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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.
Seems that ipod has the total "mental" superiority, as every MP3 seems to be compared to it.
One thing that I wonder about is the digital convergence, will iPod surve with so many the new Mobile phones containing MP3 player functionality. It used to be that MP3 player phones were far between, but seems that all 3rd generation phones will contain it as standard feature.
When are we going to hear about other crimes committed against iPods? I'm really interested in hearing about the iPod rapists.
The Linux-based X2 Megaview seems nice, but the site says it costs $4000 $-( Not in my range, but I suspect the competition will drive the prices down. Does anybody here uses this model?
I can't wait for them to come out with the FPS game in which you kill iPods!!
The Sony Vaio U weighs in at 1.2 lb - light for a PC, heavy for a digital media player - uses a 20GB 1.8" drive and plays audio, video and anything else. The cost is $2000, far more expensive than an iPod and more than most laptops, so the premium priced Vaio U is not the most cost effective if you only want an entertaiment device. For road warriors whose company is picking up the tab. i'd be happier with a $2000 laptop, i wouldn't risk the chance of losing/smashing such a flimsy looking player.
So looking at the photos of these players it would seem that Apple has hired all the designers and engineers who understand interface, asthetics and functionality.
C'mon guys, give us something that's at worthy of competing with an iPod. I'll give you the first killer idea for free: make it just like the iPod but without the stupid glossy, scratch-prone plastic and polished metal.
It's called the iPod mini.
I think what companies don't realise that it's not really the player they have to better...it's iTunes. When it comes down to it, although the iPod is a great player, it's really it's integration with itunes that makes it work so well.
is something that can play mod/xm/it/s3m/etc from flash. I'll even be happy with just a few kilobytes of memory!
None of these play Vorbis/FLAC? (Or at least it doesn't say they do). That's my number one reason for choosing a player, it's too bad it's overlooked.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
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
'iPod Killers'
Inevitably, something that wants to be just a "product A killer" lacks the originality that made "product A" popular to begin with.
Creativity can't be mimicked. I for one welcome any products that aren't easily defined by other products. The next batch of iPod-mimicking underlords, on the other hand, aren't so well-met.
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
The competitor's iTunes are called Direct Connect, BitTorrent, Kazaa and eMule. Sometimes it is called "my friend from college that has 200GB of music and hasn't been busted by the record companies (yet!)" The usability factor is there, of course, but it is not that bad actually, and such a thing as "my boyfriend's friend who knows computers(tm)" or "my nephew who is into programming(tm)" coupled with $0 /song can make things much easier for the average consumer.
Previously, on Slashdot... Build Your Own iPod Battery
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
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
This article takes a very narrow view. What about the Mini Disc players. The new HD-MD format has a 1 gig disc that costs $7. 7 bucks for a 1 gig removable media alone should give this line of players a huge boost over most mp3 players. Add in the battery life (40-50 hours on a single AA), and it becomes a great option. Hardware prices start well below the price iPod mini too.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I was thinking the other day that I may never get an iPod or similar device. I don't like using the word never, of course, but I recently stumbled across something on eBay. 4 gig CF cards for $300. 2 Gigs on Newegg are in the $200 range. With that kind of storage, I'm seriously considering skipping the whole portable music player device and getting a new PocketPC/Palm that'll use one of these cards. 4 gigs is more than adequate for my music needs, plus I have other reasons for wanting a PDA.
Though I doubt that's a reasonable alternative for a lot of people out there, I figured it was worth mentioning. I'm really attracted to the idea of having a little 'store all my interesting media' device.
We gots some cool stuff coming around the corner.
"Derp de derp."
Anyone have a link to anything else relating to the x2 megaview? A google search for "x2 megaview" only seems to turn up the article mentioned, and "x2 megaview mp3" doesn't do any better, with a paltry 126 results. You'd think I could at least find the product company's site, no? Must be quite a new company.
This device looks like it's got a lot of potential to be an nice portable linux tool. I like the ability to record audio, and the fact that it has a hard disk. This'd alieviate some of the irritation of having to use an SD card for storage, as on a Zaurus. Now, if only it had a host USB hub, or maybe even an infrared port, I'd be set. USB host/client hub would be ideal, though (and, of course, a keyboard that would work with it).
I wonder if I could run opie (or if it already has opie - doubt it, but that'd be cool) on it. I suspect it's quite capable of the task - and that too would be cool.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
And/or the other way round: a bluetooth headset profile on the iPod so you can hear your phone ringing while you're listening. It should announce the caller with a synthesized voice so you can decide whether to answer.
The required microphone could be used to record your ideas/todos on the iPod quickly too.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
...to just put a table together with the product names, their suggested retail price, the type of media they use and/or built-in storage size, connectivity (Firewire/USB/etc) and their supported formats?
And actually, I'm having my doubts that that's a comprehensive comparison/listing they've got on there in the first place.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
That's a fifth installment and we yet to see Rio Carbon - the best player in the iPod mini market segment. I wonder how much Apple hands over so the authors don't mention the player that beats mini in pretty much everything beginning with style, size (both 3d and hdd-wise) and battery life.
And, yes, I know there is a rebranded Carbon in the list, but it doesn't have the original's style and battery life.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
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
Sometimes I wonder if the editors even read the stuff they pick for the front page. This is one of the most empirically worthless slashdot stories I've seen in a while though.
This "story," submitted by an "anonymous reader" (ie the author of the review), was a complete waste of time. It's nothing but a collection of PR gibberish copied from the product pages of the players being reviewed. There is nothing of any interest in ANY of the blurbs, no evidence that the author has even seen the players he's "reviewing," and to top it all off, no links to the products he's "reviewing." (I googled one of the players he "reviewed" and got a bunch of garbage on the first page.
I don't mean to insult Michael here, but I think he probably picked this one based on the headline (the writeup is better than the "story" linked to, and not supported by the story.)
Obviously, people are indeed hoping to take some marketshare from Apple, but
(1)none of the players reviewed in this story are going to take it (they're all obscure 2-bit companies which will be lucky to move 10k units.) and
(2) Others (http://cnet.com/, http://wired.com/, and (don't laugh) even NYT's Circuits do a better job of reviewing gadgets). My advice though: just do a search for MP3 Player on http://engadget.com/ and http://gizmodo.com/.
I am not trolling here. Please read the story yourself before moderating me.
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...err..other than Aiwa and Sony (which are the same company, I mean...
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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.
+1 Interesting, what are you kidding? All this post does is baselessly insult two groups. And yes, baselessly: the .ogg format/media container is becoming more popular, not less, and .wma is used by almost every non-iTunes store (i.e. it matters). If this deserves +1 Interesting, then I'm a ferris wheel.
P.S. I'm not.
I take it from your nick you're a Jack from Alaska, like me. I grew up on Kodiak. Nice to find another one on Slashdot.
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My phone already does SPUD playes movies and games and it could even emulate sega, atari and even nes provided one had a source of roms- not that I know anything about that...
My mobile (Nokia 6230) has blue tooth and is an MP3 player, I even invested in a 1 Gig MMC card for it, however, don't count on Bluetooth for transferring music to the player. For those who don't know, bluetooth is slow. 1Mbit/sec sounds fast until you realize that, in the real world, it is much slower than that due to various factors from non-ideal conditions to the implementation of Bluetooth in your phone (or other device). I transferred songs to my phone using bluetooth and it took so long that I went out and purchased a USB 14 in one card reader and now do it that way. Don't even get me started on movies :) Bluetooth is fine for streaming the music to another device, such as an earpiece/microphone, as you don't care how fast it is so long as it is fast enough for real-time playback. But you don't want to take 5 minutes to transfer a 5 minute long song, you want it to take about 10 seconds (or less) and even the proposed upgrade to 3Mbit/sec will not solve this problem.
Don't get me wrong, bluetooth is nice but it has it's limitations.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
I agree, I have one and it is pretty darn good.
Actually my sisters not-so-geeky boyfriend was bragging to me about how his mp3-player could play ogg. Of course he didn't have a single ogg file to play on it, but apparantly it's bragable even for non-geek consumers nonetheless :)
Give me a job. Please?
Nice. Having a cool name is always good for a technology!
Reminds me of a paradigm I find useful as a freelancer, where you can place a job as a point anywhere in the Fast/Cheap/Good triangle.
So:
If you want it Cheap and Good, it's going to take a long time.
If you want it Good and done Fast, prepare to pay thru the nose.
And if you want it done Fast and Cheap, it will suck...
I've had the theme tune to Quantum Leap going through my head all day... Now you have, too!
I'm saving my money for a 40+ GB solid state mp3 player that is small, robust, has 20+ hours of battery life and costs less than $100. Until then my trusty old CD player will do just fine.
Considering that's not what bluetooth is for, I'm not surprised you had problems with it :) It would be like me complaining that it takes a while for me to send text documents by semaphore ("my DSL is much faster!"). Bluetooth is made for streaming voice, control data, or sending text files. Anything else is stretching it beyond its design. Not to say it's not useful - I find it incredibly useful, it's just not meant to transfer megs and megs of MP3s :)
I picked up an iPod the other day and I found that its USB and Firewire connectivity on PCs to be iffy at best. I couldn't get Firewire to work at all, most of the time when iTunes tries to connect to the iPod, it causes a fatal system error and I have to reboot XPpro. I haven't had trouble with any other devices using these ports so I have to assume the PC version of iTunes has some glitches that create problems with some PC configurations.
Not sure what's so informative about that. I, too, have an iPod that I connect over Firewire to my PC and it works flawlessly, and has for a year without a single problem. Perhaps you should increase your sample size before making assumptions about the PC version of iTunes?
I know this because Tyler knows this.
I have iTunes on my PCs at work and at home, and it works perfectly, just like the mac. My firewire cards work fine, too, which makes me think you have a problem with your drivers, or some other software on your machine that uses your drives. Anti-virus springs to mind - that has effects on my ipod (such as making it unmountable - NAV sucks).
I'd be more interested in mix cd's working properly.
On i-Tunes you can link tracks so it's a flowing work that the artist/dj intended. But it's one file.
I want mix cd's to play seamlessly WITH proper track listing. At the moment you can have one or the other. Minidisc can do it, as far as i'm aware mp3/ogg/aac players can't. Does it need a new format? (obviously minidisc uses it's own) or can aac be made to work? As i'm ripping stuff i own a new format doesn't bother me - as long as someone writes a winamp/xmms plugin
Acid House saves Souls
I started off using my iPod with a PC and I always found FW support on the PC to be very hit and miss. Both the cards and the drivers seem vary flakey: I guess a result of FW only really gaining any popularity on the PC since Apple released iTunes for Windows.
Are the other devices you use succesfully with FW powered externally or via the FW cable? If they are externally powered then I'd suspect your FW card can't handle the current drain of the iPod.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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.
Small, easy-to-compress files? yes. Hundreds of megs of MP3s? No.
Hope to be getting another SD card soon; cheap off ebay and does a lot more than the ipod for a comparable price. Good sound quality with an aftermarket player, plays videos, etc etc etc etc.
Decided I'd try one before I went all in on an ipod mini, strikes me as a lot of money to spend for something that just does music - and is very likely to be obsoleted in the near future by a 4gb flash-based iPod device.
It's shiney metal as well.
..don't panic
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
Sorry, but that article looks like SPAM. Especially with christmas closing in on us all. Advertising on slashdot? Who'd have thought it? I don't need junk mail in my slashdot news articles.
Does it go on forever?
I used to say "I will never have an iPod."
I used to hate the iPod.
After going through 4 or 5 other hard drive based mp3 players in two years, I finally broke down when Best Buy said I could trade my 6mo old 20GB Archos Jukebox in for a new 4g 40GB iPod, if I pay another $150.
I have now had an iPod for about 3 months and love it. The battery time is nothing to write home about, but it lasts from when I plug it into the stereo in my car to drive to work, my whole eight hour shift, and the drive back home. I have dropped it on a hard tile floor, and nothing was damaged, chipped or not working.
It's a wonderful little thing, and while I may never get a non-iPod apple product, I do love my iPod.
The only problem I've ever had with it, is how easy the case picks up little scratches while in my pocket, but that's not a huge problem.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I agree that what it was designed for it does fine. It even syncronizes my contacts at a fair rate. I admit that I started using bluetooth without any real knowledge of it's specification as it came with my mobile phone and I purchased a Bluetooth adapter for my laptop shortly there after. Using bluetooth as a wire replacement for headsets and the like is nice, however, there are those of us who see it as another device connectivity network for transferring data of any kind and I would like to see it up in the 10-11 Mbit range (ok, I admit it, the 100 Mbit range :) however, the tradeoff would be power consumption and space which would be unacceptible for a mobile phone and for a headset, though they are doing some incredible things with low power 802.11a/b/g stuff today.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
It seems the name of the industry tagging game is still "iPod Killer", to me it should be tagged "iPod competitor". When you hold as much control over the market as the white devil does, toppling it in 1 swoop is unlikely. Even if your product hit it off, it would still take a while for it to reach the point of "killer".
I hear ya. You seem to be a bit confused about what Bluetooth is actually for. It's to replace infrared, to stream audio, send small amounts of data, and replace any data cables for syncing devices. It's slow on purpose, as that allows the entire bluetooth chipset to cost cents, be tiny, and consume next to no power. A WLAN connection, which is essentially what you're requesting, would add tremendously to the weight, power consumption and cost of whatever you're adding it to.
Christmas 2012 "Dvorak: Apple is dying!"
January 2013 "iPod: 2012's hottest selling item, AAPL up 25%, Steve Jobs voted Time's 'Man most likely to be the Messiah'. "
The U series doesn't have a built-in keyboard, camera, etc. The Picturebooks are 2.2lb rather than 1.2lb, besides being a traditional laptop form factor rather than a tablet form factor; they are a completely different class of computer.
Anyway, it all depends on what your needs and capacities are; I had a Picturebook myself (the first Crusoe one) and had absolutely no problem with the keyboard, speed, or battery life, although I did find the screen a little on the short side at 1024x480. I probably wouldn't have so much of a problem with the newer 1280x600 screens. At the same time it was great for carrying around everywhere; I got it because I was sick of carrying a 3kg (7lb) laptop on my back every morning and evening on a 5-mile bike commute. My gf has it now and wouldn't swap it for a larger laptop. It's particularly good for unobtrustively taking notes when doing research.
I'm really surprised iRiver wasn't mentioned. I've got the 40GB HP-140 and it's a nice player with FM and the ability to record high quality compressed or uncompressed audio. The interface isn't as nice as the iPod, but with the open source Rockbox firmware being ported to several iRiver models, seems like a pretty serious competitor (especially for the Slashdot crowd).
Actually, it's not overlooked. If you start at the beginning (article I), you'll find that Ogg is specifically mentioned up front because of it's popularity, and that many of the units support do support Ogg. I only skimmed the five articles, but at a guess, I'd say that roughly a third of units support Ogg.
And if your coat-hangers-and-corned-beef format could perform as well as Ogg has in independent, double-blind listening tests, then maybe you should be screaming blue murder if people are ignoring it.
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 exactly is a product (Entempo Spirit) an "iPod killer for christmas" if it isn't due out until January 31st?
Or did they mean christmas next year...
-Jay
--
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?
where can i get a digital music player overview overview?
Let me guess, you have either:
A massivley overclocked PC held together with string and duct tape that you've decided is "stable" because you can do basic IO and run SiSoft Sandra's CPU benchmark all the way through without the system crashing.
or
You have some name brand or off brand premade PC that you've never done any maintnence on. You keep it on the floor, the power supply and CPU heat sink have long been clogged with dust and/or the fans have died, and you might even smoke around it constantly...
or
You regularly install pirated software that contains viruses that your three year old virus scanner doesn't catch and you regularly click on e-mail attachments from unknown sender.
and the part we know for sure:
You wonder why some things don't work.
Ever try Google? This product IS available now from stores besides Amazon. Believe it or not, you can by products at stores besides Amazon (albeit a very few -- I've only found 4 that have this in stock right now)
? dp no=511652
One of the stores has this LOW COST player in stock now is eCost:
http://www.ecost.com/ecost/ecce/shop/detail.asp
$170 for 20GB is pretty good, however people that have bought this (check engadget's forms) say it is a pretty cheap MP3 player. Think of it more as a external 20gb drive that just happens to play audio.
Link to the manufacturer's site is here:
http://www.entempo.com/products.html
Enjoy!
(void) signal(SIGALRM, (alarm_fired=1)); if (alarm_fired) printf("Revoke is clueless!\n");
Shit, I have SIX. And I'm happily enjoying each of them.
I have a 20GB HDD unit and five 128MB flash units. I take them to conferences and use them for voice audio recording. One 128MB flash unit recording 160Kpbs MP3s will record for close to 90 minutes.
The 20GB unit is for recording 48Khz WAVs of live music.
I use them professionally and although they have a few odd behaviors, they are overall very solid and excellent little mobile recorders. And they beat out Mini-Disc handily imho.
Lastly, the firmware is now free speech software.
Digital Innovations has done a good job. A very good job. Clicky.
iPod wasn't the first company to market MP3 portables. HD-based or otherwise. Samsung, iRiver (i.e. SonicBlue, then Rio), Creative, Archos, Pine Tech.... they were on the market before the year 2000.
Sigh. I remember cruising the MP3 hardware sites, and getting all excited when new products would come out...
Then 2002 came around. Apple's marketing machine that suddenly made that sort of device a must-have item.
And then everyone started saying that everyone else was copying them... hah the nerve.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Because the majority of music that people have before they purchase an MP3 player (you would think they'd purchase it to listen to music they already have) ... is pirated or copied from CDs anyway... durrr.
I don't think a lot of people would drop $200-$400 on a player to only turn around and go pay another $100 to fill it up with songs.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Ok, yes, you can find it...great...but it's not going to "kill the iPod" if it's not readily available, which was the humorous (albeit not very humorous) point I was making.
-Jay
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
the statement "Apple has refused to the license FairTunes DRM to makers of other digital portables"
is not 100% correct
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Because the majority of music that people have before they purchase an MP3 player[snip] ... is pirated or copied from CDs anyway
Which all plays fine on an iPod (unless you ripped your CDs into Vorbis).
There can be only one.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No iPod cases? Someone forgot to do a google search!
It's nice that you like your iRiver, but features alone to not a great product make.
Some of us do realize what iRiver offers and still have iPods, which may not have a few of the features but are niceer to use in many ways.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With all these iPod-related stories, slashdot should just update their name servers with an ipod zone (ipod.slashdot.org) and send people there.
First of all, it's electrical engineers, not electricians, who do this sort of stuff. Big difference in salary and education level.
Secondly, the iPod would be fine with 4x3.6V batteries without a resistor. Adding a resistor (as opposed to a voltage regulator) would be extremely inefficient. If anything, a voltage regulator called a 7812 should be in place. You can find the 7812 at http://www.jameco.com
Apple lists the iPod's power block as 12V 1A, which is the same output as the 7812.
It's hard to believe that iPod would run out of iPods the first week of December. Don't they have better supply chain management than that? Don't they want all of the sales they can get during the holiday season? Why would they allow themselves to run out of iPods, giving those sales would-have-been sales to competitors?
Drop 200gb of music into iTunes and it will happily store it into it's library.
iTunes is merely the interface through which the iPod shines. Nothing about the situation negates the strengths of iTunes->iPod. Or if you want an analogy here, iTunes is to DC, BT, Kazaa, and eMule as a phonebook is to a service directory. iTunes just makes all 200gb of music easily accessible, and the fact that you can synch all this music to the iPod makes the music on an iPod also easily accessible.
GPL Deconstructed
Part of the problem is that HFS+ cannot be fscked from linux for the ipod mini yet (the normal ipods can with fsck.hfsplus. After 32 mounts, it needs an fsck or you get read only mode. Which means you can't change the stuff on the ipod. The only solution currently seems to be to get an XP machine to vfat the drive and it from linux like that henceforth, or to regularly go to an OSX machine to fsck the drive. Another part of the problem is that the usb module stack or fireware module can get cnofused if you don't do the connecting thing in the right order. Reconnecting a confused status further messes up things. This holds true for the MS windows kernel as well. I reckon any hardware problems are minor compared with that.
I can't believe that no one cares about gapless playback. Is the Rio Karma still the only player that can do gapless, or have others finally added support? I keep wanting to get a hard drive-based MP3 player, but not without gapless (and the stories of the Karma's reliability have scared me away from it.)
Cost is reason enough to switch. The would-be iPod competitors are not really pricing their products to move. Even your average consumer can tell that 256 mb is not in the same ballpark as 4 gb. Fifty dollars less than the MSRP of an iPod mini ain't gonna get these pretenders anything, no matter how much they spend on marketing!
Just let the device show up as a USB/firewire drive. Don't make me use propriety software! I want Mac compatibility for my iPod clone! The average consumer cares more about MP3s and ripping CDs than they do about buying DRM encumbered songs online. I find it ironic that the player manufactures act like WMV compatibility is a feature rather than a limitation! The iPod interface is nice, but people are willing to put up with a clumsy interface if the price is right.
The market for people willing to purchase encrypted songs is well addressed (by iTMS and the windows-only stores). The only market space left is people holding out for something cheaper, much cheaper, but with comparable features. Sometime after xMas the product I am waiting for (the $99 5 gb MP3 player) will be on the market. (Okay, maybe after xMas 2006.) I think this ties into another post on this sub-thread, the "Fast/Cheap/Good" triangle:
> If you want it Cheap and Good, it's going to take a long time.
I can wait. There are millions of hold outs like me.
Just to add to the referenced article, here is a new player review of a new player that isn't in the five-part series.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
I know.
My argument was against the thinking that the killer feature of an iPod (or other portables) was whether or not it would work with a music store / service.
I say: Apple's marketing made iPods must-have items.
Before, such devices would be considered geeky, nerdy, unnecessary. But as soon Madison Avenue, I'm sorry, I meant Apple says it's "in", well, then by god, that's what you want for Christmas.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Belkin TuneCast II
There's already a few of these sort of devices on the market. They work with anything that has a headphone output. Since the cost is so low, no one is going to try to integrate that into a player (and then have to endure the extra paperwork with the FCC and other worldwide agencies).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
put a table together with the product names, their suggested retail price, the type of media they use and/or built-in storage size, connectivity (Firewire/USB/etc) and their supported formats?
The problem is that new players are being added to the marketplace every day, so it would be a bitch to keep it updated. Also, a lot of the new players are coming out of S. Korea, China and Japan, but are only for domestic consumption, so unless you can read Japanese, Chinese or Korean, you're out of luck.
Little-known secret -- many of the "well-known" players are just rebranded Korean/Chinese units. The most egregious example of this is Jens of Sweden's MP-300, which is just a rebranded Nextway NMP-612T.
You can find a few retailers that sell out-of-country players on the 'net -- my personal favorite is Cool MP3 Store. They feature some of the latest and greatest stuff coming out of the East -- way cooler than mere iPod's or MuVo's. Check out some of these bad-boys.
Ridiculous. This is a super clean AMD-based XP-Pro system that has nothing but the most basic startup processes that are part of the OS. I'm anal about making sure my systems are clean, and this PC that has the problems basically only runs 2-3 main applications. The system is not overclocked or non-standard. The closest thing to non-standard is that it's an AMD-based machine instead of Intel. The iPod should work, but it is buggy - or the driver software or something is messed up.
I have a Sony PC-100 video camera that I can connect right into the FW port on the PC and it works fine. It's only the iPod that isn't recognized.
So I end up using the USB, which causes the system to reboot whenever I plug the iPod in (page fault in non paged area BSOD). After the system reboots, as long as I don't remove the iPod from the cradle, iTunes will recognize it. But if I tell iTunes to manually synch upon demand, the computer crashes again.
I thought maybe NAV was the culprit so I completely removed all references from the startup scripts and stripped the OS down to bare bones. I even changed BIOS settings regarding plug-n-play and peripheral and USB options.. nothing made a difference.
Suffice to say that critiquing any Apple product is likely to elicit great ire from the Apple sycophant community, but sorry, it's just my experience. I checked a lot of iPod-oriented messageboards and it seems I am far from the only person having these problems.
I know this is a small sample, but one of the machines I sync my iPod with is a total mess of non-standard crap stuffed into too small of a box... Dual Athlon XP 1800+, Windows XP pro (SP1 - I uninstalled SP2 because it was unstable), $6 PCI Firewire card, 2 hard drives, 3 optical drives, PCI sound, PCI USB 2.0, PCI SCSI, PCI ethernet (all PCI slots used) DDS3 tape drive, AGP Gforce 5900, and I've been installing windows via upgrade since windows 3.1 including some Windows 95 betas (official, not pirated). All that, and iTunes still works fine with my iPod. Given all that, I'm gussing your problem is less of the "buggy" type and more of the "driver software or something is messed up" type.
I guess you're luckier than I am in this case.
Finally they're a few mp3 players with a decent design and color-scheme. Otherwise the mp3 players still look like they were drawn by first graders (anyone notice the one that looked like a shaver?). Are there no creative minds out there, that can design a good (or even decent) looking mp3 player?