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Neuros Review
An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net has just posted a lengthy review of the Neuros digital music portable. Just recently the company announced native Linux support for synchronizing the Neuros and we all know that Ogg Vorbis support is promised in the near future, so the unit is drawing a lot of interest. For the most part they liked the player, though they found the unit to be relatively big and heavy for a new generation portable. They also found the file transfer interface to be both impressive and glitchy."
Ogg support? I wouldn't buy one UNTIL they actually have the support up and running.
Let them know your future business depends on it!
Not to try and flame you, but isn't that a bit of an empty threat at the moment, considering ogg-vorbis mindshare in the general public?
It'd be a nice "geek" feature, i'm sure, but I don't think it's really at the level where Apple will take lost business because of it very seriously.
Just make it work. I want a 100% certainty that I will be able to migrate music from my linux box to the player. No message board lurking, no sifting through google groups.
If this product cannot reliably transfer music without copious under the hood tweaking, I am not interested.
USB 2.0 would be a nice addition too but even on that I will make accomodation.
apple is already a niche player, what makes you think expanding to other niches isn't important to them?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Otherwise I wouldn't see full-page magazine ads touting 'the power unix', and giving details on power-user experiences converting from (insert your unix flavor here) to OSX.
Don't underestimate yourself before you make an effort at asserting what you want. You just never know...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Hmm. Let's see. If we want to support Ogg, we'll have to pay six guys for a year to add it to the iPod, QuickTime and iTunes. At which point, every nerd in the world will rush out and buy our stuff, right? Uh... wrong. Because they'll demand that it work with this "Leenux" thing they keep nagging us about. So then we'll port iTunes to "Leenux" and then they'll buy our stuff, right? Uh... wrong. Because they'll complain that our software isn't "free," even though we give it away on the web site. Yeah, I know, makes no sense.
But even if we bend over backwards, fuck ourselves completely, and give these guys everything they want, how many iPods will we sell?
Eleven.
That's right, eleven.
Fuck it. Let's stick to what we do best.
--Steve
Honestly, I'm impressed that companies are starting to get the idea that they can offer something for everyone. I think you'll start to see more devices with multiple storage options, multiple formats, etc. The next step I'd like to see (since most companies won't open source their code) is built-in "modules" so additional features (and/or hardware) can be added by third party companies. --Darren p.s. I still like my Archos Multimedia, especially for the price.
"drawing a lot of interest"? From who? Most of the world hasn't even heard of Ogg Vorbis, people. Most who have heard of Ogg Vorbis realize it may sound better at lower bitrates, but nobody wants to re-encode all their CDs and stuff. So let's can the editorializing, okay?
Oh, and to all the people who are rabidly trying to convince Apple via silly little petitions(I bet half a week's iPod sales are bigger than the # of people who have signed any such petition)- give it up. They've got AAC, they could give a crap about Ogg, and they've said as much. Stop trying to force your stuff on the world- if there's a genuine market for Ogg, companies will recognize the need to support it.
Please help metamoderate.
Good point, I think Ogg-Vorbis support would be a niche-niche, if there is such a thing, though.
Consider...It would be an area in which the consumer:
A) Knows that portable music players besides CD players and Walkmans exist in the first place, and wants one.
B) Is interested and knowledgeable enough to go after an (expensive) Apple product in the first place.
C) Knows that Ogg-Vorbis even exists in the first place.
D) Cares enough about format differences to have a need to play Ogg-Vorbis files.
Again, that just doesn't seem like a big enough market for Apple to care. Please feel free to correct me with actual statistics if you have them, though.
I think there are features other than capacity that equate to more value for your money. Size is definitely one.
Random is the New Order.
How about the fact that two years ago, there was no Apple iPod, and now roughly 1 in 4 portable music players is an iPod?
Or the fact that until two months ago WMA was second to MP3, in marketshare, but now (with something like 3 million tracks sold) AAC is #2, despite only 3% of the potential market?
So far, far, more unlikely things have happened than Apple support Ogg; I mean, Apple supported MP3, right?
GPL Deconstructed
How about MyFi as a killer feature? Broadcast your music to an available fm station. No more car radio adapters. Easily share your mixes with your friends. Sit in class and have a few friends listening on the same station that you're broadcasting on.
As far as the other features go, all the reviewer's experiments showed was that the hisi has problems when not used properly. The random noise test was a joke and they said that they purposely used a bad version of the rap song as a test of how well hisi did with poor version of the song.
Radio: Why would anyone want to pay a buck a piece for a song when the radio broadcasts them for free?
I have a Nomad IIc with 192mb of memory. It easily holds 3 or 4 full albums. That's more than enough for my commute, I just have then swap out songs when I get home for the next day. with the extra memory card I got it for less than $100. I'd call that a steal.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
This device would be useful to live concert tapers but alas it does not offer support for the wav format.
And before one of you geeks pipes up with (well ogg is just as good), try taking an ogg compressed reocording over to etree and trading it without being laughed outta there chat room.
1) I can play it when I want
2) I don't need to sit and wait through insultingly stupid DJs (the second lowest form of life)
3) Most music isn't played on the radio
4) Clear Channel - a big reason for #2 and #3.
No, nothing smells fishy at all...
Everybody knows that Emmettfish is Emmett of Xiph.org fame. We also know the Xiph guys have been working with Neuros.
Even if it was just some anonymous schmoe on slashdot, he is asking you to contact him by an address at neurosaudio.com, which definitively means he has connections.
That said, I'm still not buying anything until Ogg support is officially finished.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Refresh my memory, but how many projects are we talking about that Apple has muscled into non existence?
In my recent memory I recall iCommune, which was 'settled' as a license issue, and they later rereleased software and are at 2.01.
Apple hasn't stopped Yellowdog from offering Linux, hasn't stopped Marathon from offering rackmount Macs, hasn't stopped MacOnLinux from booting Mac OS X or Classic inside Linux, released their own distro called mkLinux, released Darwin for PC and x86, still supports OpenDarwin, has yet to kill Amiga (which boots Mac OS X) or Pegasos from booting OS X, we have all these programs that allow you to unload MP3s from iPods, synching MP3s on multiple platforms, Sherlock plugins not approved by Apple, etc, etc, etc.
So, please, tell me what in Apple's behavior has made you so... paranoid and cautious about how they will treat you? I'm not saying 'Invest all your hopes and faith into Apple for they will do you no harm', but you seem awfully scared, for some reason.
And yea, AAC is a standard, inasmuch as ISO is a standard, and the MPEG ISO group has defined and ratifed mpeg2 AAC and mpeg4 AAC as standards; much like they *also* defined the MP3 standard. Heck, they defined the mpeg2 video standard that lives in DVDs today!
But if you don't believe that, there's nothing I can say to tell you otherwise.
GPL Deconstructed