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>
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.
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.