Slashdot Mirror
Big Demand for Digital Music Players
An anonymous reader writes "Market research company IDC is predicting a rosy future for MP3 player sales. They predict that by 2008 it will grow into a $58 billion industry - four times bigger than the US record industry. Also in the news, Sony will finally start making a digital music portable that plays MP3s. Their present players only read their proprietary ATRAC3 format, forcing you to transcode any MP3 files you want to play on them."
now that sony will be actual compition, do you think that the ipod/ipod mini will be not in first place anymore? i want a good ipod for $200 without havibg to go to ebay. btw, i doubt it, but first post??
I have a Neuros and its far from just an "MP3 Player". My Neuros plays MP3's, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and even the dreadful WMA files...
I hate when people call it an "MP3 Player".
<shameless plug>
If you haven't looked the Neuros, you don't know what you are missing. It's the perfect player for the geek in you. Recently they have open sourced the Firmware, allowing us hackers to have our way with it.
</shameless plug>
I don't think I'll be shelling out for one till it plays mp3/aac/ogg. mmm it'd be nice if Sonys new 1Gig MD system would allow for multi format tunes. Think it only plays ATRAC though, of course. :(
Like almost all "analysts", it's about as solid as pea soup.
I worked in the IT department for a company that distributed analyst white papers, and these people were dumb as fucking bricks, according to the people in the company who had to deal with them on a daily basis. Like, "well, I can't figure out how to email this so I'm going to print and fax it to you", dumb.
As IT workers we were continuously astounded by how poor the reports were, making ludicrous predictions and giving blatantly bad advice. As others on slashdot have said- people pay for and buy these reports to justify positions, not to learn how to do something. When I googled names of authors on the papers- some of which dealt with hugely complex corporate IT problems- the authors were fresh out of college, often with a degree that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. Ie- INTERNS, people!
It's like the old "it came into my email box, it must be true" adage, only with a real company with a fancy website and a list of clientele a mile long telling you that "sure, it's perfectly ok to dump water on your computers." Everyone's too concerned about looking stupid to admit they're being had.
Please help metamoderate.
Sony wanted to do MP3 a long time ago, but it was their devision tied to the entertainment industry that FORCED them to use a propritary format...such as ATRAC3.
It's just a legal roadblock and civilwar for sony, not one of ignorance.
Life is not for the lazy.
I disagree - I think music files will get larger. They already have. When people first started encoding music into mp3, I remember hearing "128 kbps is good enough, don't go lower or higher because it's a great comprimise of compression and quality" Now you got all these people with ipods claiming they can hear a difference between 128 and 192, so they all encode at 192 or 256 now. I personally have no problem with 128, but my point is that others thinke they *need* 192 for good quality, and soon it will be 256, which doubles the size of the file.
... I'd really like it if someone (I don't care who) made a cheap CD player with a couple of MB of flash ROM [or something similar], so people can upload their own decoders for whatever format they wish to use the player with... it'd be insanely successful with the public (and I'll buy it as well), as people could shove on OGG, MPC, MP3Pro, anything they want to use, they just port it [with instructions and maybe a dev kit given by the manufacturer, of course]. Oh, and battery life. No huge backlit battery-consuming LCDs with uber displays. I've got a Panasonic SL-SX420. The LCD has cracked partly. Not like I needed it anyway. All I need to see is what track number it is, and that's it. Plus, in winter, say you're walking to school. The liquid in the LCD takes more energy to refresh as minutes/tracks change on the display), consuming your battery. The only useful features would be a small graphical equalizer, volume up/down, lock, play, stop, next, and back. That's all I need. Yes, I realize it's only my view, and someone else might have a completely different view. But then again, I'm just saying what I'd like introduced to the market. An ultra-slim CD player, with insanely low battery usage, the basic controls, a nice EQ, and an USB port so we can flash our decoders on. All for less than CAN$150 :)
Ahh, dreams...
The problem is, its not solid state.
It's not really a problem with these players. They spin up for a few seconds, read the entire song into memory, and spin down. And even if you aggressively shake the player while it's buffering, it doesn't seem to stall the reading (i'm not sure what's different about Sony's anti-shock system, but it's superb). Battery life is great too, about 10-15 hours.
Sure, size a factor, but Sony already has cd players that are barely larger in circumference than the size of the CD and less than 1cm thick. If they extended that design to the 3" CD-Rs like Philips and others, they could probably make something pocket-sized.
Also, the disposable (or collectible) media is a huge advantage over solid-state media. I hate reloading music onto my player with my pc every time I want to listen to something different.
ipods are damn cool, but there is no way I'm dropping that kind of cash on what is essentially a fluff item.
Whether or not a HDD based mp3 player is a fluff item is certainly up to debate, and I'm certainly willing to tell you why I don't think my iRiver H120 isn't. =)
Besides the 16 GB of oggs, mp3s, and wmas (*retch*), it can also record things. For Every class I've been to this semester, I have an 80 Kbit mp3. Did I miss something in my notes? I'll just look it up in my lectures folder!
It also has a FM tuner, which was quite handy when I discovered that I had no radio when Ivan passed over Athens, Georgia.
Beyond that, it's also a portable hard drive. It's far easier to carry a few character sheets or PDFs in the public domain on a USB mass-storage device than it is to e-mail them to myself (and yes, I do have GMail. My H120 is still easier and quicker.)
I'd consider this little bugger to be far from a fluff item, and lots of people agree. But, hey, to each their own.
P.S.: It's also nice to listen to books on tape, language lessons, or *gasp* music. =)
This statement is false.
According to the Fortune 500 list, M$ and Apple are resp. :
46. Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., 47, $32.187
301. Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, Calif., 300, $6.207
billon dollar businesses. - Now according to Steve Jobs himself (from WWDC2004) the ipod's have a +50% market share (mesured by units!).
- - -
Ok, now let's do some *simple* math! :).
$58 Billions * 0.50+ = $APPLE.MP3.PROFITS+
${APPLE.MP3.PROFITS}+ + 6.207 = $35.207+ Billions
- - -
say, if M$ has to compete with the 'Linux Desktop' for markes share(s), which *let's assume will* hamper them from further increasing *much* ... APPLE would by 2008 at least catch up to them ... simply by not competing for the 'Desktop' :-)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
The trouble is cd based players tend not to last long if they recive repeated shocks. The mechanics of the drive are vunerable to shock at all times even though they are only occasionally reading data from the disk.
The solid state players are smaller and in my experiance generally last longer when subjected to repeated impacts.