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New Generation of MP3 Players, New Features
i4u writes "We got our hands on new Flash MP3 Players from two Korean Manufactures. Both players feature audio functions not seen in MP3 Player before, like SRS, WOW and TruBass. The Muzio JM-200 uses a two color OLED display. The Eratech EMP-100 is betting on small size with measurements of only 30x75x16mm." The larger (and stranger looking) JM-200 also lists ogg playback as a feature.
Any flash player that looks like a disk drive to the computer works with iTunes.
You have indeed, and you've got SRS and WOW as well on the really rather spiffy iHP-140
for Christmas of last year I did buy a Samsung Yepp' MP3 player (model YP-55 - 192Mb of storage). Mind you, it's not to be compared to any uber-fancy MP3 players that go for hundreds of $$$ but, it certainly does have features like WOW, SRS and TruBass .... and did I mention I got it in Canada? ;)
Googled up some info on these players, as I4U seems to be dead.
The EPM-100 has 512M flash, a very small 3-line display, and is about the size of a thumbdrive. I found it selling for $220.
The JM200 has 256M flash (unknown if upgradeable via cards), includes a FM tuner, and looks downright funky. It doesn't seem to be available for purchase yet.
I own an iRiver flash MP3 player because it's tiny and light. I use it while jogging, so I wanted the lightest and least cumbersome player I could find. It also plays OGG, has an FM tuner, and is linux-friendly (thanks to the ifp-driver project). I think flash MP3 players are still a significant niche.
Developers: We can use your help.
If the compression/quality ratio doesn't matter to you, there's really not much anyone could say to sway you. However, mp3 is actually a licensed technology, which is bad, and there is a movement to add DRM to it as a standard, which is worse. OGG (Ogg Vorbis to be correct)is free, and certainly isn't about to add draconian DRM to its code. Also, I should mention that I have upwards of 40GB of music on my PC hard drives, so really, a smaller ogg of nearly equal quality to a large mp3 would go a long way to putting more of my music into my device, and I don't think I'm all alone out here with not wanting to stick 256/320kbps MP3s on if 128/192kbps ogg vorbis files are pretty much just as good.
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
Ogg is simply free/open source. Better encoding quality is purely accidental.
Both players feature audio functions not seen in MP3 Player before, like SRS, WOW and TruBass.
At last check, my iRiver iHP-120 supports SRS, WOW, and TruBass in amongst its EQ settings. Don't know about their Flash-based players, but it would be surprising if some of them didn't.
I never understood the benefit of OGG either.
hint: it has to do with freedom.
its name is Ogg, not OGG
http://www.eratech.co.kr/eng/prod/pro3_1.htm
Grab it while you can.
A quick googling provides this information about Japan's electricity:
Electricity for domestic use is supplied at 100 volts, 60 cycles AC in west Japan (Osaka) and at 100 volts, 50 cycles AC in east Japan (Tokyo).
But those are Korean products we're talking about here.
Both players feature audio functions not seen in MP3 Player before, like SRS, WOW and TruBass.
I would like to point out that iRiver has featured all of those for a long time on it's newer players (as well as ogg support).
TruBass is not an indicator of how good your car's stereo system is, to be frank. Effects like TruBass do DSP magic on the audio, and it's been my experience that such effects (ProLogic, TruBass, Circle-SRS) fuck the audio up royally. You should only use something like ProLogic or C-SRS if the stream was meant for it, like the Dolby Surround tracks on some DVDs (mostly TV shows), which were specifically encoded for ProLogic channel reproduction.
But using things like TruBass is basically worthless. Your car's stereo system is probably fine. The DSP that TruBass does just happens to introduce a ton of artifacts into the sound that may or may not be perceptible, depending on what kind of music it is. For example, try listening to piano music with TruBass or Circle-SRS. It'll sound awful.
Just stick with 2-channel stereo and mirror the front two channels to the back two in your car. You'll have a much fuller sound field, and you won't be fucking with the original sound any.
But the one feature I've never been able to find in an MP3 player that would be perfect for listening to audiobooks is variable speed playback.
Many audiobooks you could speed up the playback by 20% - 50% and still understand it and comprehend it. In many cases you retain more because your mind doesn't have time to drift off.
Apparently a better thing to do is to reduce the length of silences between words etc. I remember seeing research (perhaps 20years ago!) into a variable speed tape recorder/player which would reduce silences in speech but leave the words at the normal rate.
That way you don't have to listen to mickey mouse or the chipmunks yet still save time and maintain comprehension.
Google is my friend and give me this link : http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/muzio-jm200-flash- player-with-twocolor-oled-017186.php :
i want one. Period. here the texts
A new Muzio from Korean manufacturer Jungsoft (promoting the hot new band, "Man and His Cymbals"), this one called the JM-200. Besides being sort of ugly, which is probably not a bullet-point feature, the Muzio supports USB Host functionality, SRS (some sort of surround sound magic?), OGG Vorbis support, FM radio, aluminum body, and recharging via USB. Plus, it has a two-color OLED screen, which probably isn't too much to get worked up over, but there you have it. I4U has some information, and apparently a test model, so expect a proper review in the next few days.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
since when, the iriver i picked up a couple of months ago has all those features
I'm me. I think.
I'm here in Korea and the people seem to use the players mostly in the subways and the buses.
In the States where the people use it in the car or perhaps in their work places, the capacity of the storage is a big deal since they may use it for up to 8 hours continuously.
That's certainly not the case for the people here. The average time spent in a bus or the subways is around 30min~1hr, and you don't need anything over a gig for that.
When you don't need the storage, wouldn't you want a flash player that you can put in your pocket along with your cellphone?
I think the US slashdotters would understand the reason behind the development of the new mp3 players when they understand the culture here better.
Essentially, these all mess with the audio in some way. These are all by SRS Labs, BTW.
This is all my opinion, more or less. Quotes from SRS are found here: http://www.srslabs.com/ConsumerTechMonoStereo.asp
SRS - Sound Retrieval System
Claims to be able to "retrieve the spatial information that is lost during ordinary audio compression from any stereo recording and restores the original three-dimensional sound field." Also claims to be able to eliminate the "sweet spot" and "isolate and restore the spatial cues and place them in the proper space relative to the direct sounds, such as a soloist or dialogue."
What it really does, as far as I can tell: It uses an algorithim to isolate the audio into various sets of frequencies, which it then amplifies on various speakers and introduces a slight time delay. The effect of this is to give a slight emphasis to various parts of the sound. In a 5.1 surround system, this will make it seem as if the various chunks of frequencies are coming from more specific parts of the room. This is a neat effect, but the truth of the matter is that you can't restore what isn't there. Not really. It's a trick that lets there appear to be spatial orientation on the sound, but the spatial orientation it gives is entirely made up. It's not really what it is supposed to sound like, and it's not "much closer to what the artist originally intended" as they claim. You think artists don't listen to their own work and talk to their sound engineers? The original source material you have in the player is what the artist intended because it's what you actually got from them. SRS is a neat trick, but not actually any better. It'll work on headphones, but works best in a 5.1 surround situation. On a 2 speaker scenario, the artifical delays it introduces really hurt the sound noticably.
WOW
WOW claims to "dramatically improves the quality, dynamics, image field size and bass tones of digitally compressed audio file formats including WMA, WAV, MP3 files."
What it really does, as far as I can tell: It enhances a small band on the high end of the frequency spectrum, compresses the low end, then sticks the whole thing through a phaser to make it sound kinda deep and slightly echo-y (a phaser, for those not into audio, basically eliminates very specific frequencies.. whatever ones you have it set to... you can do all sorts of weird things with a programmable one, but it creates a pretty distinctive type of sound). On cheap ass speakers, this sort of thing can make it sound like your speakers are bigger, but the actual bass output suffers horribly on good speakers, and the echo type of effect is annoying as hell once you notice it.
TruBass
TruBass claims to "produce the perception of lower bass tones and deeper, richer bass from products that contain small, medium or large size speakers."
What it really does, as far as I can tell: Basically it increases the Bass. What? You have a bass control? Well, TruBass does it better. Oh wait, no, it doesn't. It's using some kind of tricky harmonics deal to enhance the low end of the audio to make it seem louder without actually making it louder. In other words, TruBass will increase the *perception* of the bass without actually increasing the amount of bass there. The human ear is better at certain frequencies than others, and TruBass adds harmonics to the bass that increase those frequency ranges, increasing the amount of bass you hear. But it will not increase the amount of bass that you *feel*, which to me, is kinda the whole point of bass. TruBass will work best on small crappy speakers, in other words, where you don't expect to feel any bass anyway. And the distortion on the bass is pretty severe, if you have a song with good bass to begin with.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The British Empire was most certainly as dominating a power as the US for at least a half-century. By definition, nothing is at its peak for more than a moment.
I have an IRiver iHP-120. My player already has all those "new" features. Whats the big deal?
My player is just slightly larger than an ipod. It lasts twice as long. It handles the Ogg format. I could keep going but I should get back to work.
Zarnce
Unless FHG changed the rules in the past couple of months, the license-fee structure is something like this:
- Selling encoded music: 3% (or so) of what you charge for the music
- Selling an encoder: a fee per software license if you *sell* it. The lame encoder can be used legally for free because you don't have to pay for it. There are issues with distributing a compiled version, though.
- Selling a decoder: a fee per decoder ($1 or so).
There is a minimum amount of money you have to pay in license fees (a 5-digit number), but only a company that sells for more than $50,000 or so per year needs to pay any fees at all.You as a private person are perfectly allowed to encode MP3s. You can even legally sell the MP3s as long as you stay below the treshold (provided you don't violate copyright issues with the music itself, of course :-) ).
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
You are right - it doesn't really make any difference for hardware devices if you have to licence the codec or not - peanuts in the overall cost. Same with proprietary software - the licencing costs won't add much to the cost of the product, so no big deal.
But open source software is a problem. It is illegal to distribute an mp3 encoder without paying the licence fees, which makes it impossible to have a legal open source mp3 encoder (or DVD players, or anything else that is patented) because to be open the licence must allow anyone to redistribute it without restriction. The way that LAME gets around that issue is that "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder" - it is a reference implementation for educational use only. This doesn't really solve the problem, it just makes the users criminals instead of the developers and distributers.
So we don't like patented formats for that reason - because it is illegal for us to use those formats on our open source systems, and if we are restricted to use open formats on our computer, it would be really nice to use them on our handheld music players as well, which fortunately is a very viable option, contrary to what the whiners here say, and thanks to some cool hardware companies.
UL stands for "Underwriter's Labratories", as in insurance. I wouldn't want my product to be something that an insurance company wouldn't cover because of massive defects.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It doesn't seem to support "external" playlists (i.e. I don't see any way to upload one), but the player itself has a playlist feature. Aside from using playlists you can break out the songs into directories and the player has options for playing only that directory. Also, if you don't set it on shuffle it'll play the songs in exactly the order uploaded, if that helps any. So I don't think it has the playlist support you're looking for, but I haven't come across any flash player that does.
Developers: We can use your help.
Have you considered Sony Ericsson P 900?Apart from size i Guess it's allright.
Wanted : A Signature.