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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
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
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.