Dcube: Portable Audio With Ogg And A Scroll Wheel

Slowtreme writes "There have been many attempts recently to cash in on Apple's iPod success. Napster, Dell, and others have made iPod clones. This Korean Dcube looks like they are going all out. With 1.5 gig, Ogg and MP3 support, grey scale display, USB2.0, wireless, FM radio, it looks like a nice device. Most noticeable however is the scroll wheel, Apple holds patents (pending) on scroll wheel design. How much noise will this make?" (The Napster-branded one is actually a Samsung product; Samsung, too, is supporting Ogg Vorbis in some models, though not in that one.)

Comments

The price matters

[MooCows]

If this is cheap enough, I'll definitely buy it.
The one thing still preventing me from buying a portable audio player is the price.
I don't need 20GB of music in my pocket, 1,5GB is more than enough for me.

Apple Music

[mgs1000]

It's also kinda funny that, on the web page, the device's display shows a couple of Beatles songs. (The Beatle's record label is Apple Corps)

If I were to buy a new mp3 player...

[turkeyphant]

I bought a second generation 20GB iPod soon after they came out. However, I now have more music than I can fit on it and I'm getting interested in re-ripping my tracks at higher quality or even investigating FLAC. Also, Apple is doing me a disservice by preventing me from using Ogg-Vorbis which I still think is superior to LAME's output. If I download .oggs, I then have to go through decompression and another round of lossy compression to create mp3s that will play on my iPod.

As such, I'm very interested in the latest releases of hard-drive based mp3 players. I especially like the look of the iRiver players and I'm hoping to try out my friend's new Rio Karma. Nevertheless, I will have to save up again if I want to get a new player and there are a few minimum feature requirements I can't help thinking would be easy to include on a new player.

• Native Ogg-Vorbis and FLAC support
• Regular firmware updates that include customer suggestions
• Optional remote (preferably with its own display
• Ability to input audio via line-in and/or microphone. On-the-fly encoding not required
• FM radio tuner
• Semi-decent interface with well-organised playlisting and options. So many cheap flash-based players coming out of Asia these days have terrible interfaces. Also, an iPod-style scroll wheel or similar input device is necessary for scrolling through thousands of songs
• Ability to sort folders/playlists by date, album, last modified, year and artist et cetera (i.e. dynamic rearranging of playlists, song lists according to ID3 tab information)
• Access to other parts of tag information including year and lyrics
• On-the-fly playlisting
• Gapless playback
• USB 2.0 or Firewire connectivity. Additional ethernet highly desirable
• Can be mounted as external hard drive
• 15+ hour replaceable battery essential

I don't give a shit for ITMS compatibility or crappy organiser-style features or games. I just want to be able to fit all my songs in my pocket and find the right tunes to play when on the train. Is it really too much to ask?

Re:FireWire

[harlows_monkeys]

The bottleneck on those devices is the USB 2.0 or Firewire interface, so the (lower cost, cooler running, lower power consumption, quieter) 5400rpm drive is actually the better choice

What about for random access of many small files? For that, the limiting factor is likely to be rotational latency of the drive, and 7200 RPM will be better than 5400 RPM.

Re:1.5 gig? FM radio? USB 2.0? OGG!?!

[gerardrj]

You shouldn't pay more just because it has an Apple logo. You should pay more because:

The iPod works with the music store that currently makes about 70% of on-line music sales, works on both major desktop OS platforms, plays the major audio formats (AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF with others possible) for high quality compressed and uncompressed audio, operates as a portable hard drive (bootable for Macs), replaces most of the fuctions of your PDA(calendar, notes, alarm clock, contacts, games) and generally does the best job at melding all the requirements of a portable player; mainly small size, long battery life, easily readable display, fast file transfers, high quality audio amplifier, easy navigation, and the elusive cool/wow factor.

It's long, but gramatically I do thing that qualifies as one sentence.