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Another iPod Competitor
rael9real writes "NOMAD has intoduced a new player. It has USB 2 and FireWire (finally), and supports WMA and MP3. It has a 20GB drive like the high-end iPod, and supposedly holds more music because it supports WMA (though why someone would want to use WMA is beyond me). It *is* cheaper than the iPod, though. Looks like a definite competitor. Maybe it'll drive iPod pricing down." Update: 10/14 21:21 GMT by T : Note that the listed specs for the player mention only "USB," not USB 2.
They didn't have any more info than the press release did, though. They had 1-2 week availability listed.
So it's $100 cheaper than the same size ipod, with USB connectivity and WMA capability.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
per Creative, it is $299+s/h after a rebate.
The price info is pretty well buried. Had to "find a retailer" to get it.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
From the add:
"Use your Zen to transfer files from your home computer to work or school by using the Zen as a portable hard drive."
And the price is the same as the IPod after "rebate" read 8 months to get your money.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
It's not exclusive. they have an official windows version now. not to mention all the unofficial unix clients.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Go read the specifications, it's not listed. Only mp3 and wma are listed.
specs
I have a first generation Nomad Jukebox. There are several newsgroups & websites devoted to hacking these, so I'm assuming that the newer ones will be hackable also.
I love my Nomad, with the exception of it's size (Portable CD player size), slow transfer (USB only) and battery life (About 2 hours), but this new player seems to fix all of those. As soon as it has been out a while and prices drop, I would definately love to have one of these.
Anotherng that will hold the iPod is it's exclisive Macintosh support.
d ex.html
There's an iPod version made specifically for Windows--three of them actually. With a FAT32 file system, Musicmatch 7.1 for access, and even a 6-pin-to-4-pin adapter for the firewire cable.
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/02q4/021003/in
I've been lurking in various Creative boards, largely because I just bought the Nomad Jukebox 3. Anyway, the general belief is that the Zen is a somewhat stripped down Nomad Jukebox 3. When you think about it, this makes sense.
The Jukebox 3 is a hard drive based MP3 player, just like the iPod. That said, they occupy slightly different niches. The iPod is small and very portable. The Jukebox 3 is bigger, but it has much more battery space, recording capabilities, a wired remote, more disk for the price, etc. There are two different markets here, and Creative wants a piece of the iPod's pie. The Zen appears to be a Jukebox 3 without the extra battery space, without the recording features (expect through its external wired remote), without the docking station port, etc. It's smaller, more portable, and easier to carry than the Jukebox 3. It also does less than the Jukebox 3.
Truthfully, it's a wonderful time to be thinking about an MP3 player (especially hd based). Every possible configuration is out there. On the cheap side, you have Archos with it's video player. Creative has a richly featured (and fairly inexpensive) Jukebox and a less featured, more portable Zen. Apple has a very portable and light iPod that's also more expensive. There's a toy for every price range and feature set!
iPod specs here
Jukebox Zen
specs here
Height: iPod =101.6 mm vs. Zen=112.6
Width: iPod =60.96 mm vs. Zen=75.9
Depth: iPod =21.34 mm vs. Zen=24.5
Weight: iPod =7.2 oz vs. Zen=9.5 oz
Display: iPod=160x128 pix vs. Zen=132x64 pix
Output Power: iPod=60mW vs. Zen=100mW
Playing Time: iPod=10hours vs. Zen=12hours
Well, its essentially a slimline harddrive. I have no idea what the buffer is on it, so heavy shaking's going to make it skip and possibly damage the platter and/or head.
They've got 512MB solid-state USB memory keys (think: DiskOnKey) that you can play audio/video from on your PC. I imagine it won't be too long before they've got a decent 1GB+ storage chip that someone could put into a portable audio device like this. I'd hope it would be cheaper too.
I've got an el-cheapo JaMP3 simply because it cost me $20. The 64MB MMC disk cost me another $80, so I've got a whopping 80MB of MP3 storage. Sure, I can shrink the bitrates down using DietMP3 and the quality's going to suck, but I'm not about to shell out $300 for an MP3 player..
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I've used Play Center 3 a good bit because it came with my Sound Blaster Audigy, and I can't stand it. Version 3 is better than the older versions, but it's still clunky and over complicated. That's just my opinion of course and others may have had better experiences. Having used both Play Center 3 and iTunes though, I would say that iTunes is much better than Play Center. iTunes just has a ton of thought put into makeing the user interaction with the software as simple as possible.
slogg vorbis is shit. Stop whining about your fucking audio codec that no one will ever fucking suport because no one wants it. MP3 is the standard and ogg will fade away into nothing.
Firstly, how can a codec that's gaining momentum "fade into nothing"? It's not mainstream now, but neither were computers, UNIX, digital audio, etc.
Second, more and more companies are picking up OGG Vorbis support. Why is that? Well, let's see. It's a completely FREE codec that is continually getting better. It's supported by an organization that's dedicated to creating free multimedia codecs for use in open, free, and commercial use -- all without charging a cent. Most importantly, however, OGG Vorbis IS superior to WMA and MP3. If you think otherwise, try looking into some of the various listening tests. Or check out Vorbis' Listen page. If you're such a blind zealot that you won't actually test various codecs, you have no right to praise or flame any codec for any reason.
Grow up and leave the technology details to people who know what they're doing and talking about.
Although your music tastes may be very limited, many people like a VERY wide variety of music
Besides, a portable hard drive, as you propose, would require making the enclosure for the device larger
Also, the batteries may run out using today's batteries, but in a year or so
Have faith in technology
And besides, isn't it better to have extra space rather than not having enough space? This way, 99.5% of the people will not complain about not being able to carry their entire MP3 collection with them every where they go!!! (another good marketing tool)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
It doesn't appear so, but if you look at the bottom of their spec sheet page:
o ducts/Jukebox_Zen/sp ecs.asp)
** Operating System/Firmware support & update will be available via www.NOMADWorld.com
(http://www.nomadworld.com/pr
It looks at though it could possibly be added if demand was great enough. This is just speculation though.
For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support.
There's plenty of (unofficial) Linux support for WMA. Both MPlayer and avifile support most WMA formats. Plus, Crossover provides a plugin for WMA8 that works just fine (granted it costs $25, but it's the best quality/buck ratio in the business).
DZM
I have heard mention of Apple licensing technologies from XEROX, but I have never seen documentation. I don't think it happened because, According to Cyberlaw, when Apple sued MS the"Ninth Circuit recognized that "protection extends only to those components of a work that are original to the author, although original selection and arrangement of otherwise uncopyrightable components may be protectable." They "upheld the denial of protection to certain GUI items because of Apple's admitted heavy borrowing from iconic treatments in the Xerox Star and an IBM Pictureworld research report. The Ninth Circuit also found that even if certain folder and page icon designs were original to Apple, they "added so little to the mix of protectable material that the outcome could not reasonably be affected."
That said, I don't see how Apple "stole" anything from PARC. The two systems are pretty different.
Jef raskin been pushing GUIs at Apple for at least a couple of years at that point, and was already a couple of months into the Macintosh project. He had taken his Mac proposal straight to Mike Markula because the Steves had never been excited about his GUI work. In the late sixties at Carnegie Mellon (and long before Star/Alto), raskin did his PhD. thesis on object oriented graphic interface. He even called the system he described in his thesis "Quickdraw."
Steve Jobs got the idea for a new operating system from Jeff raskin and his Macintosh team who were busy developing one. Then he went to PARC to get a different perspective.
The Xerox trip was important to the evolution of the Mac in that it probably influenced some of Jobs decisions. In particular, the choice of a mouse as the pointer device, which raskin opposed. Raskin himself was pretty familiar with PARC's work. He had spent a fair amount of time there before coming to Apple and was friends with several PARC people. IIRC, there was a substantial gap between the PARC visit and Jobs' Mac coup, time he spent working on Lisa.
For the most part, the PARC story is just a Jobs authored mythology designed to paint himself as the spiritual father of the Mac. As with many such breakthroughs, the Mac was an appropriate implementation of technologies and design concepts which had been developing simultaneously in several places.
My guess is the licensing story is an embelishment of the truth that Apple had XEROX's corporate level permission to tour PARC sans NDA.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
"Zazen" is Japanese for "sitting zen", not "simple". Your use of this word is strange.
I wonder how shock absorbent this guy is
I can't speak about the Nomad, but the I have taken the iPod jogging, mountain biking, bicycle commuting etc... and have never had a skip. Essentially the iPod has a huge RAM buffer (can't remember how big, but something like 32 or 64 MB). The hard drive spins up briefly and loads music into RAM before spinning down again. This saves battery life, limits the damage to the hard drive, and keeps music from skipping. I looked at a number of MP3 players before deciding on the iPod and I must say I am truly happy with the iPod. The other bonus is that I can take the iPod and almost half of our collection of music with me with the 20GB model after synching it to our home stereo system (iTunes powered). Thats about 13 days of music folks and you can have road trip mixes, exercise mixes etc.... that can easily be updated before walking out of the house.
See scientia et macintosh for more iPod commentary.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It is my prediction that we will not see a portable Vorbis player for a while. Anything that could play a Vorbis file will need to have a more expensive and more powerful processor, which will drain the battery much faster. This is a big compromise to make just for having the bragging rights of being able to say users can also play OGG files. Two extra hours of batterly life are worth a lot more to the typical user than the ability to play OGGs.
And the price is the same as the IPod after "rebate" read 8 months to get your money.
The 20GB iPod is $499.
The Jukebox Zen 20GB player is $349 before the rebate, and $299 after.
"And like that
Nope, no sig
Ogg sounds better than MP3, yes, but: OGG will continue to improve, while MP3, for all intents and purposes, is effectively DEAD.
Yes, DEAD. The "standard" MP3 is not going to improve. Any attempt to improve it will be NON-standard. MP3Pro isn't MP3. Any 'official' enhancements to MP3 will be like MP3Pro--for profit. The MP3 "game" is up; Fraunhoffer and their ilk won't let the next goose that lays a golden egg get away.
Ogg on the other hand is free to change and evolve on it's own, patent free. Our idiot "MP3 is standard and ogg sucks" troll, obviously, didn't consider this. Nor did he consider the fact that major game companies are now using Ogg Vorbis for music formats (NWN, UT2k3, Serious Sam, etc), and NOT MP3.
Also newsworthy: There is alpha-level Ogg Vorbis support for the PhatNoise/Kenwood Music Keg -now-, downloadable from the PhatNoise web site. Looks like the Music Keg is the first one to market with Ogg! (at least for car players, anyway...)
The iPod uses a 1.8 in. hard disk; the Creative uses a standard 2.5 in. notebook
hard disk -- therefore the Creative player is about twice as big as the iPod.
Not only is this not novel (Archos has been using 2.5 in. notebook
drives in similarly-sized MP3 players for a while), it's also not a competitor
in my book.
Let's not forget that the company that makes this, Creative Labs, hopped on the DRM bandwagon.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
People are complaining about features? The Nomad does have features over and above the iPod. Most notably recording. Many people in the live & location recording circles are exploring the Nomads as a replacement for DAT and Mini Disc recording. Creative engineers have been quite active with end users on some of the message boards I frequent with refining the firmware of the Nomad III to enable bit accurate recording and data transfer, so they will listen to a relatively small customer base to improve their product. That said I think I remember reading an article that discussed why so few portable devices support OGG and other codecs. It basically comes down to CPU power. Most of the embedded chips do not have enough processing power to support OGG decoding. Any device this small makes a tradeoff between battery and processing power. Finally 10-12 hours of nonstop music is a lot, maybe I can't listen to EVERY song on a player in that time, but do you always know what songs you listen to before you leave the house? I don't, so it's nice to have a large selection to choose from. And the ability to recharge from a USB port or an AC adapter sounds pretty nice to me. Competition in this market will drive innovation and lower prices. The iPod and Nomad are both prime examples of that, so let's hope for our sake the battle continues.
According to the specs, the buffer is 16 MB SDRAM.
I've actually just recently gotten hooked on MiniDiscs. Yes, I know, the DRM sucks, but it's easy enough to get around (besides, I usually rip straight from CD anyway so it's not a big deal.) The NetMDs are way cool, the MDLP4 format can hold about 4 full length CDs on one MD (albeit at a reduced bitrate, but with the headphones most people use with light portables, you'd never be able to tell the difference.) The thing is impossible to skip, the battery life is insane (60+ hrs on a single AA,) plus it's small and the media's cheap.
I really do wish Sony would get over the stupid DRM bullshit though, as that's really the only major flaw the NetMDs have. Well, that and lack of cross-platform drivers, but that seems to be a problem for a lot of portables. You can pick them up at Best Buy for around $150, but I'm sure with some online searching you could find them for a bit less. The discs are about a buck a pop, but when compared to flash media or a cratered hard drive, it's a steal.
Yeah, I know, a lot of people are going to bitch about how the format is closed and very much proprietary, but personally I don't care so long as it works. If you're just looking for a solid portable, take a look at the NetMDs. Yeah, 10 gigs of MP3s on a hard drive player sounds nice, but I'm not sure I wanna plunk down that kind of cash on something with as many sensitive, breakable parts as are in a hard drive. Aw well, any other MD fans out there?
Shock absorbtion my @ss. Listen, the iPOD is great and I have one, but the 32 MB of "shock absorbtion" memory has got to be the *BIGGEST* mis-direct I have ever seen.
Depending on the encoding rate, the 32 MB can hold upwards of an *HOUR* of music. This has nothing to do with shock protection; generally 30 sec to 1 min works fine for this. The 32 MB is what gives the iPOD its great battery life for a hard disk based MP3 player. The iPOD's disk spins up, loads up the 32MB and spins down. If it had only shock protection memory -- 1MB or 4MB -- the HD would be spinning alot more (or all the time) so you wouldn't be getting the 10+ hours of battery life like we do now. To summarize:
32 MB != shock protection (well, for the most part)
32 MB = battery life extention.
There are a lot more specs then that on those page: recording capablity:
zen: yes, ipod no
radio
zen: yes, ipod no
S/N ratio:
zen: 98db, ipod: dosn't say
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That's all great and everything, and the jukebox3 can to it too. But I've listened to both. Apple sent one to an online magazine editor that I know for him to review, and then conveniently 'forgot' about the device, leaving it in his care. (Whatever you want to call that). The iPod's sound is flat, almost tinny at time. When I listened to the same mp3 file on the Jukebox it sounded better even before I flicked the equalizer on. Then it rocked the house.