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Digital Music Player Overview
An anonymous reader writes "MP3 Newswire just posted its fifth article of its 'iPod Killers' for the holidays list. Most interesting are a bluetooth unit from Aiwa, Sony's Vaio U, and an Ogg/photo/FM broadcast record, flash unit from SAFA." See also I, II, III, and IV.
is something that can play mod/xm/it/s3m/etc from flash. I'll even be happy with just a few kilobytes of memory!
If I understand correctly, Apple's iTunes' architecture (at least, on a Mac) allows MP3 player manufacturers to write "plug ins" for it, so it works with their players much the same as it works with the iPod. A list of iTunes compatible players can be found here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=935 48.
My question is - why is this list so short? Isn't writing a plug-in a fairly simple thing? Why have so few of the MP3 player manufacturers bothered to make their players compatible with this program?
iTunes for Windows won't work with any player but the iPod. If Apple makes that decision, to encourage people to buy iPods, that I at least understand. But as long as the architecture is there on the Mac, why don't more player manufacturers take advantage of it?
- Alaska Jack
I mean, is there a technical reason (beyond the space-saving shape) that an iPod needs the kind of battery it has? Would an iPod work with regular ol' AA batteries? Or do they not supply enough juice?
Being able to use just regular, store-bought batteries would really make an iPod a lot more appealing to me, even if they brought with them a small increase in size & weight.
- Alaska Jack
Compared to the iPod and the mini, these products are just plain ugly. (IMHO). Until the competitors manage to steal or match Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief industrial design talent, the iPod will reign supreme.
Since I'm financially challenged and these products are aesthetically challenged, I'll go without an mp3 player for now.
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
Well, the real clincher here would be the fact that Lithium ion battery cells have a much higher energy density than alkaline, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride (sp?), or any of the other battery types (I can't think of any right now). So, you couldn't use "regular" AA or AAA batteries (1.5 and 1.2 volts, respectively, iirc) reasonably, without a significant mass of them (considering the ipod needs 11.1V).
:)
Lithium Ion AAA cells are 3V - 3.6V (I think), or so. You could conceiveably take 4, throw a resistor in there (can't think of the ohm you'd need off hand), and take it down to the 11.1 volts needed. Not really knowing what an iPod looks like (I've not really examined one in person), but this is conceiveably possible with my limitted understanding. Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know if you'd be able to replace the internal battery when it dies, or if the damned thing is actually inside the ipod in an inconvenient fashion, but I -imagine- you could replace the internal battery (after it dies) with 4 lithium ion batteries and still charge them. I suspect that the ipod battery is simply a bunch of lion cells, anyway.
You can get 4 li-ion AAA energizer batteries for about $10. I don't know if all liion batteries are rechargeable, or if the energizier batteries are - I'd think they would be. (anyone know for sure?) If they were, taking the time to figure this out might be worth the mod (once the battery dies), as an external battery pack costs about $80.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
if that sigmatek device could use external dvd drive for dvd playback, it would make perfect device for long bus trips
it mentions support for mpeg-2, and if the device has enough power to unpack divx, it should have enough power to run dvds smoothly aswell, and with 40gb drive, you could even play the dvds from the hard drive instead carrying the disks with you
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The problem I find with all these players is that it seems you get to choose between somewhat bulky, fragile hard drive units with a lot of storage but poor battery life, or small flash based players with at most 1gig of space. My own player, a Panasonic SV-SD80, is about the size of US quarter, but squared off. It weighs about an ounce and a half and I never go anywhere without it, as it is so small you can drop it in your pocket and almost mistake it for loose change. I've dropped it several feet onto hard pavement at least 10 times with no ill effects. Plus, running on its internal battery it gets 16-20 hours of run time, and with the water resistant case it comes with (which has an extra AAA battery inside) you get around 50 hours. Try that with an iPod... That being said, even with a 1Gb SD card installed (sidenote: why would anyone buy a non expandable flash player??) I only get perhaps 200-250 songs on it, which means I'm bored of the rotation in about a week.
What I would like to buy is a player that comes packaged something like an ipod, but where the top 1/4 of it is a micro size flash based player (with an SD slot!) that contains a 1 or 2 line display, basic controls, and a small battery, and would afford the ultra-portable benefits of the SV-SD80 or similar player. For those times when you want access to your whole library, you would attach the bottom 3/4 would as 'dumb' modular add-on that simply holds a 20-60gb hard drive and a bigger battery to support it all, and the ability to shuttle songs to the flash unit as needed. Maybe even a larger (color?) display. It wouldnt need the player circuitry or controls, headphone jack etc, as that would all be contained in the flash head unit.
I look at it from a slightly different direction. With the MD player I have 50 hours of playback time in my pocket as well has 500 tracks. Adding to that 50 hours is easy by carrying a few extra AA batteries. You can also get AA's anywhere when you're travelling.
What good is 10,000 tracks in your pocket when your 10 hour battery will only let you listen to 200 of them?
To me the fact that I can change the media with extra discs in my special-bag-for-my-media-player is just icing on the cake. The cake is the standard batteries.
I don't want to have to remember to charge my media player every day so I'll be able to use it the next day, and I want a lot more than 10 hours of play time off a charge. There are days when I listen to my MD player for more than 10 hours.
I know there's a lot of people here complaining about the cost of batteries, but come on, alkaline AA's are 40 cents, that's under 1 cent/hour for playback. Over the life of the thing you'll spend less than the difference in price between the minidisc player and the iPod. That also assumes you won't be keeping the iPod more than a few years or you'll have to spend $100 on a battery replacement.
If the iPod took a single AA battery like the MD player, got the same life out of it, and were no bigger than the MD player, I'd have bought one long ago.
these pieces of crap are not ipod killers. 256kb? wtf is that scheisse. now try the iriver H320 or H340 perfect for the open source warrior, plays ogg vorbis , and now with the latest firmware, Xvid video! http://iriver.com/product/info.asp?p_name=H320
I take my iPod to parties, and with the mains adaptor/belkin battery pack and a headphone->stereo jack lead, I have (checking itunes...) 3 weeks of music. The beauty is, it can randomise ANY track you have on there, not just whatever's on the current MD. So, if you want to play "dance" music at the party, select the dance genre.
Also, I don't have to think about what MDs to take with me - I just take all my music at once. :)
Don't even get me started on the firewire interface (so I can capture my music even faster), and the fact it's a 40gig hard disk (I keep VMWare client install and a Windows 2003 adv. server VPC on the iPod - it's configured with VPN & SSH access to my home machine, so I have a PC on my home network wherever I can find an internet-connected PC with a firewire port).
According to Apple, 2m iPods have been sold and 20m iTunes tracks.
This means that for each iPod, there are 10 tracks from iTunes on it.
Assuming each track is 3 meg big and the average iPod is 30 gig, then you are looking at ((3*10)/(30*1024))*100 = 0.1% of a users iPod taken up with iTunes music.
Even if you double or quadruple the downloaded numbers, you are still talking less than 1% of iPod music is from iTunes.
In short, based on these stats, I cannot see how anyone can consider the iTunes service as a key driver in someones purchasing decision of the iPod.
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Many of the players in the articles haven't been announced for domestic (the USA for me) release.
Just glancing over, these two m:robe players from Olympus, the Aiwa S710BT, and the Toshiba gigabeat haven't been announced for release anywhere outside of Japan. As far as I know, anyway.
How come we don't see any DVD based players. 4.7 gig of music (or double that with dual layer media) is quite respectable. Such a player shouldn't cost much more than portable cd players.
Does such a player exist?