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New MP3 Portables
An anonymous reader writes "This has been a busy week for the announcement of the latest crop of MP3 portables, probably just the start of many more with the holiday season only a few months away. First Samsung has announced their first jukebox model the Yepp YP-900, a 10GB unit using Toshiba's 1.8-inch drive for storage (same one as in the iPod) and eschewing FireWire (400 mbps) for a USB 2.0 (480 mbps) connection to transfer files. Mambo has also announced a jukebox player called the Digital Media-X PhotoBank Jukebox that is more akin to the Archos Jukebox Multimedia in that it can store and display photo files and possibly video files in the future. The Mambo holds 20GB of memory on a more common 2.5-inch hard drive, making it a heavier unit than the YP-900. Like the Yepp, the Mambo also goes with a USB 2.0 connection, heating up the competition between FireWire in digital music portables. The most interesting feature about the Yepp? It also has a MMC/SD card slot to facilitate trading tunes to and from other digital music players. (Take that SDMI). Finally SonicBlue has started shipping replacements for the Rio 600 and the Nike PSA[play 120 (made by Rio for gym workouts). Both the Rio S30S for the exercise-minded and the Rio S10 come with 64MB of memory and are upgradeable to 192MB through MMC flash cards. The S30S comes with an FM radio, while the base-optioned S10 is claiming 35 hours of running time on a single AA battery. Both players transfer files via USB 1.1's 12mbps port."
While the ipod is small, other units have a number of things going for them that the ipod doesn't.
The NJB3 for example, has built-in recording in either uncompressed or MP3 format, and a battery life that's in the ~22 hour range with two batteries loaded.
It also supports bi-directional file transfer, so you're not stuck just "syncing" your media when you connect it to the host computer.
It's bigger, yes - but it also utilizes industry-standard 2.5" drives (which go up to 60gb now). That offers a lot more room for expansion than the 1.8" drives which are used in the smaller devices.
Saying "everything else is a joke" is naive, and flamebait imho. What may work for you may not fill my needs - the opposite can be true as well, but let's be honest here.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I think there must be two distinct groups at SonicBlue designing MP3 players. One does fairly standard players, often sold under somebody else's label. The other grinds out these strange backpack players.
What the second group is smoking is one of the great mysteries of our time. The players and backpacks are filled with strange, inexplicable features. On the other hand, this series is one of the few that supports bookmarks, which are essential to us spoken word types.
Personally I prefer the PhatNoise PhatBox. Supports MP3, FLAC, Windows Media, Audible, and soon to support Ogg (available in alpha test now). It comes in either 20 GB or 40 GB carts and interfaces with a bunch of head units. Also the Kenwood Audio Keg is the same thing (licensed PhatNoise). It uses 10 GB carts and works only with Kenwood Headunits (I got an Audio Keg myself). There are a lot of cool features including m3u playlists and text-to-speech technology to announce the name of each playlist.
//m
"If Bose would make something like that I would buy it in an instant..."
Apparently, you have never read a critical review of any Bose audio products.
Firewire is free:
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It also supports bi-directional file transfer, so you're not stuck just "syncing" your media when you connect it to the host computer.
And how might you explain this?
"I'm not prepared to fork over even more money for a firewiire card when I have 4 perfectly good USB 2.0 ports on my motherboard, which are faster."
As mentioned above: $18. When you spend $400 or more on a piece of hardware, an extra $20 is nothing. Well, unless you're being cheap.
480Mb/s peak versus 400Mb/s sustained. Your USB2 ports are not faster then FireWire. You can believe Intel's marketing if you'd like though; whatever you'd prefer.
"With Apple hardware also supporting USB 2.0..."
No Apple hardware ships with USB2 support.
Anyone who is interested in signing a petition to add OGG support to the Ipod, Here's the link!
I didn't sign it, but then, I don't really care.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Wow, nice troll!
:P
While there's no dedicated Ogg chip currently, there's proably very few, if any, dedicated WMA chips out there, so immediate availability of Ogg chips isn't a make-or-break for the format.
However, as for the parent post's link to that single, outdated study, I think I trust the huge, distributed test covered by c't over one guy, thanks.
Floating-point intesive? Try again. Take a careful look at the HUGE TEXT at the very top of the page.
And how about those format specifications, eh?
If anything's a joke here, it's your post.
The Free desktop that Just Works
And a big advantage of USB2 is that it also works on USB1 ports--slower, but it works, and just about every computer has USB1.
There is a little snap-on MP3 player for the Ericsson T28 World phone. Not much capacity, but it's detachable for when you don't need it and runs off the phone's battery. I think it uses MMC cards. HTH.
Firewire is 400mbps SUSTAINED between devices without needing a host controller. USB 2.0 is 480 mbps *MAXIMUM* throughput. Bearing in mind that everything a usb device does goes through the controller, you actually get a maximum of 240 in each direction, assuming there's nothing else on the usb chain. If there is then you'll get even less.
I am sure that in a lab you can get usb 2.0 to go faster than firewire but in reality there is no way it will.
I have both and I have usb 2.0 and firewire external drives and the firewire one smokes the usb one (they are both 7200 rpm ibm drives) even when the drive is the only thing on the usb chain.....
if I add a mouse it gets comical.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
The story is that iriver made the best mp3 cd player called slim-x, it's the thinnest player out there, and costs about $150. Then a bit later they came out with this chrome-x which is bulkier, but costs $90. It's got all the features, iirc.
My advice is to read reviews and buy it.
Overall, the machine is quite good and probably the best on the market. However ther are a few things that it doesn't get right.
First, gap removal -- I have many albums that arte contimuous (live recordings, DJ mixes, classical music, etc.) The iPod provides no gap suppression, so that in between every track there is a noticeable gap of about 1/2 second (or up to five seconds if the hard disk decides to spin up at the same time.) Now, I realize that due to the architecture of most portable mp3 players, gap suppression is not feasible because it requires processing on the decoded audio. So I went and re-encoded all those albums as single mp3s. However, that didn't work well because of:
File size limit: The iPod is very poor at handling files that exceed the size of its 32MB memory buffer. It is incapable of playing music while reading from the hard disk. So if you have a file that is longer than 32mb, it will play the first 32mb, then pause for 3-5 seconds while reading the next 32mb chunk into memory. This means that there is no way to properly listen to continuously recorded albums.
Furthermore, the iPod provides no mechanism for bookmarking or labeling points within a track, so it's impossible for me to see what the title of the current section on my continuously encoded album is. I would find this even more annoying if I listened to audio books.
The backlight is not adjustable, and it's too bright. In a dark room it hurts my eyes.
The backlight, unlike most other kinds of backlight, needs to invert the screen when it's on, which you can see if you take the iPod out into the sunlight. But on a cloudy day, the backlight and the ambient light balance out almost exactly, and the display is unreadable. I can hold down the "Menu" key to turn the backlight off, but that isn't helpful because when I move the wheel the backlight turns on agin immediately. So I have to navigate through the menu system (which is tricky when you can't see the display) to turn off the backlight.
Did I mention the menu interface? The menu interface provides no provision for muscle memory; it cannot be operated by touch. You must be constantly looking at the display while you move the wheel. This makes the iPod downright dangerous for use in the car (which is about 50/70% of where I use the thing). Much of the danger could be alleviated if the wheel provided any sort of tactile feedback -- there is a audible "clicker" you can enable, but you cannot hear it in a noisy environment, or while the music is playing. You cannot adjust the volume unless you are in the "Now Playing" section of the menu interface. If you wanted to turn down the volume without looking at the display, the sequence you have to go through is this:
That's a little much to expect when you're trying to just mute the damn thing while keeping your eyes on the road!
Finally, iTunes seems to have some speed issues in reading files off of CD-ROMs. Off the hard drive is nice and speedy, but from the CD it clocks in at around USB1.0 speeds. I don't know why this is the case.
I would like to know if there are any portable hard-drive based mp3 players which address these issues.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Recently, one of the best German computing magazines performed an extensive public test of various audio compression codecs, judging Ogg Vorbis as the clear winner. Slashdot article here.
While certainly not a flawless study, it seems a lot more legitimate than what you cite.
To add to MagnusDredd's comments...
m p/ 0,24331,3393574,00.htmll d.com/news/0004/26.usb.sh tml
It drives me nuts every time I see this crap about USB 2.0 being faster than FireWire. Firstly, the theoretical maximums are only 80Mbps apart (400 vs 480) so who would care at those speeds?
More importantly is that FireWire's actual speeds leave USB 2.0 in the dust. In many tests FireWire is over 100% faster, and in NONE is it slower, than USB 2.0. Why? Several reasons but, most importantly is that FireWire was made for massive data transfer point-to-point. USB was designed for peripherals of all sorts and requires post processing between your two transfer points, a huge amount of overhead and lost performance when all you want to do is move data. Sure, you wouldn't want a FireWire mouse, but you would only want a USB 2.0 mp3 player, or other mass storage device like hard drive or DV camera, if you were unfortunate enough to buy a PC with USB 2.0 built-in. Given the choice, only the misinformed would choose USB 2.0 over FireWire. And if you really need speed, the rumored next generation of FireWire is going to hit 800Mbps.
A short list of evidence (plenty more where this came from)...
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/ju
http://maccentral.macwor
http://www.barefeats.com/fire26.html