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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."
Id buy one in a second that had Ogg Vorbis support. anyone know of a portable player that has flashable codecs support?
adventure-today.com
I bought the GF2MX when it hit $90 and a GF3Ti200 when it hit $90. I bought my (older) 11 second buffering sony car discman when those hit $90. (It gets like 80 hours play on a pair of AAs, too, and works flawlessly to this day. Very nice.) So any MP3 player I'm going to buy is going to cost less than a hundred bucks.
I also don't want a device where the media costs more than the machine, which limits my choices to a pretty narrow range. Lik-Sang doesn't even seem to be loading, but that's where I'd ordinarily look for a device like that.
Does anyone know of a very thin CDRW/CDR/CD player which does VBRE MP3s and costs less than $100 which doesn't simply fall apart within a week of the warranty's end?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously, when are all these big name vendors going to start using a truely free format? I can't imagine that the likes of Sharp or Sony want to be beholden to some german company in a case of patent infringement.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
I've been looking (truly, quickly) at (MP3) players, CD players and stereo systems and I was hoping to see a few advertising OGG playback. So far I haven't been able to find any digital hardware equipment (not a computer) that would play ogg off-the-shelf.
If I'd find a reasonably priced player, preferably CD, that would play ogg I would buy it. I own a relatively small collection of music (~1GB) 80% of which is MP3 but I'm starting to rip my new CDs with ogg.
Anyone knows of CD players that read ogg files on CDs?
Disclaimer: I don't care about people saying "you stupid! just rip your CDs in MP3" because they don't get the point. I don't want to start a fanatic war on ogg vs. mp3 either because it misses the point too. I just want to listen to ogg files because I like it.
The Yepp isn't coming out until Feb/March, so it is way behind the iPod in that respect. By the time it comes out, Apple will have had the 10GB iPod on the market for a year. I mean come on, "Oh yeah, well wait 6 months...I'm going to get an MP3 player with the same capacity as your iPod and a slightly faster connection speed for the same price you paid today! Oh, yeah, the interface will probably suck too."
Besides which USB 2.0 isn't really faster than Firewire, and either one is faster than that 1.8" HD can handle anyway. The real advantage to Firewire is that it provides power too, so you can charge and sync your iPod by only plugging in one cable.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
However you really should look up the current specs. The latest model iPods do offer more then the Yepp, FireWire and USB 2.0 are about tied for market penetraton (their speeds are essentially identical right now though FireWire is going faster RSN), and most agree that the iPod interface & software integration are the best on the market.
While everyone is welcome to choose whatever fits their needs best the iPod is a remarkably good value bang-for-the-buck, particularly in the latest revisions. Comparing iPod Rev. A specs with the latest Yepp isn't particularly valid unless price is also listed (iPods have gotten cheaper quite quickly.)
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.
If only Apple released a version of iTunes for Windows. Surely it couldn't be that hard! I think they made a big mistake by not doing so.
I keep hearing that exact sentiment and I don't know if it's really true or not but at the very least there could be another way of looking at it. In the first scenario Apple made a huge mistake when not making a "Windows version" of iPod because that's just plain lost sales! Similarly, Apple makes a huge mistake when not porting iTunes because the bundled Windows software sucks ass and will impact sales of Windows iPods...again, lost sales.
The second way of looking at it goes a bit like this. Apple doesn't hurry to port the iPod because the lure of using one is enough to drum up some computer sales. Maybe not the same number of computer sales as the lost iPod sales, but computers are higher ticket items and presumably Apple makes more money on them. Similarly, Apple doesn't bother porting iTunes because it's one of those things that make the Mac look really good compared to the PC - again, more computer sales.
Which scenario is closer to the truth? Only Apple knows and even they don't know for sure because you can't count sales you didn't get. We can assume, however, that they are the most interested party when it comes to Apple sales and revenues...and thus they probably did their homework before deciding how to play it.
Which brings me to my final point: why are there an endless stream of second-guessers who figure they know that Apple would have made more sales/money if they had done differently?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Yes, because the difference between 400Mb/s and 480Mb/s really matter when connecting an external hard disk. It's 2002. Hard disks do not run at 480Mb/s.
Besides, the "USB2 is faster then FireWire" talk is just Intel's marketing; USB2 is 480Mb/s peak, where FireWire is 400Mb/s sustained.
I think that the meaning of the word "mp3" has metamorphasised in its useage in online culture. "mp3" I think now means digital music suitable for online trading as opposed to audio compressed with mpeg layer 3 technology. That's really what it means. The average mp3 user knows nothing about fraunhofer. Heck, I still call my ogg + wma + few mp3 directory "mp3" because it fits the purpose.
actually, you're mistaken. you could use private ips and set it up as a completely seperate network with your computer, since firewire can act as a ip interface. thx. next pls?