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Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market
kurtz_tan writes "Creative Technology is spending 100 million in a marketing blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market which is now led by the Apple iPod (54% of the market last year for MP3 players that use hard disks). Creative is second with 16.5%. Does Creative Zen sound as cool as Apple iPod ?" And reader TheMediaWrangler writes "The Register reports that Apple will build a stockpile of flash-based iPods to be shipped as early as January or February of 2005. AppleInsider had the original scoop."
54% of total portable music market, 92% of hard drive-based market.
From the AppleInsider article:
Although the iPod holds a whopping 92% slice of the pie for hard drive-based players, this figure shrinks to 65% when flash models are tallied as part of the mix.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Hmm. I think Creative is receiving its just desserts since the release of the first Nomad Jukebox.
They had a special team in their R&D center in Scotts Valley design that product, and then after it was done, they laid off most of the people in that project team and outsourced them to a less-experienced team in Singapore.
Consequently, some of the team was picked up by Apple which went on to develop the second rev iPod.
Detachment 3 Media
Exposed, Exploited, Exploded
When browsing through songs, click and hold the selector button for a couple of seconds, and the song will flash. This adds the song to your on-the-go playlist. Good for playlists on the fly.
- oZ
// i am here.
iPods have been able to play MP3's for longer than they have been able to play M4A's and M4P's... IIRC, the original 5 GB iPod didn't even have support for AAC (much less the DRM.) iTunes originated as a Mac MP3 player called SoundJam.
However, Steve personally didn't like the audio quality of MP3s and defaulted iTunes to burn them at 160 kbps instead of the traditional 128 kbps. This combined with the inital iPod's support only for the Mac platform limited its appeal until Apple integrated MPEG-4 and it's AAC codec into QuickTime. Once this occured, Apple finally had a "ideological" business reason to leverage the iPod onto the Windows platform: as a way to reinforce QT installations on PCs. QuickTime technology drives many of Apple's high scale packages, like Final Cut Pro, as well as making a good PR platform to keep Macs on the radar, so more visibility of QT verses Real or Window Media was in line with Apple's historical biases.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
You can make playlists on the player. It's limited but hold the center button the next time you have a song/album/artist/whatever selected. Now go to playlists. At the bottom is "On the Go". You can add more and eventually save the list.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
It's like trying to break Microsoft's OS monopoly: "Yea, well our OS runs the GIMP!"
Gimp also runs under Windows, not that it really matters for this discussion, but I just thought you might want to know.
I personally liked Ephpod better. I just needed a simple interface, and I wasn't going to be buying any music from the Itunes store. For those of you who don't know, Ephpod is a free software package that is used to upload/organize/configure music on your ipod. Give it a shot, I really liked it.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
AAC is essentially MP4, so Creative would be behind Apple by about 3 years in this regard.
From http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/ - Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is at the core of the MPEG-4, 3GPP, and 3GPP2 specifications
Probably not, but their not so "gentle" reminder to "register your product" that won't close until you remove inetreg.exe from the registry and restart your computer did a good job of scaring me away. Good products? Maybe, but with this kind of marketing screaming "register now!", they should lose all their customers.
What?
Creative Nomad Zen 40gb is at 269.99 on Best Buy's website currently.
I'd be willing to deal with Creative's quirks for $30 less and twice the capacity of the cheapest ipod.
Watch out! The registration popups will drive you nuts. Buying decisions based simply on cost will get you burned big time.
What?
Only one company (Sony) has the resources to do that easily. (They currently offer all three of those pieces.) Unfortunately, they are too mired in IP idiocy and bad design to have any chance at it. Don't expect this to change any time soon.
(Posted anonymously as I am a Sony employee.)
The ipod supports bookmarkable AAC files (mp3 too?? not sure), as well as audible (audiobook) files - http://www.audible.com/ - an no, I don't work for them.
I listen to lots of audio books on my iPod. The 'bookmarking' feature is one of the things that makes the iPod AWESOME to listen to books on. Basically, it automatically 'bookmarks' where you leave off.
So, if you want to stop in the middle of the book to go listen to some music, or whatever -- when you come back to your book, you pick up where you left off.
There are applescripts you can use to convert long mp3 files into bookmarkable AAC files too. Alternatively, if you rip in a file in AAC, it's pretty simple to switch on bookmarking in that file as well, using applescripts (there may even be an option in iTunes, I haven't checked). For example, I have some long comedy mp3s which I've turned on bookmarking for using some of the scripts.
Cheers
Funny, there was just something about it on macosxhints.com. This hint lets you have speed control and bookmarks with non-audible content:
0 41 114214939859
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20
Considering, "The worldwide corporate headquarters is located in Singapore" (Creative's Corporate Site) you can't really call it outsourcing (unless they outsourced management as well).
Flawed analogy, Apple didn't dominate the PC market as it does in HD-based players today. It had good marketshare, but not overwhelming.
Could be. The L train is iPod central.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Really? That's interesting since the MP3 format spec pegs the maximum bitrate of an MPEG-1 layer 3 frame at 320kbit/sec. I'm curious as to how one gets higher.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
iTunes does one important thing (though other programs can do this too) and that is create an index, a database, a file that contains information for all your songs, that is uploaded to the iPod that allows the iPod to function.
This index is the library file: Think of it as a card catalog in a library, or a directory at a mall, or a index in the back of a book. It allows the iPod to do three things: Be fast, efficient, and power thrifty.
Instead of scanning through the whole hard drive for ID3 info, it scans through an 11mb file stored in ram. This allows the iPod to be both fast and power thrifty when you're searching for a song, album, artist, or playlist.
As per copying the files and folders, you can copy them on and off the hard drive, because it's just a mass storage device. But going back to that index thing, iTunes (or another similar program) will copy the music into a specified Music folder so that the index and content are always in sync.
As per shuffling across a bunch of CDs, yes, you can do that.
You have one problem that would prevent you from being happy with the iPod: You want to do all the work and don't want the computer to do any of the work. By default iTunes will sort all your music by artist and album into their own folders:
Folder "John Coltrane" will contain folder "Blue Train" will contain all your music.
Then, with the iTunes interface, all you have to care about is: "Who is the artist?" or "What is the album?" or "What is the song?" or "What is the genre?" or "Who is the composer?" or "How many times has it been played?" or "What year was it recorded?"
That's the other thing about the index/database. iTunes uses it too, so if you want to, you have access to all your music in any myriad number of ways OTHER than artist-album.
GPL Deconstructed
Here there actually is a difference. The Mac version of the graphics card has firmware that allows it to be recognised by Open Firmware, rather than the antiquated PC BIOS. Just be glad that you're not buying a graphics card from Sun - they're identical to the Mac ones (both use Open Firmware) but Sun will charge 2-3 times what Apple charge.
When recommending what Mac to buy I say "Get a DP 1.8 with 80 GB disk, 256 MB RAM and without the superdrive.
I'd be more inclined to recommend the 15" Combo Drive PowerBook (with RAM upgraded to a minimum of 256MB, from a 3rd party supplier), or the SuperDrive model if they can afford it (the illuminated keyboard is very nice, and I've got a lot more use out of my SuperDrive than I thought I would). I do very little that taxes the 1.5GHz G4 in my PowerBook (and I do quite a bit of video editing and compiling on this machine). The PowerBook, of course, comes with a screen (and a very nice one, at that) and has the added advantage that it can be easily used in bed or in the garden. Since it's silent, and has TV out, it can also be hooked up to a TV for watching DVDs or other movies on a larger screen.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I iTunes rearrange my music collection. It didn't rename any files, just rearranged my directory tree. At first, it was pretty awful (nothing was where I had put it!) but then I started using smart playlists and never thought about my directory tree again.
Why do you care about the directory tree if your music collection is in a query-able database? This is a monster huge big big big killer feature.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If my favorite badn is X, and iTMS doesn't carry them, the whole "it's easy" argument is sort of moot.
If it's your favorite band, then chances are you already own their CDs and will just rip them. I find iTunes much more useful for expanding my musical tastes in new directions than reinforcing what I already like.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
I'd say one track + instant gratification + hymn (so I can actually do what I want with the music I purchase) is even more attractive.
1. I'm sure you're speaking figuratively, but for those who don't know, the Polish Cavalry didn't declare war, they were defending their country against invasion. "Going up against" might have been a better phrase.
2. Cavalry wasn't in fact obsolete in 1939 as is often made out. In fact, if you watch the newsreels of German troops entering Czechoslovakia in 1938 many are on horseback, with horse-drawn carts. The Polish cavalry of the time was similar, the units fought as dragoons, using the horses for transport (which was actually advantageous, as many of the roads in all of Eastern Europe were just unsurfaced mud tracks at the time, and vehicles would often get bogged down) and dismounting for battle. They used rifles, machine-guns and horse-drawn artillery. In fact the Polish cavalry had a particularly effective anti-tank gun.
3. The Panzers actually suffered considerable losses in the '39 campaign, the tanks were not the Tigers or Panthers of later years, but light tanks, and in the woods and fields of Poland often suffered at the hands of infantry and cavalry antitank weapons.
You might like to have a look at (for example, just a quick trawl through Google) this page or this one or this one or this one.