used to be.
Where or not $399 becomes _the_ pricepoint for people to start rushing in to buy Compaq's (isn't it HP already?) new toy, it all boils down to the utility of that toy.
Yes, it may be able to hold 400 songs. But if the RIAA has its way, it will make all the owners of the new toys PAY DEARLY for it - perhaps being tagged with labels like "pirates" or even worse, being charged in courts of "stealing intellectual properties".
It's us who have to be blamed, for we let scumbacks from RIAA and friends to RULE the world. We should have being pro-active, that is, even _before_ RIAA got its way, we should have make it IMPOSSIBLE for them to get their way through that stupid congress and the greedy son-of-the-bitch who lives in the White House.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Does anyone know if it is relatively easy to put a larger drive into this thing? 20GB is cool, but 60GB would rock!
.:diatonic:.
if you read the article, down at the ^2, theres a statement that 'Home network file transfers, analog recording of LPs, cassettes, etc., and S-Link changer control will be available via a free, automatic upgrade available in the near future.' :)
Translation: If it works, you'll get it, and we'll update your software without telling you
Why not use the much cooler (geekier) SliMP3?
And get cool stuff and an even cooler open source project to participate in / benefit from.
And, no, I am not affiliated with Slim Devices in any way.
I just think it's neat.
Guess I just can't resist the bright, bright VFD...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I'm currently working on building my own ethernet based mp3 player. Using minimal hardware, I can get it to fit on a 3" x 5" notecard and have analog, two digital coaxial (both isolated), and one digital optical outputs. Total cost is about $150 (buying each part in single quantities and excluding labor costs). This only means that all of these mp3 players are jacking consumers.....
:wq
Did I read that right? Only a 20g hard drive in this day and age when I can get an 80g one for under $200?
I guess at $399, I can spring the extra $200 for a >100g drive, but still....
the price drop should tell u something. if they thought it was worth $600 more before why do they suddenly change their minds? Did they find a huge flaw in it that no one else has realized yet and they want to get rid of as many of them as possible?
There are 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary code and those that dont
"[E]ven _before_ RIAA got its way, we should have make it IMPOSSIBLE for them to get their way through that stupid congress and the greedy son-of-the-bitch who lives in the White House."
:-P
Everyone knows that the RIAA, MPAA, and the rest of their "industry" are the pet whores of liberals. Big Oil is the pet whore of the "greedy son-of-the-bitch who lives in the White House."
Get it right, dammit!!!
I was in a focus group a couple of years ago for this thing. They asked us how much we would spend on it, and I said $300-400, so they kicked me off the focus group. Most people said $500-1000.
My reasoning was that I could put together a cheap linux box for $300-400 (at the time I had done two like this) for playing mp3s on a stereo. $400 is much more reasonable than $1000 for this thing, but the difference in a $400 computer two years ago, and today is pretty significant. Though the form factor and (hopefully good) user interface may make this worth more.
Finally, I hadn't heard this was pulled from the market, but kicking people off the focus group when they say things that you don't want to hear is a good way of getting a false sense of the product. "Let's get rid of everybody who would pay less than $700, then we can tell the suites the price point is $1000."
"Will this price point be enough to lure users?"
More importantly, now that it's actually priced within reach of a lot more people, I expect that the RIAA will want it banned.
You see, at $999, it was kind-of self moderating.
that they can openly sell a device which only purpose is to create illegal copies of music.
Won't the RIAA attack them with legal killer drones ?
Well there is some "free" music out there, but this stuff is mainly free because noone would be so foolish to buy it.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Here's what they've gotten right: average folks are starting to embrace the put-all-my-CDs-on-a-hard-drive and listen-to-them-from-there model. And $399 is a much better price -- not just cheaper, but better: it's more in line with what other stereo components cost.
But for me, there is one big thing missing from this setup: if you want music in the living room, and in the study, and in the bedroom, you have to buy three of these things, and rip your CDs three times each. If one of these boxes could feed a Rio Receiver or a SliMPEG over ethernet (wireless perferred, of course), I'd be much more interested. Central storage, distributed independent playback.
-Mark
if they release one of these in polished aluminum / silver / steel / not black, i'd consider purchasing one.
Wait till you see what I am about to release. It will blow your mind. Burn and rip and share. Open Source. Stop me if you think you can. HaHa.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
I agree that there's a niche market that wants a Rio, but, for the vast majority of computer users (including mahself) they don't compare in portability, utility or price to mp3/CD players. I have another brand of Rio-like device (I never use it anymore so I can't even find it) which was about $200; my mp3/CD player was fifty bucks - and, should the need arise, it also plays CDs.
I can't see how any of these devices can compete with that in a market large enough for a company like Sony to give a damn, and I certainly wouldn't pay $99 for a Rio. Maybe two years ago, when skip protection on CD/mp3 players didn't work for some inexplicable reason, it would have been a going proposition, but not today.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
How can we be blamed when we did everything in our power to help? It went through because the $ PTB $ wanted $ it $ to. You talk as if we're all congressmen. Well most of us are neither governing officials nor corporate powerhouses so we are not listened to. I sent many thoughtfully-worded messages to my congressmen and got no acknowledgement. If you're a congressman or corp-whore then feel free to blame yourself but if not then STFU.
Uses MP3 format at compression rates up to 320 kbps. Enough capacity for nearly 400 audio CDs or 5,000 individual songs.
Does this mean that I can only use mp3 format? How about wav or Ogg Vorbis?
I would not spend $400 on one of these. I currently have 25 gigs of storage that I can use for whatever, and supports all music formats. Thanks to a Linux file server, and winamp, and free cd ripping software. Why would someone want to spend $400 when I put together a better file server that cost under $100?
the Archos Jukebox 20. Same storage, 1/10th the size. You get portability with the only sacrifice being the need to hook it up to a PC to manipulate files. Not to mention the fact that the Archos Jukebox is $100 cheaper...
All the hardware and software parts to do this yourself are already out there, mostly for free. Fetch an old pentium out of the trash, qet your own 20G HD. You already have a CD player and probably a sound card in the thing. You might want to hack with the power supply/cooling to reduce fan noise. Here is an example of why a slower machine would be better.
Since you probably don't want a video monitor atop your stereo, add an ehthernet card so you can remote manage it, or read the serial port console HOWTO. Install Linux, install mpg123 and cdparanoia, check out The linux remote control project to learn how to add infrared remote capabilities, and there you have it. Since it's on a LAN, you can access songs over the network, and vice-versa.
You could even build this thing diskless and access everything over the LAN, which would make it really quiet. Check out The etherboot page for booting over a LAN, or consider a flash memory drive (more money, but simpler to implement).
I'd have done it myself by now if there weren't 10^6 more important things to work on.
But this thing looks like shit. Same as the Rio Central. The only one of these which looks good is TerraTec's M3Po. It looks nice. I wouldn't want one of the others in my room..
You'd need a simple user interface, like and LCD screen and a few pushbuttons. check out This LCD interface to a linux box for an example. There are surely many other examples out there.
You're pretty funny.
I've got a Rio Receiver so I can easily play random songs from my 1500-or-so CD collection.
Strangely enough, it does manage to play music that I bought from a store. The Compaq unit most likely would, too.
I find a quote that reads:
Easy to share music from your PCs (available through an automatic future feature update)
I read this to mean that you can pull mp3s from your PC, but not send your mp3s to your pc. Thus, if you want them in both locations, you have to rip them on the PC and transfer.
"Eliminates the need for bulky CDs, tapes and LPs. Frees up CDs and tapes for use in the car or portable players."(2)
(2) Home network file transfers, analog recording of LPs, cassettes, etc., and S-Link changer control will be available via a free, automatic upgrade available in the near future.
So in other words it will be connected to the net, from which I think we can realistically infer that it will title all your tracks that you record into it, and send that information to persons unknown. Same Internet connection to be used for 'automatic updates' (and I think you can bet your life the thing will not work without a net connection).
So in other words, Say Hello to DRM.
I think it's very important to note that as it ships, all it can do is rip the CDs you already own. Wow, be still my heart... Sure it will support audio in and "home phone line networking" (whatever that is) at some undetermined future date, but on Day 1 it will be a $399 CD player. And if you own CDs then it's safe to assume you already have one of these...
Let's see, science/technology, libertarianism, and "information wants to be free". 3rd! Can we partition out a section of slashdot to put all these articles which say the same thing?
Because of the recent RIAA sillyness, I'm asking people to be evangelists for local music. Go listen to bands, push the ones you like to your friends. Buy CDs at concerts if they're selling them, rip them and listen to them on your portable instead of ill-gotten corporate junk. Download samples from local artist sites and share them with your friends. Flood Gnutella and its like with music that the artists WANT to share.
The best defense against the RIAA is to ignore the products of their members!
HP bought Compaq and are sorting out which products to keep and which to biff. HP's de100c Digital music cente is clearly a superior product so they're ditching the Compaq product. This will most likely also mean no support, no upgrades and no point in buying it.
I have not found a mp3 stereo component that is aesthetically acceptable and stackable on my hoe entertainment stereo system.
Onkyo make a nice unit but it does not do TV overlay stuff.
If this component had wireless support to stream mp3's from my PC I'd love it.
For now however, the tv screen control/browzing, mp3 playback and 20 gig storage and its appearance make it worthwhile.
People say the archos jukebox is just as functional and I disagree. They key is integration into my remote control collection and stereo setup.
I junked my 2 Sony 100CD changers for mp3 storage on my PC, but have to string a cable from my sound card to a switcher to the stereo. A kludge at best. This is a good idea at now a good pricepoint.
Now all it needs is an embedded webserver and wireless support since I junked the ethernet net in my house for a wireless setup.
AC
There are 3 network players that I know of, one which has been highly publicized on /. is the SliMP3. The other device, which has been around for quite some time is the Turtle Beach Audiotron. There is also one made by RIO.
I recently bought a network player after a few weeks of wrangling I decided to go with the Audiotron since I already had samba set up and I wanted and SPDIF connection which the Slimp3 does not offer. Anyway, you can check out my review.
Now that everyone and their grandpa has a "hi-fi" in their living room the marketers must have been running out of incentives to get people to upgrade their stereos. This product seems to be the perfect opportunity to get people in on the next wave: Lo-fi. Maybe people will be inspired to downgrade their speakers to miniature computer models and ditch those pesky Monster Cables once and for all, once they hear the lo-fi results that you can get from mp3s played over a proper audio system.
they canned the entire audio group the day before the merger was official - is this to get stagnant inventory out the door? how can component prices drop enough to drop the price by over %50 and still make money? there's no revenue stream after the sale like with consoles games. i wonder if they were faced with tossing a boat load of now-unsellable components or moving them out at a loss...
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
is that most people who are interested in making an MP3 library of all their music already own a computer, and it's hard to compete with the $4.99 price tag on this alternate solution for playing your MP3 collection on your stereo.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Check it out:
a rd/UltraBoard.pl?Action=ShowBoard&Board=MSNCompani on&Idle=&Sort=&Order=&Session=
http://www.kenseglerdesigns.com/cgi-bin/UltraBo
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Bill Clinton supported DMCA and signed this bill into law.
So before you start your criticism, might as well aim it the right way.
...get a Terratec C.A.R. 4000:
http://www.terratec.net/ttus/default.htm
" since I junked the ethernet net in my house for a wireless setup."
Way to go. You traded a setup that was probably good for 100Mb to something that gives you 2MB.
You might as well dump your cable modem for a V34 at the same time. You'd had to have the bottleneck on the *inside* of your house.
Wireless is great for roaming laptops. Is subpar for everything else.
Wireless is great if you don't already have a wired network. Its nonsensical (more expensive, slower) if you already have the infrastructure.
Try not to be so trendy. It will be cheaper and better.
"once they hear the lo-fi results that you can get from mp3s played over a proper audio system."
You're a confused audiophile. I'll straighten it out for you (I was doing hi-fi's when your mom and dad were still dating):
1) If you record at 256 or 320, you can't tell the difference for most source material.
2) You might be able to tell on certain classical music (but you hate that stuff, right?)
3) On Pop/Rock whatever you call it, the music is already so processed that adding another processing doesn't make it worse, it makes it different. I mean, "Oh dear, Linkin Park sounds muddy!" isn't something that anyone will ever say. Or at least if they do, it won't be the fault of the equipment.
They specifically didn't mention being able to bring in mp3s from an external system. I'm fearing that customers will actually have to sit down and have the machine rip each of their CDs.
This would make it more difficult to pirate music, though it'd never really stop it.
I like audio books, how many Libraries of Congress does it hold?
The one thing missing though is 802.11b connectivity. I don't have cat5 running to my hifi/video gear. Wireless connectivity would go a long way. Cringley has similar ideas
http://www.myirock.com/players/irock300w.htm
It's a little FM transmitter that plugs into your device's headphone jack then transmits it to one of four frequencies between 80.1 and 80.7 to any nearby radio.
The device could be an MP3 Player, a Tape Player, a portable CD player, and of course even a computer.
The radio could be your car's radio, the radio in the living room, you get the idea.
And it's only $30 bucks... (but the transmitter is to the radio, the better the quality. The best use of this is to hear MP3 Player music through your car's speakers. Many even have a tape deck so it's an excellent alternative to Car Casette Adapter--which iRock also makes..)
They sell these at Radio Shack.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Jebus Cripes!
It's trivial to compete with the $4.99 price tag on your 'alternative solution.'
Just pick any equivalent connector/adaptor that isn't gold plated.
'Gold plated' is the stoooopid tax, dude.
"The site doesn't mention whether there will be any onerous playback-restriction technology included as a free bonus."
Well, as a matter of fact, some of the key ADVERTISED capabilities will be "available via a free, automatic upgrade available in the near future.
So, whether or not playback-restrictions are currently in force, they could easily be added as a "free, automatic upgrade" in the near future.
There is precedent for this. For example, owners of the REB1100 eBook device at one point discovered that they could no longer download any commercial eBooks without an easy, automatic firmware upgrade--and the firmware upgrade just happened to disable the REB1100's previous capability of downloading personal content (e.g free Project Gutenberg eTexts, HTML content captured from the Web, etc).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I have a friend that work in the market research business. It's not a well kept secret that focus groups are usually manipulated to get the results the clients expects. Basically, they're used to justify what a client wants to do (i.e. we have an idea and our market "research" indicates that it's viable).
Has anyone seen anyone selling stereo component sized computer cases? I've considered rolling my own convergence device, but the last thing I want is to have a tower case sitting beside my TV.
20GB is cool, but 60GB would rock!
But remember, it doesn't need to keep a copy of the operating system and applications on the same drive, so you gain 5-10 GB right there vs. a PC solution.
Anyway, how many CDs do you have? At 192,000 bits per second (which has been shown to be transparent for stereo audio, even on good speakers), 20 metric GB equals 160 billion bits equals 833,333 seconds, or 231 hours. Assuming each CD is one hour long, I infer that you must have a huge collection. How big is it?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can spring the extra $200 for a >100g drive
A 100 GB drive will hold over 1,100 hours of MP3 audio at 192 kbps. Where did you buy your thousand CDs?
Will I retire or break 10K?
As soon as you hook an 'MP3 Player' up to a quality playback system (somthing better than your PC speakers)
What makes you think that my sound card isn't plugged into a medium-high-end receiver and speakers?
it become obvious that it's 'way worse' not 'way better.'
NO. Tests performed by r3mix show that 192 kbps LAME encoded audio is transparent to the human ear. Your concept of "mp3" seems to be stuck at "128 kbps encoded with MusicTrash Jukebox".
lossy:
Conversion of the original analog sounds into 44.1 kHz stereo 16-bit linear PCM is itself lossy. Even conversion into 2.8 MHz stereo 1-bit PCM (Sony Super Audio CD) is lossy. It's a matter of how much loss you are willing to accept. For instance, the median *NSYNC fan wouldn't care if her copy of her favorite song was 64 kbps mono MP3.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Audiotron is a stereo component styled device from Voyetra/Turtle-Beach. The major advantage it has is that it has no hard drive, it reads data from your windows or linux pc (set up for file sharing). They have a beta/discussion mailing list that has provided fantastic support, and it's come quite a bit since software version 1.
p
This thing is absolutely great, works with Windows, Linux, NAS devices, etc. You can rip your music anyway you like (mp3 and microsoft formats only), use shoutcast servers, etc......
Around $300.....
Product info: http://www.audiotron.net/audiotron/producthome.as
Mailing list archives: http://maillist.voyetra.com/audiotron.html
How is this better than an iPod perched on the shelf?
A 10BaseT line runs at ten million bits per second.
A 320kbps MP3 datastream requires (only) 320 thousand bits per second.
You could stream roughly thirty concurrent different music streams at 320kbps each over a 10baseT ethernet line.
There may be a bitrate limitation in the SliMP3 device itself, but the ethernet wire, even if it's "only" ten megabit line, connecting the SliMP3 to the server is not the bit-rate bottleneck.
-Mark, a 192Kbps kind of guy
It's even better and comparably priced.
Embedded Gracenote CDDB (but what about 'new' releases ?
You don't have to build anything. Allows you to rip CDs to the harddrive with almost same amount of storage. Microsoft loses money everytime you buy one. You can play games on it if you want.
No it's not a one to one with what you can do with the Ipaq box but pretty damn close.
** I wish one of these would have a changer so that I could rip 6-10 discs at a time without having to sit there and switch out the single discs.
**Also I think that the device should be able to do a faster rip. if it can not compress as fast as it can read the disc, it should copy the RAW data to the HD first and then compress.
**One more request, if it could do a dual pass VBR compress.
I can't believe how many people in think that just because you have an excessively large music collection you stole it.
I didn't assume that. Rather, my mistake was to assume that nobody had a CD collection five times larger than the largest CD collection in my circle of friends. I guess I have a lot to learn.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is better than an iPod *how*?
The site doesn't mention whether there will be any onerous playback-restriction technology included as a free bonus.
;-)
The obvious solution to the copying issue is to require the user to insert the original CD into the unit while songs from that CD are played from the hard drive, as verification that the user has the correct rights to play songs from that CD.
iPod.
Same price point, same features, but fits in your pocket.
Who would pay $1000 for a VCR-sized box when a pocket-sized one costs $300/400/500?
Mine's plugged into the hifi through the Aux input, and plugged inot the car vaiaan FM transmitter. Otherwise, its in my pocket wiht headphones attached.