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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.
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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 !
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."
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
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."
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
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
Care to share more information on this? I've also been thinking about putting together an mp3 box, and would be interested to hear what hardware you're planning to use and what kind of setup you're making. Will it just stream mp3s from across your network, or will it include a big HDD to store them locally? Have you considered how noisy it will be? What measures have you taken to reduce this (choice of processor, fans, HDDs and so on)?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
For this I would take a look at the MP3-Box HOWTO. It describes a setup for a networked mp3 player, with low noise and everything.
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
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 was just thinking about this, because I saw the price of the ipaq and thought - at first - "Wow, that's a cheap price." Then, I thought, "Well, actually, couldn't I do everything it can do with my old P233MMX?" Then I thought, "Uhh, wait, my minitower isn't exactly portable."
So, here's my solution: buy a used laptop for between $250 and $700, or buy a Multia for between $50 and $100.
Neither makes any noise, both support Linux/NT4, and both have minor expansion capabilities. The laptop is more portable, but the Multia is more powerful.
You know what would be really cool? An old iBook. Those things would be plenty fast enough for any job, plus you could run OS X on it. Then, if you wanted to take your music with you, you could. If you wanted to use it as a workstation, no problem. Or, if you wanted to stream music across the network, that'd work fine, too. You could even do it wireless using AirPort.
Well, anyways, that was my brainstorm. Lots of people say that you should never buy a used laptop, because they fall apart in several days or are always missing critical parts, like the battery. That's probably true, but everything in life is a chance. I've never gotten screwed too badly on eBay.
p.s. my definition of portable might be different than yours. Get a Sony DiscMan if you want to go jogging with your music.
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.
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
I like audio books, how many Libraries of Congress does it hold?
"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!
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?
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
I personally own at least 200 CD's (meaning actual plastic discs) plus gigabytes and gigabytes of downloaded stuff. So 20GB would probably be fine, since I have plenty of stuff that I never want to listen to again. 60GB would leave more "room to grow", however.
My other first post is car post.
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.
"IRock" is not really like the Rio Receiver at all.
What you describe is merely an FM Modulator.
Rio Receiver's and the like play a file stored at a remote location (usually a hard drive on your local LAN) over ethernet or HPNA at their full quality.
FM will introduce lots of distortion and loss of audio signal.