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Review of Dell's Digital Jukebox
bu115hit writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Dell's Digital Jukebox. The quick summary is that Dell has provided their own version of an iPod in size and shape, and they gave it better battery life. However, it seems the iPod is still a superior product overall, for ease of use if nothing else."
I think Dell is still a bit behind Apple in this arena. The IPod Mini looks bad ass and I'm hearing nothing but good reviews. I think I'll have to pick on up one of these days. My only wish is that the IPod Mini came in white. Silver is close, but it's not white.
Show me an iPod with decent Ogg and FLAC support, and I'll show you a few hundred bucks. 80% realtime doesn't cut it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Straight from Steve Jobs's own weblog comes a more succinct review
CONS
- slightly wider (not that much)
- slightly thicker (not that much)
- slightly heavier (not that much)
- not as many songs (after 2500, does it make a difference?)
PROS
- cheaper
- twice the battery life
For a commuter on a budget, this looks like it stands to gain some market share.
libertarianswag.com
As long as the battery is replaceable and doesn't blow up, I think I'd be content.
I own an iPod and a coworker of mine has the Dell. So I've seen and used both.
They are the only two units for sale right now worth having. The others are bulky, ugly, more expensive...why bother.
In the end I went with the lock-in. I bought the iPod becuase I bought alot of iTunes music, and I love my iTrip FM transmitter.
So Dell's mp3 player has life of "Up to 16 hours", and iPod's battery life is "Over 8 hours". What does this mean?
8h+ == 16h?
What is the point of these types of reviews? Everyone knows the Dell DJ is a piece of shit. It's like comparing... ah fuck it I wouldn't know.
This is an awfully sloppy review.
The price comparison links for the iPod say they're for the 20Gb model when in fact they're for the 15Gb model, thus eliminating a major point in favor of the Dell model: no USD$50 Apple premium.
The conclusion makes it sound like there were many problems with the unit, but reading the rest of the pages I found that outside of the reviewer botching the software installation, his only criticism was that the unit isn't a very featureful voice recorder. (And how he expected things to work properly after he canceled the software installation in the middle, I don't understand. Maybe it could have been smoother, but panning it in the review when he did such an unusual thing in the setup just doesn't seem fair.)
There's almost no discussion of playback capabilities. Those of us who've used these devices know that there are issues to watch for: some devices have problems at certain bitrates, or with handling variable bit rate recordings, etc. No apparent effort was made by the reviewer to address those issues. I'd also have appreciated some discussion of the quality of the audio stage, how much power it has, how it performs with quality headphones, etc.
This "review" reads more like a poorly executed "first look" than the product of a reasonable-length, in-depth evaluation.
Tomshardware, besides being a biased pseudo-hardware site, has never reviewed, nor even seen an Ipod. How the hell can they compare the two?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
On dell's websites px/brand/delldj?c=us&l=en&s=gen
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.a
It says "The 20 GB capacity Dell DJ stores up to 5,000 songs"
but on the Tom's Hardware page it says "Over 4900 songs".
I know thats not a big difference on a percentage basis, but 100 songs is still a lot.
Or, is it a difference in overhead produced by the iPod and DJ operating environments?
Like I've said earlier, the real risk to the Record Labels and the music industry is not Peer-to-Peer networks or piracy, although both may affect them to an extent.
The real hit is going to come in the form of people downloading songs that they like - I do not have to buy an entire album of crap just to listen to one song, and neither do I have to pay $12 for a CD full of crap.
This is the market's way of getting back and eliminating bad music. Sure, there will always be some cross section that will listen to stuff like Britney and the Boybands, but they will largely diminish purely because popular demand for better material will kill them.
Apple, HP, Microsoft and now Dell. Yay! Way to go.
What made the iPod a hit was its simple user interface. The scroll wheel. Apple patented it, and now everybody is having trouble making a competing product.
...I just use my $40 MP3 CD player with burned CDs.
The iPod was purchased as my primary entertainment device, and I later purchased a Dell DJ for use with a project that I am working on for a school.
The iPod was purchased based on winning design, features, available accessories (iTrip, CF reader, etc). The Dell DJ was purchased because it was $219 no tax no shipping for the 15MB version, making it by far the cheapest portable device that can store several GB of data.
However the interface on the DJ is horrid. The display does this "windowing" thing where clicking the main button never performs an action but only leads you to a menu of actions. To do the most simple thing in the world, resume playback where you left off, you have to click three times.
The primary clicker is also a joke. The combo scroll wheel is tacky and too loose. Often I will go to click only to have my thumb spin the wheel down instead. The recording button is a nice idea, but you have to hold it down to register, and there is no way to name your recordings so you know what they are. (By the way, this might be good because the way you enter names in other sections is to wheel tediously through letters A-Z, then choose the options to shift to letters a-z, then wheel to the actual letter you want.)
Also, no dock for the DJ. It uses a USB2 connector on the top...bad design. The connection is so tight I was afraid to plug it in for fear of breaking it. Pulling it out makes me just as fearful.
And finally...worst of all...the Dell DJ does not detect as a standard USB2 device! WTF was Dell smoking? Am I supposed to carry the Dell DJ driver CD around at all times? Why not just carry my data on CD instead? The whole point of portable storage is to load it up, and take it anywhere you need the data to access it. The iPod is detected as a standard firewire/USB device on every version of Windows 98SE or higher.
Overall, it will serve its purpose for a prototype, but Dell needs to spend some serious money to come out with a 2nd generation version that addresses these issues. I understand they can't use a wheel like Apple does, but there has GOT to be a better analog input than what they came up with.
Oh, one last nail in the coffin...the include software is from MusicMatch and is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever used. There is no automatic sync. The option to sync your player and computer is buried three levels down in the software. The ID3 tags you make in music match don't translate to the player (will sort 1 10 11 12...19 2 20 21 22 on the player, ignores track number). The only saving grace is that as a standard Windows Media device, you can use pretty much any other program to sync the device, but I think Dell was really stupid to sign up with MusicMatch instead of just writing their own (given that Windows does all the work, all they need is a pretty interface with a big "Sync" button).
That's about all that comes to mind. I wouldn't recommdn the Dell unless you were someone who planned to load their entire collection once and then never ever ever touch the player again. If you had to sync/update the Dell DJ on even a weekly basis it would drive you up the wall. Spend the extra $100 and get the 10GB iPod or the extra $40 and get the 4GB iPod mini.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I know it's supposed to be the future of music players and all, but I keep wondering : apparently that new Dell mp3 player (similarly to its iPod rival I believe), use a special high capacity battery to power its 15G hard disk for 15 hours and costs $250.
In contrast, my old Rio CD mp3 player uses a pair of AA batteries that don't require a special charger (if I'm on the road, I'm glad to be able to "recharge" my mp3 player anywhere AA batts can be found), the batteries last several hours too, and I probably carry more than 15G worth of data on my CDs (and more importantly, I can burn as many more as I want). Finally, there's no risk to trash the hard disk heads with shocks. All of that for the $110 I paid for it new 3 or 4 years ago.
So I'm wondering : sure CD mp3 players don't have a particularly exciting form factor, and I have to swap CDs, which isn't sexy, but they're cheaper, they (seem to) fare better with shocks, consume less power, don't use special batteries and have virtually unlimited "storage" capacity. It seems to me those are much better no-nonsense devices compared to those hdd mp3 players. Hip tech fashion victims aside, do these iPod things really make sense for the average Joe Blow like me who just wants music on the go without headaches and wallet-aches?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It is at your loss when you only get the songs you like. I have several CDs that I got for one song, but after listening for several months I suddenly realized that a different song that I didn't care about is now the one I like the most. Not all songs have reached that point, but some have, enough that I'm unwilling to get just one song for fear of missing the better ones that you need to learn to like. Most real artists don't include a bad song on their album.
I however do not listen to (much) RIAA music. I cannot comment on some of their practices I've heard of but not seen myself. If you really want some hit song, perhaps you are better off with the one song, if they really do just but garbage on the rest of the tracks so they can get a their quota of 9 songs...
So I returned the Dell and bought the Gateway DMP-X20. For the same cost, I got all the same features, plus an FM tuner, voice recorder, and audible.com support. So far I've been happy with the Gateway.
-tim
I don't have an AAC encoder, and I like CD-quality sound. Furthermore, I don't know of an AAC encoder available in source form or compiled for Solaris/Sparc64. Ogg and FLAC compile quite well, and cost a lot less than $500 headphones.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Make a difference!? I've got 4700 songs on my "like 'em enough to bring to work" list.
The cake is a pie
I called Dell sales and Dell technical support, and Dell has no method for replacing the battery (outside of warranty), and the battery is not user replaceable.
(Also, iPod's battery is replaceable, via several different methods.)
Cons:
- Installation was hell
- manuals were bad
- doesn't work in a usb hub, unmentioned in the docs.
- Doesn't work as a hard drive unless you install the software on all the machines you connect to
- crappy headphones
- voice recording not all that useful since you can't export.
Pros
- cheaper
I got the inspiration for the parent post from a FARK photoshop contest (warning: LOTS of data -- slow to load). Check out lornamatic's pic.
From Fortune's review:
Dell Unveils Its iPod Kryptonite
Bizarro was an imperfect clone of Superman yet still pulled off the occasional superhero feat. So it is with the Dell DJ.
By Peter Lewis
The evil scientist Lex Luthor used his duplicator ray to try to clone Superman, but something went terribly wrong. The result was Bizarro, a good-natured but ugly and backward version of the Man of Steel. Bizarro was the antithesis of cool; his home planet, Htrae, was square.
When Bizarro had good news to announce, he would say, "This am terrible!"
Which leads us into a discussion of Dell's new Bizarro version of Apple's iPod, called the Dell Digital Jukebox Music Player, or Dell DJ for short. Coming from the square world of Dell instead of the hip world of Apple, it's bigger, heavier, and clunkier than Apple's sleek, suave, elegant iPod, which arrived on the scene two years ago and quickly became the most popular portable digital music player on our home planet, Earth. Even worse, the Musicmatch-backed Dell Music Store is the clumsy, Bizarro counterpart to Apple's brilliant iTunes Music Store.
[...]
Bizarro, the pathetic wretch, was driven mad by constant comparisons with the handsome, smart, and sexy Superman he was meant to emulate. So too must the DJ suffer from inevitable comparisons with the iPod, with its two-year headstart. If the iPod did not exist, the DJ might even lay claim to the title of Best Portable Music Player Since the Sony Walkman.
But the iPod does exist, and so do Apple iTunes and the Apple iTunes Music Store, and thus the Dell DJ is doomed to be merely the second-best player on the market.
You seem to be under the assumtion that a lossless compression format would do anything with audio that would have to be heard on cheap, portable headphones or a small, cheap speaker.
:P ;)
;) ) or other lossy audio file? It'd be a drain on the storage, and since there'd be more disk activity a drain on the batteries as well.
This is speaking in general of all portable, small audio solutions, not a dig on any company, just before anyone decides to go on a tangent on me.
With a small device like a iPod or a walkman, you can't bring the type of equipment where a lossless file would show any noticable difference. Hell, even low bitrates probably wouldn't show much of a difference. The lossy compression's artifacting would mostly be covered by the fact that the headphones or speaker can't cover what's being lost in the first place.
So, basically, why FLAC? Why waste that much space on something portable? Why wouldn't you convert that to a Ogg Vorbis (Ogg is a wrapper, not a format. But you knew that, right?
As for Ogg Vorbis support, the iRiver iHP 120s support it and are "only" 400$ or so.
It seems these days as if virtually every USB device comes with a warning saying you should not plug it into a hub. Everything wants to be plugged directly into the CPU. Too bad if you have more than two of these devices.
WTF???
It is not just a matter of needing a powered hub, either. The Tom's Hardware review notes that it was a powered hub with which the Dell digital jukebox failed to work.
I don't know enough about the USB spec to know who's wrong, but it seems to me that if USB devices don't work on a hub, either
a) the hub is defective, or
b) the device is defective, or
c) the USB spec itself is defective.
What's the deal? Are hubs supposed to work, or not?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
MusicMatch, the software that comes with the DJ is by far the worse part of the product. However you can pay $20 for Dudebox, a much better product by Red Chair. Highly recommended.
But how could he not have tested an iPod for comparison by now?
The last remaining link to the caveman people?
I recently owned both a Rio Karma and an iPod after I bought the Karma (20gb) for myself then received an iPod (10gb) as a corporate gift a week later.
/. before:
Just thought I'd point out a couple of things which I haven't seen on
-The iPod is easier to use, and looks cooler, but it will only synch to one PC, so it's significantly harder to pirate your friends' songs. (Since everyone in my office got one, they were a little disappointed when I explained they had to copy mp3s onto a local computer, then copy them onto the iPod in a separate directory using it as an external hard drive, THEN load from there into their iTunes back at home before they could take each others' songs).
-The Karma uses a proprietary filesystem, so if you want to use it as an external hard drive as well, you'll have to install the Rio software on the PC to which you want to transfer files.
-The Karma has a little scroll wheel on the side, which you have to have functional to navigate the OS. However, the design is such that it is most likely to fall on the wheel if you drop it (take a look at a picture of the Karma and you'll see why). After dropping it once, and breaking the wheel, I had to crack the thing open and krazy glue the wheel back into place (nerve racking since it's designed so that dropping glue 5 mm's off will glue the wheel so that it won't turn). My other option was paying $200, or 66% of the price new, to have it fixed by Rio itself. THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM.
-Finally, a nitpick: Rio charges extra to permit mp3 encoding in its software. It's not a big deal to use a third-party encoder, but seriously, WTF?
So I'd say get the Rio Karma for better pricing and pirating capabilities, but keep it encased in bubble wrap or avoid all pavement or something.
The article complains that there is no mention that the DJ will not work with some hubs, and goes on to complain how this is so different from Apple.
I find this unfair in that my iPod can only charge when plug it into the firewire port on my external drive. Apparently daisy chaining doesn't work so well with the iPod.
Find that in the iPod docs. And I am a shameless consumer of Apple products. Don't assume that Apple stuff always "just works".
Instead of getting a geek to test out all these products. Why not get an average joe off the street to use them. Which ever one he can transfer music files to, play and enjoy the whole process, should be the one that comes out on top.
My other sig is a Porsche.
iPod devices. WMA plays on...evrything else. Can you say Sony Betamax? Superior product that failed in the long run.
USB wasn't designed to make our lives easier, it was designed so Intel could sell you processors to manage the USB traffic.
For anything other than input devices, FireWire is the way to go.
If you want to bring files to school or work or and copy them to a machine that doesn't have the Dell software installed, you're screwed.
How many people have 20gig HD's full of music? My 10gig ipod has maybe 3gigs of music and 6gigs of files...To me the Dell DJ is useless because of this.
When am I ever going to listen to 15GB worth of music on my player? That's like my _whole_ friggun music library! I don't even listen to half those songs anymore... I would rather have something like a 1.5 GB mp3 player.. Hey, it could be smaller and probably easier on the batteries.. ? The only thing I could find that had those specs was the Muvo2, and no store around here (lower B.C.) sells it.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Too bad the Dell doesn't work work as a data device without their drivers. My cheapo usb drive works with PC's and Macs with the OS built-in drivers. Maybe Longhorn? Hahhaha don't hold your breath...
As someone who does a lot of travelling and moves around a bit, I see these things as digital wallets. Why else would you want 40 Gb? Dell's device might be more usefull if you could go to any computer with a reasonably modern OS and plug it in, without needing administrative access to install drivers.
There is another problem, USB. The iPod has firewire which doesn't need a host, I can only speculate that this is one of the reasons why Belkin chose firewire for their card reader. USB is good, it's good to have both, but when you want flexibility, USB has it's issues.
Sometimes it's just the little things that count, that make a good design great. When I go to work and work on pc hardware and Windows, I miss the details, nuance and elegance that makes working with my Mac at home a joy to use.
Sorry.... mod this down if like.... but you get what you pay for and when you buy Dell you're not paying a lot. I don't own an iPod nor am I a fan of Apple but I have extensive experience with Dell products and wouldn't spend a dime of my hard-earned cash on anything they sell.
Last time I checked, Steve's name wasn't Olivier Lebra, and Steve didn't live in Montreal, Quebec.
If it's supposed to be a parody, you could have fooled me...
Please help metamoderate.
I'm not telling you to buy an iPod (I don't have one and haven't tested one)
I imagine that the Dell probably does have better battery life than the iPod. But having owned both a Dell Inspiron and now a Powerbook, I know that - at least when it comes to laptop computers - Apple gives a much closer-to-the-truth estimate of expected battery life than Dell does. Brand new, my Inspiron would get maybe half the battery life that Dell said it should (slightly over two hours in real life; Dell was saying a bit over four).
#DeleteChrome
I am a DJ and I have 38.3 gigs of music... 5514 "songs" where a couple hundred of them are live dj mixes (whole pieces.. betwee 50 and 120 minutes long on average,) so that equates to about 25.2 days of straight music.
I generally like all of my collection, there isn't any "fluff" in it.. it's all collected carefully and I would much prefer to have a device which could just hold the entire library.
I mean.. 20gb.. 40gb.. 60gb.. for laptop size mini drives, yes, it is important to keep it smaller than larger as a financial concern when building the units.. but.. i'd *definitely* take the larger drive; my music collection isn't shrinking.
As I use digital media nearly exclusively, (I buy cds, rip them, put them back in the jewel case and then they go to live in a box...) a higher capacity device is extremely important to me.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
battery
Oh god damn will you troll just shut up with that FUD allready!
You can't take the sky from me...
I myself don't understand what the big deal with the iPod Mini is? I have a 20gig second generation Ipod that I think is perfectly fine. I don't complain about the size at all (my sister has a 3rd generation Ipod which is even smaller!). Granted, having something that small that could play loads of music is nice, but for $249, it seems somewhat steep. Especially so, considering that for a mere $50 more, you can have 15 times the storage space!!!
:(
Do the new pretty colors justify that much of a rip off? I don't get it.
Its really the disk space that matters more than anything else, as the number of songs that it holds is nothing more than marketing, and making uninformed consumers who know notihng about the relation of music to disk space think: "That's impressive."
The IPod Mini looks bad ass and I'm hearing nothing but good reviews. I think I'll have to pick on up one of these days.
Why? It's barely over 1/4 the capacity of a 15GB iPod, has a smaller display with fewer pixels, and it's only $50 less.
4GB isn't really enough storage for a music collection (unless you record at low bitrates/quality). So you are either syncing constantly and rotating music out or you have stale music that you're tired of.
Peace
There is no error - a song is not a standard unit. You could squeeze a lot of fast one minute punk songs at low bitrate in the same space as a Alice's Restraunt, Telegraph Road or whatever long songs at high bitrate.
I've had mine since before the holidays (actually meant to do a review and never got around to it). Worked perfectly out of the box. My wife and I used it for a cross country trip over the Christmas break, and never had an issue with it. I would put 16 hours as minimum for battery life. It survived on one charge the entire distance from Northern Virginia to Omaha (about 1200 miles, and 18 hours) and still had two bars on the meter left. Obviously - batteries are always a YMMV.
Altho not as small as the iPod, it has a more rugged feel to it. More solid, and less fragile. Plus it doesn't look so friggin' girlie.
Sound is great, but those earbuds *are* crap. The thing puts out enough power to push studio headphones - cheap ones, yes, but still. On good phones it sounds great.
The version of MusicMatch included with it sucks. For those (like myself) that hate reading manuals, it is absolutely horrible. But the Windows Media Player access is logical, so I normally use that.
If you do not have USB 2.0, get it. My initial transfer of about 11GB of songs took overnight. I bought a 2.0 card the next day. Transfers are exponentially faster now. Oh, and I run it through an *unpowered* hub when I use the USB1.x connection, and never had any problems with it being detected.
Over all, I like it. Plus it's well padded with the C note I saved by avoiding Apple.
Good job. Totally ignore the fact that there are 3 seperate programs, one even by apple that doesn't void the warranty, to replace the battery while the Dell DJ has nothing.
Shoo, back to troll land with you.
- Sherman
Err... I thought they were 1GB in capacity for some reason. Doh!
Anyway, they are 4GB, which is a little more reasonable.
Perhaps, but if that's your basis for countering the original post's assertion that "it seems the iPod is still a superior product overall", then it doesn't really contribute to the argument for the DJ / against the iPod, since the Dell DJ doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, either.
is the MPEG 4 audio standard.
WMA is a proprietary format that sounds like ass in a can compared to AAC, Ogg, and the better encoded mp3s.
I am seriously sick of people acting like the iPod is the basis on which all other MP3 players are judged on. The fact is that there are players out there that are better than the iPod- namely the iRivers, and Zen Xtra's. Honestly, to me the only thing the iPod has over ANY MP3 players is the ease of use.
;)
:-p
I have a Zen Xtra, and I couldn't be happier- and I have considerable amount of time with each of the major competitors. It is a FACT that the Zen Xtra has the best sound quality- something very important for audiophiles like myself. It also has one of the best GB to money ratio. I got my 30GB for $300, the same price as the 10GB iPod (although I think by now they have replaced that model with the 15GB)
But to be honest, you really can't go wrong with any MP3 players at the moment. From the ones I have tried (iPod, iRiver, Zen Xtra, and Rio), they are all incredibly easy to use, with the iPod taking the prize for that section. The scroll wheel is amazing, and I'm angry at Apple for patening it. Like I said before, you really can't go wrong with any of the MP3 players- except that the iPods are WAY WAY WAY overpriced for average income people like myself. You people who pull in 100,000 a year get what you want.
Oh, by the way- the Dell DJ's hardware is the EXACT same as the Zen Xtra's, I'm pretty sure. I think everything besides the case and amplifier are the exact same. The menus are the same, the jog wheel is the name (what kind of name is jog wheel anyways). Hell, even the LED is the exact same.
The price difference between the 15Gig ipod and dell is $50.
for this you get:
-it feels nicer in your hands and slips into your pants pocket better and is less of a pocket weight in you jacket or shirt.
-Best quality earphones magnets you can buy, with low-tangle coated wires
-Firewire charging. Did you see the brick the Dell comes with?/ this is not really a portable device.
-you can charge the apple anywhere with a tiny plug for the fire wire.
-you can plug the apple into most computers with or without software
-better wheel interface.
-store more songs with better high quality song format AAC
THe price difference bwteen the 20 Gig model is 100$. for this you get all of the above plus
-- a dock for your desk
-- a smaller remote than the dell.
It also works with itunes music store.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
yep, that $50 goes a lot further. Dell cheaped out in stupid ways.
From Red Chair software comes "Dudebox Explorer." Kinda stupid name, but it does oh so much more than the included crap for this player. You can stream files over the internet from the Dell player fer cryin' out loud. It does everything the included software should, but doesn't. The software is $25 for the full version, but WELL worth it. Red Chair makes enhanced software for many other MP3 players out there as well. Rio's player, the Ipod, & Nomad are all included. You can basically edit EVERYTHING on the MP3 player as if it were a hard drive in oyur system. You can edit ID3 tags, rearrange playlists, control play functions, and as I said before you can play songs over the internet on another computer. It generates a web page playlist on the fly to allow easier access. Just type in the address into the explorer bar. I used it to play music on my laptop when it was connected to my desktop through the LAN. Winamp streamed it like any old web radio station. SWEET! It makes the Dell Jukebox that much more worthwile to have. The software fits on a floppy so I can easily sneakernet the software to another computer to uses it as an external hard drive. It is STILL a far cry from plug n' play, but I don't do it that often anyways.
http://www.redchairsoftware.com/
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
Dell licensed the software from Creative Zen series.
I feel that I won't get modded up because i'm so late to the thread. (and i live for karma)
But I am very surprised that nobody has mentioned the very important facts about Dell Jukebox. In fact, I am close to believing that everybody is talking out of their ass when it comes to hdd mp3 players.
My brother has a Creative Jen Xtra. It cost 270 bucks for 30gb model. It's the cheapest hdd player ever when it comes to gb/dollar. I found a guy who had a Dell Jukebox. Both of them had the exact same interface. I didn't see enough of the dell to see if it's got all the creative's EAX stuff, but the user interface is exactly the same.
Now, you don't know how bad the interface is. And frankly, if you've never really used iPod, I suppose you'd think it's pretty nifty. You just don't really know how good life can be.
First of all, dell/creative doesn't work as usb mass storage device. Even iPod works as firewire mass storage device!! The device driver and the provided software sucks. Again, perhaps you don't know how good things can be unless you are used to iTunes/iPod combo. All I know is that the drivers for dell/creative cause crashes on windows xp sometimes and half of the times it doesn't crash, it doesn't work. It's like crapshoot.
On the dell/creative interface, it is the most convoluted thing. No designers in the world has ever come up with how you can comfortably present all the complexity of hdd mp3 device. No one. For example, in iPod, there is no way to delete songs or find bps of songs or edit existing playlists. Apple made a decision when they decided to hide all that for simplicity of use.
On dell/creative, you can do all of the above. The tradeoff? You can't just play a song by clicking on it! When you click on a song, it brings up a menu and you scroll to "play this song" and it enters the "currently selected" section where it will be played. Most operations make you hunt through menus and godawful number of clicks.
Sizes. dell/creative is big. I can use my iPod comfortably with three fingers. My index finger supports iPod, my middle finger balances, my thumb clicks buttons. I have to use the whole hand to hold the dell/creative. Especially creative zen is awkward because there are buttons to operate on the side of the players. You have to coordinate all five fingers which all has buttons assigned to it.
I bet you, if I had gotten dell/creative about an year ago, i would have thought it was pretty sweet. But alas, I got an iPod. I know how good things can be. I tell you, no reviewers have spent enough time with any number of mp3 players to really know how good iPod is compared to the others. Trust me, we wouldn't be hearing about no iPod killers.
For the records, I am an ex-linux user of about 3-4 years. Then I became freebsd user. Then I got a used crt imac g3 600mhz (fastest computer i own). My freebsd server still serves files over samba and acts as the gateway.
Come on, just because everything else looks EVEN WORSE doesn't mean the iPod looks good. It looks like multimeter or an old glucometer. As soon as you step out of Jobs' reality distortion field (patent pending) you will realize that it looks butt ugly, and anyone wearing one visibly is clearly a Dork or a Nerd. Sure it's a fad right now, but it's got a huge media presence because of tons of Apple ad $$$, and because it is one of the best portable MP3 players, which are all the rage now.
As far as good looks, I think that in five years you'll want to wear an iPod with the same desire that you want to wear one of these.
I'm with you. I'm a (very) amateur PCDJ (Traktor), with about 7000 songs, and I'd prefer to be able to listen to whatever I want whenever I want. However, fiddling around with different mp3 players, the iPod is the only one that has the ease of use I need to work with that many tracks...So here I am holding my breath turning blue waiting for the 60 Gb iPod.
I think youre partly mistaken about the mass storage device issue--it can be if the destination computer has the right drivers, but its not as universal as the ipod, plus you have to lug the power supply.
But you make good points baout the ease of use
(i find all the tampon references a bit disturbing though. guys?)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
to tie this back to the topic, this is why i prefer cd-based mp3 players to ones you link to the computer. i like to make whole discographies (an artist's entire work, or often, several decades of work), never mind whole albums. i never chop up and rearrange albums except when i'm specifically making mixes for other people. mp3-cds are totally conducive to this, whereas hdd players imho you're much more likely to switch singles in and out, hear the same songs over and miss the discovery of great new ones, that i get all the time when out with my portable. i really think there's a significant difference in usage depending on the technology used... i would find an iPod restrictive, counter to all the marketing. it all depends on what kind of music listening you do. i am forced to think about my cds before i burn them, check that everything's there, scan for mpeg stream errors, check the names and tags, mp3gain to avoid clipping and so on. this sounds a hassle but it only has to be done once & then i have a huge library of material i can switch out anywhere. in the long run i know i enjoy my music more :)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
The editors forgot to mention that it looks ugly. The iPod has a way better design and the fact that the mini iPod comens in different colours is not dumb. To bad iPods have an internal battery that costs too much. I'd rather have 2x NiMH AAA or AA batteries.
Actually, as far as earbuds go, the apple earbuds are pretty good. For earbuds.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
You know, the reason I will not buy a Dell DJ is because its lack of originality. It's a blatant rip-off of the iPod.
So Dell is like a Chinese copycat. Wait for someone to come up with a really good product, then imitates it and sell it for less. Dell can because it never has to put money in research and development.
Maybe good from business point of view. But it's not worth admiring.
Just download the older version of Audible's software - I think version 3 or below will work, and use the codec that comes with it. Grab Goldwave, a very impressive digital audio editing program, for less than $50. It'll be happy to open audible files using the codec mentioned, put in splits at silences (cue points), and save the individual blocks into MP3 files. Overall, conversion of a 6 hour book or book part takes 2-3 hours on my P4 1.3.
It kind of sounds like it would be easier (and faster and cheaper) to pay a high-school kid $5 an hour to read a book into a microphone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A Boston broadcasting history resource is being developed for the web...
/ faq o m
Sound Archives. Boston Public Library.
http://www.bpl.org/soundarchives
If you would, a survey form is available for your impressions at
http://www.bpl.org/soundarchives/electronic.htm
Contact
jlatchford at bpl.org
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Check out the iRiver iHP-120 (and the new 140 model) . Purely in my opinion, the iHP-120 sounds a lot better than the iPod. It also has a longer battery life (I get about 12 hours out of it) and it can play WMA, MP3, WAV and yes, Ogg Vorbis. It can also record direct to WAV or MP3, has a pretty decent FM tuner, and 20 gig of HDD space (or 40 gig on the iHP-140). It's a good solid all-metal construction and it's about the same size as the iPod. If you're considering buying an iPod, you really owe it to yourself to read up on this beauty first.
Have you ever had an original thought in that empty fucking head of yours? Like 15 people have already made this point, in fact someone makes this point every single time Apple or the iPod is mentioned. I mean really, have you ever uttered a word, had a thought, or even slightly had a neuron fire that wasn't just the byproduct of someone else's. Shut up and stop being such a fucking parrot.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
thanks
if people didn't improve on existing designs nothing would ever get better.
you'd be sitting in a cave scrawling your moronic graffiti on the wall with a stick duller than your parochial vision
You haven't been here long, have you?
If you're talking about cheap, mass-produced top 40 focussed bands then I've no doubt that's very often true.
When you're buying from the _good_ artists, it emphatically isn't. The good tracks are very often the ones that they don't release as singles so many simply don't hear. How would you find them under such a system?
Let's hope that this revolution pushes attention back to the proper album-writing bands. If the record companies can only sell a few songs at $1 each for the chart acts but whole albums at $10 for the serious bands, perhaps we'll start seeing quality again.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Er... the guy they get to review the Dell Digital Jukebox has never owned or reviewed an iPod?
Wow is that sloppy journalism on behalf of THG.
The one question all the way through that everyone wants to know is how it compares to the iPod, and this guy basically admits he never touched one? Anyone else think this makes this review a bit of a waste of time?
This sig has been deprecated.
Please think about how you make your links. In this story, the word Review should link to the review. The way it's linked now, there is some uncertainty as to where clicking on Dell's Digital Jukebox will take you. If that phrase is linked at all, it ought to go to Dell's product page.
Thank you for your attention.
Nobody asked you to shill for your favorite flac-playing player, and nobody was discussing it. The topic was the reason Apple didn't include it in the ipod.
I think it's funny that in every ipod related discussion some boob feels the need to assert why X player is better, even when it has zilch to do with the actual topic.
Defensiveness points to insecurity or jealousy. Which is it?
It's interface is proprietary as well. At least with Dell you can acccess as such one the drivers are loaded. Not so with the iPod.
Have owned and used both, I know how good things are with the iPod and they're not that good. No UI works well when its battery is dead and new scroll wheel is a piece of crap. The original iPod was the best.
No device is ideal, but I like the Rio Karma best at this point.
yep someone gets it. all the other posters are calculating size and weight and cost. anything you can reduce to an ordinal number and compare.
But its all the little thoughtful design detail in the apple that make it special. As you point out: cords that dont tangle, round corners so it slips in yout pocket. the balance, no having to carry a power adapter with you. the interface.
Other vendors look at the original imac and think, oh its just the color. and they look at the ipod and think its size.
wrong wrong wrong
Laptop Hard drives are 2.5 inches, the iPod has a 1.8 inch hard drive.
the Creative has a 2.5 inch hard drive, and I have no clus as to what is in the dell.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Subject says it all.
At Head-Fi, I would say most of the new posters are people who bought an iPod, and could not stand the sound of the headphones. So after spending a great deal of money they have to buy decent headphones. As the apples are of poor design, as in fall out of most peoples ears, poor quality, and white, so they get dirty and gross looking fast. Nothing like looking at your classmates stained white cord, yellowed around the ears, and peanut butter coloured around neck. Real classy.
from the article...
The one bit of bragging rights that Apple aficionados feel they have at their disposal is that when they buy products, they just turn them on and use them. No patch downloads, no workarounds, no lousy documentation. (It's also frequently true that, when they do encounter a problem, it requires taking the machine to the shop and doing without it until an "expert" figures out what's wrong with it.)
Now, while trying to figure out where he got this completely incorrect ASSumption, I found the answer a few lines later...
Why is Apple still here? Because there are devoted legions of people who are willing to spend more money to avoid messing with their equipment - they just want it to work. I haven't had an Apple product around in years...
Ahhh, there we go. Thanks. Phew!
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
The iPod, back to the original 5GB unit, came with a sticker on it saying "Don't steal music." Dell's shown their incredible creativity and lack of any me-too-ism by putting a sticker on the Dell DJ that says..."Please do not steal music."
OK, one point for including "the magic word" -- but if you're going to copy Apple, why stop with packaging stickers, and leave out the useful bits like making it work when you plug it in to a hub?
1) purchase battery from ipodbattery.com for $49
2) remove iPod case with tool supplied in battery kit
3) disconnect old battery, connect new one.
4) replace cover
5) wipe hands on pants (sorry, wrong site)
Or you can send it to Apple for $99.
Either way, not too bad.
From the article:
I'm not telling you to buy an iPod (I don't have one and haven't tested one)
I thought it was a decent review, but not a comparison by any means. He also mentions that he hasn't used an Apple computer in years. So I wouldn't read this article as if it were a true comparison of the DJ and iPod. Personally, I think it would have bee much more valuable to compare the two since the iPod is currently the de facto standard of portable audio players.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
There are composers that write a single thing worth hearing on their whole lives.
As an extreme example take Ruggiero Leoncavallo. He wrote only one opera that remains widely popular, "Paggliaci". All the rest was rubish.
I don't understand how somebody could be lacking musical taste for not accepting all the output of a given artist.
As in many other fields, 90% of the musci produced is normaly crap, and this applies very often to musci produced by the same musician, even in the same album.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is a bunch of songs, very often loosely connected to each other any way.
I don't see why selling one song only should make any difference, it is not like an "album" is a serious musical form.
If that is a problem, bundle all together in a single file and sell it aa an unique item, but we are not talking sonatas or fugues here...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... is different to the on in which this thread lives (in other words your shameless plug is completely off-topic).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is a geeky nitpik, but how could Bizarro be simultaneously from a different planet and be a Superman clone? Of course its easy to believe that different backgrounds have been presented in various comics, but I wish he'd stick to one of the story lines for this analogy.
The reviewer sees the need to make backhanded comments about Apple and its "supporters." Why? Is the world divided into Apple and non-Apple? Does the high quality of the iPod relative to the unit he's reviewing give him free license to make stupid, incorrect comments like, `It's also frequently true that, when [Mac users] do encounter a problem, it requires taking the machine to the shop and doing without it until an "expert" figures out what's wrong with it'?
George Walsh is an idiot. His writing tasks could have been simplified by having a photo of the DJ and the iPod next to each other, with specs listed in one graph, captioned: "The Dell DJ is ugly compared to the iPod, has atrocious documentation and support, is more difficult to use, and possesses no compelling features that would lead anyone to buy one over an iPod."
I hate to take advantage of a sucker, but since you're saying you would throw them out I'll take them!. (you really need to do a little research on these. they have incredible magnets and are flat out to 20Khz. Which means that they dont saturate easily and render music faithfully. Which if you still dont get it meant its not possible to build a better headphone)
10% off this weekend at their respective online stores (or at least, they are at the canadian versions).
Neither of them seem to be making a big fuss about it, but when you add the product to your cart, the discount will appear.