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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."
then it wouldn't be an "mp3" portable. So don't ask.
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.
Looking at www.sonicblue.com and saw some more info on the players. Some facts that might interest a few.
Supports Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management
Upgradeable to future music formats
http://www.sonicblue.com/audio/rio/s30s.asp
The Yepp player uses the same drive as the iPod, so it could have exactly the same form factor and weight (specs weren't released, so this si speculation), and has the same capacity. And it transfers with USB 2.0, which is both faster than the iPod's FireWire, and is also more commonly available on the PC platform. So why is this "junk"? If anything its good competition.
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
What I wanted was a MP3 player that could be used under water. Those FM radios made for swimming have terrible tuning, specially when you dive a few inches (flip turn, for instance), and usually seek for another station when that happens. I understand the problems of doing a casette player for under water use (size, movable parts, water proof issues of openable containers), but a MP3 player seems perfect. That would be a sports friendly player.
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.
Oh Apple, when will you do the right thing? The libraries for Ogg Vorbis decoding are released under the BSD license. They can be compiled via [either GCC or] ARM ADS and its free
GCC and the Tremor library (integer arithmetic Vorbis decoder) are free software, but ARM ADS software is hardly "free". It's proprietary and $6,000 per seat.
How hard is this for them? What I really think is the problem is that QuickTime and iTunes cannot deal with variable bit rate audio codecs, so playing them on Mac OS is a no-no.
Actually, the big problem is that the iPod player runs audio through a chip that takes MP3 audio on one pin and produces PCM audio on another. It's much harder to change hardware than software.
Oh, and USB2 connection? Sure you don't have to pay a buck to apple every time you sell a device, but the power has to be a separate plug.
Not necessarily. USB 2.0 devices can be bus-powered. Besides, you need batteries anyway for when the device is disconnected from the host computer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I dunno about you, but I will find the player I want independent of bus interface and THEN, and only then, will I decide that I am not too cheap for
AN EIGHTEEN DOLLAR PART!!!
Sorry 'bout that.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
- Apple overnights me a box
- I stick ipod in box
- I call to have the shipping company pick up box
- Apple sends me a brand new ipod, arrives 2 days later
That's what I call service, most of the other players I've seen have a very limited warranty and the companies are almost guaranteed to object to a replacement. Apple was amazing and they should be, with the recent release of the ipod for windows, they are bound to get a few converts if they keep that level of service.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.
lets see USB is controlled by Intel, Firewire is controlled by IEEE, now which is more open, one or many.
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?
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)
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.