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Toshiba Unveils 80GB 'iPod drive'
sushant_bhatia_progr writes "The Register has an article about a new 80GB drive from Toshiba. Toshiba says it will ship an 80GB 1.8in hard drive in Q3 2005 - a year after it introduced the 60GB version that can currently to be found inside the iPod Photo. The 80GB HDD - model number MK8007GAH - comes in a 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.8cm casing. Toshiba will ship a 40GB version - model number MK4007GAL - that's just 0.5cm thick in the second quarter. It's lighter, too: 51g to the 80GB HDD's 62g. Toshiba's current 40GB and 60GB (model numbers MK4004GAH and MK6006GAH, respectively) 1.8in HDDs are 0.8cm thick, so the new drive should make for thinner mid-range iPods.
Both drives spin at 4200rpm, offer an average seek time of 15ms and operate across an Ultra DMA 100 interface. They can take 500G operating shock and 1500G non-operating shock."
Is this going to bring the prices down though?
Oh, and FIRST!
Imagine a Beowu-- Never mind.
I think the shrinking of the 40hb hard drive from .8cm to .5cm is much more important than the creation of the 80gb model.
I think I would rather have a really thing 40gb model than a slightly larger 80gb model that probably will cost a lot more.
A beowulf cluster of those, only used by old people in South Korea.
does anyone know of any mid-range digicams that use these or similar drives?
I'm guessing they are different to the 'IBM microdrive' yes ?
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
or are there really not enough spec numbers in this synopsis?
"I see a new, higher capacity iPod in the future..maybe just in time for MacWorld SF 2005..."
*cues fog machine*
will we see this in the next ipod kill.... *gets assassinated* ~kalinga
I am not familiar with HDD tolerance levels. What does 500g and 1500g equate to? 3ft drop and 5ft drop? Can someone explain.
* No DRM
STFU, you don't have to use any files that are DRM'd.
Of course you can, jumping off a fence and hitting the ground gives you a gee force of that magnitude, albeit for a fraction of a second.
This is a good point. From the time the iPods were first announced each iteration that came after continually became less thick and I think this is what really helped the iPod continue at its spot in #1. When you hand someone an iPod, they are first amazed by its dimensions and feel in their hand. As an owner of a 40gb iPod Photo, thickness went up considerably, and I think this would be the thickest portable harddrive/player that I would consider purchasing after owner the thinner previous models. Atleast with the size increase on the 40gb Photo the battery life went up instead of down, so this is probably what has to do with most of the thickness. Guess its a hard balance for Apple to find between thickness and battery life.
I dunno, 4000 bytes isn't really that big these days...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Maybe not, but Sony's new player lets you copy MP3s onto it but not off it. Does the iPod do similar?
How about just adding a small USB port that will hook up already existing external drives, and adapting the software just to read from it? I know it defeats portability a little bit, but then you could place in your car those old laptop hard drives in external chassis, filling them with music or movies, and then switching them on your iPod - like old 8-track cartridges?
That would be kinda' neat, kinda retro.
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
Well, I'm sure there's someone out there aching for an 80GB iPod.
And, thinking about the market in general, 80GB hard disk drives come in handy if you're Archos, etc selling what essentially will soon become portable PVRs.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
80GB is pretty much the size of my current HDD in my computer (a generic PC). So why is that drive so much bigger (standard 3.5" HDD)? And when will these tiny drives be built into desktop systems?
A thinner hard drive allows for a fatter battery.
At what speed a disgusted user can throw it because it don't "operate"? In fact, wonder what kind of action/device can generate 500G or what would be the size of the biggest piece of the owner of the disk if suffer that.
> * More colours, white sucks
At the time of this writing, if I type "applestore.com" in my browser, the first thing
I see is a picture of pink and blue ipods.
Apple doesn't provide software to let you pirate music using your iPod, but if you have half a clue (which I'm guessing you don't), it's not to hard to figure out how to copy a file.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
That's the killer feature I'm waiting for.
:)
If the iPod just appeared as an external hard drive I would buy one today.
Some hardware should not be reliant on software (think cameras, phones, etc, etc).
This is where the iRiver comes into play
I'd rather see a hard-drive-enabled video cam. No need for tapes, easy editing... don't feel like I have to continue.
And it better be 80 GB, not the measly 4GB like in some recent news...
I really believe that a device like this would win the market... it's beyond me why is nobody making them yet on mass scale.
I've got around 1200 CDs. Even 80 GB is going to be too small ripping with AAC at 160 KBps.
Still waiting...
Okay, I thought the story about only the old people in South Korea using email was funny, and the spin offs of "In Korea only old people do {insert activity here}" were funny for a bit, but you people wanting to get in your crack about old Koreans on EVERY SINGLE THREAD are just not funny and are ruining what was a pretty funny joke in the process.
</RANT>
Maybe not, but Sony's new player lets you copy MP3s onto it but not off it. Does the iPod do similar?
Nope, there is a tool to copy songs off the iPod.
Me too. 80GB is far too much to need in a small portable device. If you need that much space then get an external USB drive.
I'd be more excited by 20GB microdrives
So this gives approx 22 Days of music. So now if the battery last this long it would be worth it
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
They do... at least they do under XP and OSX for me. You may need to enable this functionality from the iPod settings under iTunes.
but if you want to put 80gb in my mp3 playing cellphone/pda , please do it quickly
So, I wonder if these drives could be used to upgrade the Rio Karma....Anyone have an idea?
Mecworks BLOG
if someone would only port MAME to the iPOD, i'd stop crying.
In fact, they are buying LOTS of them... and if the damn thing supported FLAC I would buy it too and load up the whole 80 or 100 or 120 GB it offered (I don't want to hear about iPods supporting AppleLossless -- that is not an open format so I don't plan on using it).
But a HDD based video camera would be nice too.
Which may or may not have an effect on battery life. After all, the new drives could consume more power.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Maybe if you had done some research you would find out that you can use the iPod as an external hard drive.
Actually, now that I think of it, should I blow money on an MP3 player at all if I don't listen to music other than a single FM station and a handful of CDs in my car? I need a fun gadget to spend my money on or else it's just going to go towards paying off credit card debt. :-(
IMHO the iPod is nearly perfect as it is. The only reason I still don't own one is the lack of Ogg Vorbis support. Anything more than that is just gravy.
Eat the rich.
On the mac anway (I don't know about windows). When you plug it in the ipod "mounts" onto your desktop and you can use it as a hard drive.
.) if I remember correctly. I think its easy to get the songs off, its just hard to put new songs on the ipod without itunes or some utility.
You can copy file on an off this like it was an external drive. There is a "urban legend" story of someone walking into a compusa with an ipod and walking out with a ipod full of software...
The music is in a "hidden" file (starts with a
Actually, you probably can't. Assuming a 0.1" deformation of the bottom of your foot, you'd have to jump from 150" or 12.5 feet. If you landed without any other shock absorption (flex of your skeleton), you're almost certain to break somthing (you're ankles, most likely).
As a comparison, a typical dinner plate will survive about 100g, and most CRT computer monitors find their limit at about 75g. Highly sensitive inertial guidance system components are in the "extremely sensitive" range down around 15g.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So when you plug an iPod in via USB, it doesn't come up as a separate drive? (Obviously I don't have one) Aren't there any hacks for that?
If you don't like the white then you've got the limited edition black with red dial version out right now as an alternative. Also, there are several companies out there that will customise a casing for you, so you're only limited by your imagination.
I do have to ask though, why the big obsession about colour? It's not as if the world and his brother can see whether your iPod is white, black, or blue with pink polka dots when it's jammed safely in your pocket.
As to your other points, well, here's a quick list of my own:
1. Smaller hard disks mean lower power consumption, so tick that box too.
2. DRM is a non-issue - you can rip your own music, you know.
3. 99 percent of people out there only use there iPod to listen to music on the move, and the remote that's supplied is good enough for all but a very small minority of people such as yourself. Just what do you call "decent" here anyhow?
4. Again, a feature that the overwhelming majority of current iPod owners probably don't even think about, but I'm sure that Apple will include one as soon as there's a compelling reason for them to do so.
5. Some people do have more than 40GB of music, so the larger drive will be good news for them.
Seriously, half the stuff you've written borders on ridiculous and the other half only matters to you and about four other people.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
A PDA with this kind of drive in it could be used to store 120 or so movies (well...mine only gets 320x240 resolution, and I'm assuming good compression like DIVX).
They already have video units like this, but for some reason they think that if your PDA does this then it doesn't have to be able to do anything else.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I realized now Apple will have yet another high capacity music player I'll never be able to afford. Thanks Steve
I have done research, and see that if you use it as a firewire drive and view hidden folders then you can see the 10 folders in which it stores mp3's, but that you still have to use third party software to update the iPod database.
What I want is simple... no required software, drag 'n' drop music onto it and it instantly appears.
That way I can use my iPod with my work computers (which are of course locked down) as well as my home computers.
It means I can use it to carry my music as well as play it. And yes it would permit piracy, but that's not what I want to do... I have a legitimate use in that I want to carry the music I have purchased and own back and forth and listen to it inbetween.
iRiver does this, iPod does not.
"1.8in HDDs are 0.8cm thick"
.8cm thin. Sheesh - get with it.
You mean
RTFM; please, I beg you.
can YOU take a 1500G blow.
A 1500G blow? Heidi Fleiss sure is expensive these days.
The 40 GB drive will fit in an iRiver H120! My old 20 GB drive is almost full.
* Better battery life
I've had my IPod for a few months now, and with a decent amount of usage I have yet to have the battery run out. It came close, once, while driving to Canada from PA.
* No DRM
Like the other poster said, you don't have to use any DRM'd files. You can throw all of the unprotected AAC or mp3 files you want on the thing. Also, Apple does let you do quite a bit with the files. You can share them on I think up to 5 devices now, and you can burn them to cd. I have yet to run into a situation where I wanted to do something with files I bought from the ITMS that I wasn't able to.
* More colors
Well you can buy that hideous U2 black and red IPod now.
* Decent remote
The inline remote Apple sells is pretty decent, it's just frustrating that they make you buy a new set of head phones with it.
* Digital I/O
Not really what the IPod is intended for. It's a portable personal music player, it's not meant to be connected to your home stereo, it's meant to be connected to head phones.
There are plenty of things I would change about the IPod, the first thing that comes to mind is for it to scroll song titles while you are browsing your library. Very often you get several tracks in a row with the exact same name and no way to tell them apart other than listening. This is especially true when it comes to audio books.
-matt
1. You don't like it? Buy a mini.
2. The iPod gets 12 hours now. The iPod Photo gets 15. Whaddaya want? A micro-fusion-reactor?
3. Only in fantasyland, buddy. DRM is pretty much necessary to keep Apple from getting sued out of business by the RIAA. You don't want DRM? Start a lobby group and make it illegal.
4. It's a portable music player, not a home stereo. Remotes are available as part of the Bose SoundDock and there's a third-party IR remote available.
5. The device is compact...where the hell are you going to cram a digital I/O (TOSLink) port?
You may not have 80GB of music, but those of us with hundreds of gigs' worth are drooling over the idea of an 80GB iPod.
blog |
...the 1,8" disks are completely unbuyable. I'd love to replace my 20GB disk with the 60GB one (laptop) - except even though they've been announced ages ago, are in the iPods and are shipping, there's nowhere to buy just the disk :/
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The iPod's music is stored in a set of "hidden" (you can see them with the shell in OS X, but not with the Finder or at all in XP) folders, together with various XMLish files that tell the iPod what's available and what the playlists are. To copy music from the iPod is a simple matter of finding the file. To copy music to the iPod requires updating the XML files. There are free software tools to do this.
But in essense, yes, it's a regular firewire (or with 3G and newer models USB and FW) hard drive. You can even partition it, as far as I'm aware.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The storage is getting small enough that vendors could actually start making RAID available in their devices.
ie. mirror all changes over to second drive when I tell it to. Remember, IPods can be used for more than just music1
Well my mp3 collection now weighs in at 89 GB. I already have a 10 GB - so the question becomes do I forsake 9 gig of my precious music or wait for the eventual 100 GB version?
;)
But wait, I also like having a few OS'es on the pod to boot from in case of emergency or boredom - so that is another 5 GB or so atg least. Backing up my home folder is crucial (what a neat feature) and is going to tack on another 10GB. Plus photos, movies and the like.
In fact this news is already outdated for me. Wake me when the 200GB comes out (hopefully they will have ported MAME to the ipod by that point
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
If that 40GB could be put in a CF form factor the people with the high end digital cameras would likely get excited. At only 5mm thick it seems like it's heading that way.
Personally I'd like to see bigger drives than 80GB. I have an iRiver iHP-120. I had to make some compromises as the 20GB drive is too small. I like to use it as both a traditional portable, and as jukebox attached via Toslink to my stereo. OGG at Q5 is noticably degraded from the original CD, especially in the bass area. I had to use Q5 just to get all of my CDs on it to it. My CD collection ripped as MP3's at a similar-sounding quality level (~192 kbs VBR) consume well over 20 GB (the OGGs require 75% of the space, but drain the battery faster). At the end of the day, I would rather have FLAC on there... but that would require about 100GB.
if they're 0.5cm, or close to that, this may be seen as a way to expand the capacity of the mini - or at least heading that way.
There in only one reason I can think of that small hard drives are not currently used on digicams: power consumption. If the iPod (and its imitators) were not caching info to flash memory and having to run their mini hard drives all the time, the longevity of both the battery and the hard drive itself would be significantly reduced. Unless you are willing to compress all video shot on your camera, the memory format will need to be able to write at a speed of no less than 25 Mbps and flash memory is only now getting up to that point -- and it's ain't gonna be cheap for an application like this, methinks.
from
I dunno, 4000 bytes isn't really that big these days...
Actually, 40 harpibytes would be (40 * 1024) yottabytes, which is 49,517,601,571,415,210,995,964,968,960 bytes. That's pretty big, even by today's standards.
bp
there is only DRM on iTunes purchases. it doesn't really have anything to do with the ipod. i have 4000 non-drm'd songs on my ipod.
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
Stack a pair of 40gig drives to get to 1cm.
.5cm drives?
I know... battery drain for 2 drives... but you don't have to spool up both drives at once.
You could have separate archives on separate drives.
Really, you could use 3 drives, implement RAID.
All 3 drives could spin when docked.
Photos on one drive, video on one drive, music on 3rd drive.
40gig on
-- No sig for you!
The disadvantage (for me) is the lack of a very long battery life, which is a common feature amongst most HDD based players, in my opinion, if you only listen to a few CD's each day, and you like the radio, go for a smaller 512mb or 1gb flash based device with a built in radio. iRiver ones seem to fit the bill nicely with battery-lives that dwarf the iPod, but again, they essentially are aimed at different areas of the same market, ask yourself "do I need it?" and base your decision off that.
And hell, pay off you're debts first, you work hard, probably doing a job you would rather not be doing and then you throw away your hard earned cash on interest payments for a credit card with which you bought shit you probably don't really need? Solve that first mate and you'll have more money overall to buy gadgets and gizmos.
2005/Q3?
Ah good, so that means it is safe to get a current top of the line iPod without worrying that a new one will come out, and the one you just got will be available for $100 less the next month.
Now can I please get a 10 or 20 gig IPod for $99?
Bastards.
Apple free since 1990!
2. The iPod gets 12 hours now. The iPod Photo gets 15. Whaddaya want? A micro-fusion-reactor?
YES
iRiver does this, iPod does not.
Also, the iRiver (iHP-120) records. IMNSHO, this is what really sets it apart. Not just shitty little 64kbps 'voice' recording, but any bitrate on-the-fly mp3 or wav recording. With digital and analog inputs and outputs, and a suprisingly decent quality lapel microphone. As standard equipment, not an add-on that you have to buy.
Oh yeah, an FM tuner as well...
Oh yeah, and upgradeable firmware as well...
I guess it depends on what you are looking for, style or functionality. Me, I like the flexibility.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
it's way to late to buy one of these for christmas. so far as I can tell, everyone is sold out of everything
------ Free Mac Mini! Better than an iPod! h
I have some money to blow on a toy for Christmas. Why should I buy an iPod over any of the other MP3 players out there like the Creative Zen?
Honestly, thats a good question (one that I have been asking myself recently as I am in the same position with some Christmas money to blow and I want an HD based MP3 player)
I have been trying to decide between the Zen and the Ipod and I have decided on an Ipod for several reasons (and I'm not even a "Mac person").
First and foremost I am choosing the iPod for build quality. Just holding it in your hand it feels more solid and well made than the Zen. Second, the design is the best, at least according to my tastes...it's very nice to use, look at and hold. Another thing is I have seen A LOT of negative reviews on the web regarding the Zen's build quality (particularly the headphone jack). There seem to be a lot of poeple out there who seem relatively intelligent (at least they were articulate and seemed compitent in their reviews) and are very unhappy with their Zens. Also, there are TONS of accessories for the ipod. Cases, battery packs, software utilities (even for Windows), from MANY manufacturers...this is not critical, but it's nice to have a selection of accessories to choose from when it comes to a product like an MP3 player.
I agree...up till point 5. It's perfectly possible to use a stereo or even mono plug to put a digital signal over coax. You could even auto-sense (by default). It probably depends on the innards if an additional IC is needed. Most high end sound card have this feature (e.g. my soundblaster audigy). Optical might be more difficult.
This would cater to the people who have large music collections and have no interest in storage of photos or a need for a colour screen. Like me.
Given that the iPod Photo has significantly longer battery life with a colour screen, one with a b&w screen could probably increase the 12 hour duration as high as 15.
I'm still not convinced that video is the way to go at the moment, mainly because it's such a niche area. Digital photography only really took off for the average Joe a couple of years ago with the reduction in price of digital cameras to an affordable (and in many cases, dirt cheap) price.
At the moment, I'm looking at the photo iPod simply because I want 60 gig. It's somewhat disappointing to think I'm paying out extra money for the photo functionality that I'll never use.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
So you want us to tell you without doing any work yourself? Go read some reviews of the Zen and competition. You'll find that the others lack excellent navigation, or have quality control problems, or lousy customer service, or are bulkier.
Might seem a bit obivious to me, but why don't you just put the database updater software on the actualy ipod itself, it plugs in as a external drive so it should be quite capable of running a file from it.
Hb is harpibyte, hb is hectobyte, 100 bytes indeed.
Kirinyaga
That's wonderful... why don't you go complain to Toshiba then, since not only do they not make the iPod but the article clearly indicated that they didn't even mention Apple in the announcement.
Maybe I'll post a reply to this article talking about the zoom quality on my digital camera (hey you could stick a microdrive in it, so it's just as on-topic, right?)
-b
myselfmusic
That's why I'm holding out on it as well. But I figure by the time they support Ogg Vorbis they'll be powered by cosmic rays or something so you won't need batteries anymore.
what the fuck are you talking about? I have an eMac ad have no such raster defect.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Those of us with hundreds of gigs worth of music really need to take a hard look at their hoarding issues...
There's a setting in iTunes that says "enable disk mode" or something like that. If you check it, the IPod is available as a disk drive (I forget if it is on by default). I think there's also a button combination you can hold down that will do this straight from the IPod, but I'm not certain what it is with the 4th gen IPods. On a Mac (from what I've heard) you can even use the IPod as your boot drive. Not 100% certain why you'd want to, but I'm sure some people have come up with some interesting uses for that feature.
-matt
I assure you that you can see the music dir under XP. I'm looking at \iPod_Control\Music\F00 right now and see a bunch of my mp3s.
-matt
iPod "mezzi," perhaps? :)
The mini is too small (storage-wise) for me, but I'd love something about halfway between the Photo and the mini. Actually, I'd love a mini with a 20 GB drive or better, but that's not happening any time soon.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
they already have an 80G drive model
It's so funny, I remember how I, as a teenager, painted everything (my alarm clock, my bike, etc.) in a combination of matte black with glossy red. Thought that was very cool, which it problably was, because that clock was before its paintjob white and orange. That was ugly then, that is in my taste ugly now. L'histoire se repete, because we just had / still have a wave of orange design (Abba revival, Hooters? :-), but when I painted my clock and bike, it were the early 70's. So this new :) U2 iPod, yeah, real modern color scheme by Apple....
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Sheesh, it was +5 a minute ago. 12-15 hours seems long enough (if they keep the current trend going with the latest devices). Just plug the darned thing in before you go to bed or something.
I think the shrinking of the 40 gb hard drive from .8cm to .5cm is much more important than the creation of the 80gb model.
Maybe Toshiba has already developed such a drive and has not publicly announced it yet? I wouldn't be surprised that the iPod Mini gets a 20 to 40 GB hard drive within the next 18 months.
I think 512x384 is the minimum resolution a portable DivX/XVid player needs to support to be useful.. as far as 640x480 would be optimal. A recent build of XVid at around 1mbit looks great at those resolutions, or around 141 kb/sec with 128kbit audio. This gives roughly 157.6 hours in 80GB or 80-100 movies.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
The Japanese manufacturer didn't mention any customers by name of course, but having supplied Apple with micro hard drives to date, it seems likely the relationship will continue with the new, higher capacity.
We all remember the fit that Apple threw when they pre-announced Apple's order for the 60-gig. Seems like they're thinking things through this time.
I've got both a third gen 20GB iPod, and an Archos AV400 PVR.
I use the iPod solely for music, and the Archos solely for video. If Archos ever got their act together and shrunk the device even a little, integrated a remote and smartened up the sw then I'd drop the iPod in a hearbeat.
I've got a one hour long commute each way. For me that is nothing more productive then watching the overnite market news instead of listening to music. I haven't messed about much with movies and such, but for catching up on the news the Archos can't be beat!
At least until Apple enters that market.
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this is great!
the option of having all my music stored in an uncompressed format is becoming closer to a reality!
I'm sure Apple is planing on using these in the new Newton that will be released at MacWorld SanFran next month.
[hint] Imagine how many HyperCard stacks 80GB can hold?
I know a lot of people say this is too big, to much this or that, but really, if you have over 20GB of storage, you are not really targeting the casual music listener (other than the gullible ones, who think bigger is always better), but people with an interest in having their music collections in a good quality with them.
Of course, the iPod doesn't support lossless compressed formats, but this is about a harddisk that could also be used by better audioplayer manufacturers.
Anyway, a record, ripped in good quality, or even lossless will run between 100MB and 300MB. Let's be conservative and say 150MB per album. That means that on this disc will have space for around 500 albums. (rounded down to be on the save side, if you have only mp3 playback this number might grow to be around 800-900 albums)
500 albums is a medium sized collection for music lovers. (and 800-900 is not excessive) Personally, I would really like to see players with 80GB that are small and have good battery life. I don't care for colour screens and video, image and other capabilities (apart maybe from recording or digital in/out) and I would really like to design a menu for a music player. (is it so hard to have different random modes: artist, album, year, genre? or the ability to schedule songs to play next without generating a playlist?)
Oh well, I guess I'm not a good target market, I want to control how I listen to the music I love...
CC
If you don't like the white then you've got the limited edition black with red dial version out right now as an alternative.
For only $50 more... I hate white cars, but if I had to pay 10%+ more for one that wasn't white I'd certainly be driving a white one.
I think the real point here is just that white sucks. Yeah, no one sees it but you, but if you don't like white then that's kind of boring. It's especially annoying when the mini's come in different colors so you know it's not like Apple is blind to the idea of using color. Of course if you somehow manage to accumlate more than 5 gigs of music, you just might not want the mini...
Except the iHP recording is buggy....
4 9159&postcount=8
http://www.misticriver.net/boards/showpost.php?p=
Those of us with hundreds of gigs worth of music really need to take a hard look at their hoarding issues...
Nah, not really, with HD space as cheap as it is right now, why rip your music low bitrate? Go 320kbps MP3 and be stoked knowing you'll never have to re-rip your music. This, of course takes up more space, so at a high bitrate 100s of gigs is completely reasonable for a music lover's collection.
The math is right, you yanks ought to find out how the rest of the world formats their numbers.
Okay, I'll paraphrase: "White sucks. We want black." Blue and pink. Pah, who actually buys that shit?
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Arrrrrgh!!! If you don't like the iPod, don't buy one, but please come up with some better excuses!!
* More colours, white sucks
Ever heard of the iPod mini?
* Better battery life
12 hours is not enough!? Really!? Do you have power in your house, or do you rely on solar power flash lights?
* No DRM
You have an issue with iTunes, NOT THE iPOD!!! The iPod plays DRM free mp3.
* Decent remote option
It's an iPod. It's small enough to hold in your hand. I never could quite understand why it had a remote in the first place! The iPod is roughly the size of most remote controllers! The only time I really appreciated a remote for the iPod was when they came out with the Burton iPod Jacket. I snowboard, and listen to my iPod while doing so. The jacket made life perfect.
* Digital I/O
You want digital I/O to play back compressed audio!? Why? If you plug the iPod into your Mac, and have a digital I/O USB interface (like I have) you can still get the digital I/O. A bit clunkly, but since I don't see the point in digital outputs for compressed audio, it's all the same.
1. You don't like it? Buy a mini.
Being limited to 5 gigs isn't worth it just for the color...not really a good alternative.
2. The iPod gets 12 hours now. The iPod Photo gets 15. Whaddaya want? A micro-fusion-reactor?
12's not bad, but they have competitors that are getting 18+ hours. That's a big difference.
4. It's a portable music player, not a home stereo. Remotes are available as part of the Bose SoundDock and there's a third-party IR remote available.
Once again, competitors offer standard...
Focusing on the news of the smaller, lighter 40GB drive, coule there be other applications of this in a device such as the iPod mini or even an Apple branded cellphone?
Or perhaps the 80GB will me a debut not in an iPod for music and photos, but in an iPod-like PDA/Table/Treo type device.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
retro fit a lot of camera models with this. Will get fully uncompressed digital video. Yum with a cherry on top.
reel stream
Well come on up to Canada we'll even get you married!
I bought my wife a 20 GB iPod (3G) on the strength of the user interface. The iRiver was the strongest competition at the time, and it was not pleasant to use. I've since bought an iPod mini to use at the gym, and the click wheel is even better than the previous design.
There are players with better specs. and lower prices. I have yet to find one that can compete with the iPod design.
No text for the fucking countrist.
The AirPort Express already offers a combination analog/optical digital output jack. Don't be too surprised if that widget makes its way into an iPod dock.
But I fail to understand why anybody would want it on the iPod itself. There are no optical digital headphones, and if there were you wouldn't want to carry them around. The dock connector provides a way to get digital audio in and out via the dock. Put the combo jack in the dock and you're done.
I write in my journal
One of the reasons the U2 iPod is $50 more is because it comes with a shitload of U2 songs("more than 400"), including the new album. If you don't happen to be a U2 fan, this probably has little value to you but if you are, well then it seems worth it.
I'd LOVE to use my 10gb-er as additional storage, as it's always in my bag with the iBook (which runs close to out of space if I'm video editing on the bus) But it's full of music. So, I'd imagine the ipod would do double duty, the more free space it's got.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It was a great setup, but I haven't seen that style of connector used in a long time. The only other place I'd seen it was a few years ago when I bought a Panasonic portable CD player in Japan. It seemed pretty common over there, but I couldn't find anything like it in the US.
-Redundancy Man strikes again!
http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio/
Then buy ye the U2 iPod. It's black, and damned cool at that. Just a pity it's U2
Pfft - Sorry, what?
I already heard somewhere that Chris Rock has two ipods - one music and one speeches/comedy/spoken word. Maybe i should have the 80GB pod for regular use and then a 10GB "Pimp Pod" for "special circumstances."
Not a bad idea at all...
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
12 hours is not enough!? Really!? Do you have power in your house, or do you rely on solar power flash lights?
Well 12 hours is the absolute max you will ever get with a new unit, quiet volume and no changing of tracks. I do most of my music listening on long-haul flights. I could easily be travelling 20 hours door to door without power in between. I ended up buying a Zen Touch - not as nice as the iPOD in many ways, but it has the battery life I need.
The Lord of the Rings movies were made by passing around digital footage stored on iPods that were just used as portable firewire hard drives.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You may not have 80GB of music, but those of us with hundreds of gigs' worth are drooling over the idea of an 80GB iPod.
I've had an 80G portable music player since May.
It plays Ogg Vorbis (and MP3 and WMA but I don't use them) and gets an eight hour battery life. Since June 03.
It also records (noisy biult-in mic [works good for lectures] and line-in).
I paid $400 for it with a 20G HD in June 03, dropped it while it was spinning in May 04, and got an 80G HD for it for $160. You can get it new with an 80G HD right now for $400. Or $250 for the 20G.
Why is an 80G iPod (released at the earliest in Fall 2005) big news? It's not.
Did I mention the firmware was released as Free Software?
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
switching them on your iPod - like old 8-track cartridges?
It would be way cooler to have a car stereo that takes hot swappable hard drives that are packaged to look like 8 track tapes. It could even insert "clunk" sounds every 10 minutes if you really wanted to feel like you were back in the 70s.
I agree...
I have several devices that use the mini optical jacks. It wouldn't be hard to put one on the iPod. But then again... who are we fooling? Why are we worried about a digital output on the iPod when the average consumer is going go load it up with 128kbps mp3s? The bottom line is mp3 players are NOT intended for audiophiles!
Or there could be a lot of people like me who are looking forward to the day when I don't have to worry about what lossy codec sounds better than the other at a given bit rate.
Bring on big drives and lossless compression!
For just music maybe not.
I keep thinking about all the other uses an iPod has though. Don't know about the Windows side of things so much, but on the Mac side, you can even boot your computer from an iPod.
So when I'm looking at something as portable as an iPod with that much storage I'm thinking maybe I really can carry around all the info I want in my back pocket. -Well not really my back pocekt...
Actually, you probably can't. Assuming a 0.1" deformation of the bottom of your foot, you'd have to jump from 150" or 12.5 feet. If you landed without any other shock absorption (flex of your skeleton), you're almost certain to break somthing (you're ankles, most likely).
At first I mis-read that as 150'. From that height its not just your ankles breaking; your femura* will shoot right through yor pelvis. As to whether their final resting place is inside or outside of the body is left as an exercize to the reader.
Ok, I have grossed myself out for the morning.
<<shudder>>
Apologies.
* Good word, huh?
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Their is an unsubstantiated rumor that Quicktime NG will be released at Macworld in San Francisco in January. Part of the rumor includes: "Support for .ogg, heAAC, and FLAC audio. (these will also be available for playback in new iTunes)." If it comes to Quicktime and iTunes, it will likely also appear for the iPod.
This is just a rumor mind you, but it is not quite as out there as other rumors I have seen. Maybe you should keep your fingers crossed.
a mini toslink which you can set to be a digital coax.
Um.. No it doesn't. The U2 iPod comes with a $50 gift certificate to the iTunes music store which can be used *only* towards the purchase of the Complete U2 Box Set, and nothing else. Which is really a lame deal when you consider that the vast majority of people who would want the U2 iPod are the big U2 fans who already own almost everything listed in the Complete U2 Box set.
I am one of those big U2 fans, but I skipped on both the box set and the U2 iPod. As much as I dig their music, the iPod and the box makes me think that U2 is cashing in on their biggest fans, and it sickens me.
Screw the U2 iPod. If you want pretty colors then buy a normal pod for cheaper and send it off to have it colored. Bono has enough mansions already.
...by putting in two drives and a RAID 1 controller.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Lossy codecs are hardly an issue when you're listening to music via headphones.
Even if you use that "one high quality format for all media" argument, VBR MP3s are hardly that much worse in sound quality than, say, FLAC. If 99.9 percent of people can't tell (or don't care about) the difference between a VBR MP3 and the source CD on a mid-range separates system then, really, what's the big deal?
But, yes, for the small minority that do care about lossy compression even on the move, then more space is good news.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Or with all that space available now, can we please have the firewire port back ON the player, so I don't have to carry two objects.
The greatest scam of portability has been puting powersupplies and ports on a second device...That You Still Have to Carry!!
I really miss the firefire port on the org device. At least then you could get some dual use out of it, being able to transport files as well as songs.
Sounds like good business planning to me. IPod et al just need to be careful and figure out when enough (space) is enough, and focus on selling other features (as their competitors have, to differentiate themeselves).
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
At what point in your interaction with other people, do you ask if they would like to feel your iPod. I found the whole concept of that a little strange. I carry quite a few electronic gadgets and things around with me. I've never felt inclined to ask anyone if they would like to see them or feel them.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
80gb =22days is just plain ignorance
anyone who has 80gigs of music didn't buy it all on itunes, most likely, so no neat "128kbps" standard.
i have a 90 gig music collection, 18,969 files, average bitrate of 155kbps, and the total play time is 8 weeks, 1day, 5 hours, 3 minutes and 20.690 seconds.
8 weeks != 22 days
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
So does this mean that I can replace my ipods 20gig drive with a new 40gig toshiba drive? Also can i replace the crappy 8 hour battery with a new 12 hour one? Just me thinking....
A .5cm 40GB drive is going to cost more than a .8cm sized 40GB drive, so your argument against the cost of moving to the 80GB drive is not very fair.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
i just ordered a zen touch 20gig for $175 (newegg owed me bigtime for screwing up a previous order), so we'll see how that compares.
main reason, battery life is about 2x as long, and it was under $200, which means i dont have to dip into my savings account. (poor college student)
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
Dude. Smell my iPod.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Can you accept a gas-fueled microturbine?/
http://www.telecomdirectnews.com/do.php/100/10938
2. The iPod gets 12 hours now. The iPod Photo gets 15. Whaddaya want? A micro-fusion-reactor?/
no, I want a gas-fueled microturbine!
http://www.telecomdirectnews.com/do.php/100/10938
5. The device is compact...where the hell are you going to cram a digital I/O (TOSLink) port?
Let Belkin deliver another external device for the iPod, I don't mind..
Natalie Portman pour hot grits down your pants in every single thread?
I'm having trouble filling my 15Gb iPod, despite having my entire record collection on it, now I'm supposed to make use of another 65Gb?? I'll have to rip my parents entire LP collection (containing atrocities such as Michael Bolton and Cyndi Lauper)in order to come close!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'd think it would suck to edit video on a 4200 RPM drive on a device that was designed for the HD to be spun down the majority of the time.
Seriously, the iPod HD is not designed for that sort of constant use. It loads songs into the buffer, then spins down. Rinse and repeat.
If memory serves, the HD in the ibooks is not user upgradable without voiding the warranty (as opposed to the PBs, which is user upgradable). So for your purposes, you want one of those bus powered (for editing on the bus, right? =) FW drives, but god knows what that'll do to your battery time!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
it still helps with 128kbps, because it eliminates line noise and the quality of the headphone amp circuit. the ipod already doesn't have the highest signal to noise ratio.
i have toslink optical in/out on my mobo, my minidisc has toslink input, my discman has toslink output, my 2 dvd players (one is a 5 disc changer) has toslink output, my surround sound reciever has 4 toslink inputs, and i have a USB toslink soundcard that came with my minidisc recorder that i can put on my laptop. they exist and are useful, and i didn't go out of my way to get any of these things. (the 5 disc dvd changer was $1 at a garage sale b/c the RCA output didn't work.)
if you put it in the dock, you then have to carry the dock around, or worse yet, move it every time you want to listen to it on your stereo or have it connected to your computer. i looked in my discman, the toslink connector isn't much bigger by any limiting means. power consumption difference is negligable, no amp circuit running.
the optical output was the one criteria i had for purchasing an mp3 player, but since VERY VERY few existed, and i didn't like them, i went with teh zen touch for it's battery life, and that i could get it for $200. i would have paid an extra $100 for an ipod or something else with a toslink, but *le sigh* it didnt' exists in a viable form. i'm a moron. mod me down.
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
No words, can express the heavy annoyance I felt when reading that sentence. Now I know why Gr.3 English teachers are always so tweaked.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
the 1,8" disks are completely unbuyable
Have you tried this new-fangled thing called the internet? You can even get it on computers these days!
40GB 1.8", ~$140
I'd say the 60GB is just a matter of weeks. Tosh are using it in their F60 player, the excess goes to Apple. After the xmas rush there should be lots to go around.
Personally I'm waiting for a reasonably priced 100GB 2.5" to drop into my Archos.
Da Blog
I was reading kinda quickly, so I obviously missed it. Which of those devices is a portable music player that you carry around with you and that, while you do, you listen to exclusively with headphones?
if you put it in the dock, you then have to carry the dock around, or worse yet, move it every time you want to listen to it on your stereo or have it connected to your computer
Buy a second one. They're cheap, like $40.
i looked in my discman, the toslink connector isn't much bigger
Toslink is obsolete. The state of the art optical jack is a combination mini headphone jack and optical jack.
i would have paid an extra $100 for an ipod or something else with a toslink
No, you wouldn't have. That's a lie and you know it. If you were willing to put up with a piece of crap like a "zen touch" (capital letters are your friends, really), then there's nothing that could have persuaded you to buy an iPod at any price.
Once again we see that some people have no taste.
I write in my journal
I fail to understand why anybody would want it on the iPod itself.
Because being able to quickly plug in digitally to a nearby amp for playback (parties!) or record (DJs!) is cool. And carrying around a whole other dock gadget is just silly. Besides, the iPod chipset has always had SPDIF from the outset - it's part of the PortalPlayer reference design. Apple just decided to not expose it on the iPod, probably because the record companies told them to lube up and bend over.
Da Blog
Toshiba says it will ship an 80GB 1.8in hard drive in Q3 2005
=)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Or, have a 40 Gb model the same thickness but with oodles more battery life.
I ended up buying an iRiver H140. It doesn't do photos, and the database is a joke, and there's no real shuffle feature (though you can hack something together for that), but it appears as a regular USB HD when you hook it up to your PC. So you don't need any drivers or software to copy anything you want to the device. The day I got it, I connected it to my laptop and copied my entire MP3 collection to it. I can browse my collection using the same filetree system I used on my laptop, and I can play WAV, OGG, and a few other formats I haven't even tried yet. The sound quality beats the Treo hands-down. It also has a radio, a record function, and optical line-out for the day when I finally upgrade my home stereo to something with digital inputs. And the remote that comes in the box is excellent. Plus I get the ease of a portable HD for storing backups and sharing software like Firefox and ZoneAlarm when I make tech support house calls.
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
Audiophiles have plenty of other excuses for not buying iPods, most of them, as near as I can tell, made up out of thin air.
For those that don't know, thin air is a huge problem if you are trying to faithfully reproduce a sound. Thicker air carries and holds sound much better, with less distortion (especially in the upper ranges).
iPods, like most other advanced electronics are manfactured in what is called a "cleanroom environment", where normal air is stripped of all it's suspended particulates. This thinned out air is then included in the iPods when they are shipped are are one of the reasons it tends to attenuate the upper frequencies, leading to muffled highs.
Hope that clarifes things a bit.
i'm sorry, i must not have meant toslink on my minidisc, i dont pretend to know everything about everything. my discman does have the combo. i guess toslink is the square one?
:)
no caps this time just for you
and you dont have to listen to an ipod exclusively while carying it around. i'm sorry you fell for that marketing trap.
my suitemate carries his ipod around, and doesnt' listen to it exclusively with headphones(SHOCK!!(like the capital letters?)). it's called a bluetooth adapter to another person's computer.
i'm sorry i think outside the box and dont share the same criterea that the average consumer does. please, rip me apart some more. i enjoy inflating your ego.
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
It'd actually be used more for 'near-line' storage than direct editing. There's no reason to keep Virtual PC images, all pictures, and video on the main drive when it can be pushed off to the iPod when necessary.
I've noticed that the iPod runs much more efficiently on the iBook than it does hooked up to Firewire on a PC...it doesn't generate near the heat. (and is powered by the bus, which is a bonus.)
HD in the ibook IS upgradable, it's just a PITA, and will wait til this thing's out of warrantee and I _really_ need the space. It currently floats between 15 and 5 gb free out of 30.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
You don't have nice enough gadgets.
In Soviet Russia, hard drive makes YOU thinner!
This is something that involves too many factors to call just like that. The iPod is a portable device and has power limitations, so it could be under-driving your headphones, for example; a technically *worse* set of headphones might sound better on the iPod if they're easier to drive.
One where you can plug in a mini plug rather than rely on a crappy mic from belkin? Then you could record from a real mic, or from a keyboard, or from a mixing board, anywhere you go. Now that would be something really useful. A dictaphone is nice, but when you have all that hard drive space it is a shame not to be able to use it as a real recording device.
Recording to MPEG is terrible for editing. At least DV throws out less information and is easier to edit.
Apple is announcing the new iPod Video based on the Toshiba 80gb harddrive. A special Paris Hilton Edition will be released in Infrared Red with her video pre-installed.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
In fact, the Apple AirPort Express has exactly that kind of dual-function jack.
Wow! That's almost a full Shitabyte!
Culture is more than commerce
You're right about the headphones. IMO its also true when listening to music in the car (too much background music) and from most computer speakers.
Where the lossless does help, is that with a "big" iPod I no longer even need a CD player with my home stereo system -much less a tape player or turntable. All those CDs can just be stashed in the cupboard.
"it appears as a regular USB HD when you hook it up to your PC. So you don't need any drivers or software to copy anything you want to the device"
Everything the iRiver does you can do with the ipod also... just go to ipod preferences and change from "auto-update ipod to library" to "manual update"
tags likwise can be changed manually -
You may say thats a hassel but "the database is a joke, and there's no real shuffle feature (though you can hack something together for that)" isn't more trouble?
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I use my ipod for music, not photos, so I didn't want to get the photo IPOD and its likely more delicate screen. I record everything in Apple lossless, which gets me about 100 CDs on my 40GB ipod. I would love the larger drive. By the way, anyone else who records in lossless noticing occasional skips while they listen, presumably due to song size exceeding the 32 meg cache size?
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
...bullshit. There are plenty of these things sitting in stacks in the Apple stores.
You might have trouble finding a 60GB model (I had to check a couple of stores), but there are tons of the 40 GB's out there. Apple may have misstepped on this one, thinking they'd get more interest than they did.
I wanted the iPod Photo specifically for the photo ability, but two things SUCK about it - I need 80 GB for my music and to hold my ~6,000 photos in full resolution (that's family, pets, vacations - not pr0n) and to also hold my 320KBS music. The other thing that SUCKS about it is that you can't view photos on it unless iTunes first processes them into a format and size to display on the lcd. This really sucks when I back up photos while on vacation; I can't look at them on the iPod.
Apple fucks consumers again; first they change the plug interfaces from the first gen, to force people to buy all new peripherals (cigarette lighter chargers, iTrip, flash media copiers), and with this they give those of us who need the space an incremental improvement instead of just going for 80 or 120 GB.
Will I buy another iPod Photo when the 80 GB's come out? Yeah, probably, but I'm not happy at getting fucked again by Apple. Face it, Apple is just as "evil" as Microsoft. Half the reason people switch to Macs is that they develop a schoolgirl crush on Apple, so I'm immune; I'll never buy one.
You can actually get great views of Divx/Xvid movies for a Palm down pretty small and it still looks good if the compression is done right. A full 1.5 hour movie can easily be reduced down to 150 MB and still be very clear on a Palm PDA screen.
m handhelds/sho wthread.php?s=580904de21df8bd7cd1f085f1fc4f364&thr eadid=64511&perpage=10&pagenumber=1
Here's a great guide from Brighthand.com if you are interested:
http://discussion.brighthand.com/pal
The iPod and Bluetooth don't have anything to do with each other. There's no Bluetooth transmitter on an iPod, nor are there any third-party add-ons that have one.
I think, possibly, that you don't know what you're talking about.
I write in my journal
Forget U2 -
How long till the Library of Congress is available on an iPod?
I wanna catch up on my light reading...
As for the shuffle, I hardly use it, so the lack of a "true" shuffle isn't a problem for me. I usually listen to complete albums in order rather than random tracks from all over my collection. The H120/H140 does have a shuffle feature, but it shuffles your music once and keeps the files in that order. You have to add/remove files to force the player to create a new "random" shuffle. Or just create a playlist of all your music and shuffle that before copying it to the player. I agree that the hacks don't come close to what the iPod offers. And if I were buying a HD player for my wife (who's not as gadget-savvy) I'd get her an iPod. But I like to be different, and the iRiver player suits me just fine.
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
Everything was going fine until you decided to get gross. Keep that in mind next time.
Is sex dirty?
Only if it's done right.
--Woody Allen
And anyway, okay, maybe one dongle is required. if it's just an XLR->RCA mini issue then you can use something like the A96F wire to handle the impedance. If all you can get is AES/EBU over XLR then you're going to need a convertor box. But so would a (current) iPod, as well as the dock. And by now you're carrying round a small backpack of gear. All things considered, I prefer optical.
Da Blog
A more interesting thing to me about the drive is that it's the first to use perpendicular recording which was covered way back when.
If I had an 80-Gig iPod, there are about two dozen or so albums I would keep as FLAC or AIFF files in the iPod, so I would no longer need to keep the CD's in the living room.
Most pop and jazz recordings sound like mush regardless of format. No ammount of equipment is going to make Louis Armstrong's "Hot Fives" sound like he's in the room, but I'll take that scratchy clay-78 sound of Satchmo's horn over a live performance by Kenny G himself any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
However, for that handful of audiophile gems, such as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, and "Love Over Gold" by Dire Straits, it would be nice to have some excess real estate on my iPod HD for lossless copies.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Dot or comma he's still off by a factor of 10, limey. Even with a shite US education I can figure that.
well if we're going to be nitpicky, might as well point out that it's really just 40 * 100 BITS.
Surely you're not serious. Did you really spend ten thousand dollars buying mundane-fi, easily destroyed itunes tracks?
Then you burned them to cd.. right?
Actually, that's my next plan. The 20gb drives weren't quite affordable enough for me, but now that 40gb drives are only a little more I've been drooling at the prospect of an 80gb raid in one of my thinkpads. Hard drives are the slowest part of laptops anyway, being able to raid0 two drives oughtta make for one very speedy laptop.
Heck, with them getting so thin as well you could actually cram FOUR drives in the drive bay of a 600 series! No disc controller to handle all those drives in the unit - but still, I find this amazing.
I think, possibly, that you don't know what you're talking about.
errm, what about this.
I think, possibly, that you don't know what you're talking about.
Even better than trying to watch a tiny screen is to be able to shut your eyes and listen to one of the many Podcasts around on your way into work...
Plus you'll probably get a lot of odd looks if you are trying to watch the Naked News on the bus.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...and able to recognize a very forced attempt at a meme that is just not working out.
If you're going to try a new meme, make it new - not just some lame rip-off of "in Soviet Russia". Hell, just Bring back OGG. That sure would be a lot funnier than the very poor attempts at humor this South Korean thing has led to. It's just sad really.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
with the right software on the PC, it can capture and output sound from the trasmitter. I believe matt is using somethign similar, but not as pretty.
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
Since when have Apple Lossless Encoding and WAV been "lossy"
:)
...
I think I missed the memo on this one
-S
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Ah, I forgot some folks are so brainwashed by herr steve they subconciously apply that branding to everything in their lives.
Aren't those just "rips?"
Too many stories about OGG around, but I did mean OOG. Thanks for the correction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
do any of us actually have 80 GB of music we would want to listen to? I don't.
49,517,601,571,415,210,995,964,968,960 bytes? You'll never fill that up.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
"is it so hard to have different random modes: artist, album, year, genre?"
The 3G iPod has shuffle by album. There are so many tags that are so rarely set properly that there's a trade-off involved. How much are you going to clutter the interface? If someone hasn't set many year tags (and most people have not) they may have trouble if they naively select a year. Selecting 1935 would probably just shuffle twenty songs on my iPod, even though I have many more from that year. Worse yet with genres because the cddb entries tend to be unreliable. I've had disc one of an album significantly vary from disc two.
"... or the ability to schedule songs to play next without generating a playlist?)"
The iPod has "on the go" playlists. Select a song, hold down the middle button, and its added to the on the go list. I could stand a little more flexibility in the details of its working, but then I only have a 3G. I hear the 4G improves immensely on this.
And of course other posters have addressed the ALE compression scheme. I haven't seen something mention that the iPods with the color screen and the photo capability actually have longer battery life than the old BW models, but I did leave this post sitting for a while.
I get the feeling you haven't sat down with an iPod for a few hours recently. I listen to music in about the way you describe, and I have no trouble. One of the quirks of the iPod is that there are many different "hold this button to do this" shortcuts that have to be memorized to get full control. The menu works, it's delightfully simple, and most of the things a control freak wants are possible if you know the unit intimately.
There is a certain point, though, at which you have to relax about things. It is a portable unit, not a computer. Requiring a unit to be able to spit out all your classical music from 1859 which is no shorter than ten minutes and was not composed by artists whose names begin with the letter "L" at a moment's notice is too rigorous. Remember that doing such a thing with a set of CDs would be an enormous effort. Only a computer player is capable of doing it automatically, and that because a computer has more input devices to do the configuration.
Remember... every control option you put in a portable player for an esoteric purpose is something you must scroll over time and again during more ordinary operation. Leaving some of these in the client software instead is a trade-off on instant gratification that's minor compared to the effort audiophiles usually put into a playing a single recording.
(Did I forget anything?)
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
One can make a case that "Telegraph Road" is the best song ever (I frequently do). The rest of the CD is decent, but pales in comparison. Out of curiosity, why'd you label it an audiophile gem?
When assessing a review of a technical or electronic product, substitute "throbbing cock" with the actual name of the product. If the review still makes sense, the review is not based on technical capabilities, only personnal opinions.
Battery on a mini DV cam corder lets you record a whole tape (90 min, ~20 GB) and run the screen (i.e., camera is ready) for a few hours. While the screen is running, the DV tape is ready to record, instantly. When at the ready like this, the tape mechanism uses no power (although the screen and rest of the camera is powered up of course). Can a HD be at the ready without spinning (and thus eating battery)?
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
There are already available external HDs that
have their own power supply (rechargable battery
pack). They have a USB and/or Firewire interface
and are marketed for use as portable video
storage.
It would seem that a RAID(5) or RAID(10) array
built from these drives for the same application,
with the same I/O, would make a great product.
I, for one, would welcome a battery powered
portable RAID for video applications and for
my laptop (on the road).
MoanWhineGripeWTFUseGoogleMoanWhine
Not everyone wants to "research it" when someone here might already have an opinion. I would trust the average slashdot user's opinion on a product than some random "dealtime.com" review, or corporate sponsored rag.
First, it's been my experience that USB hard drives suck. I've tried three different ones and on two different computers in win2k, winxp, mdk10 and ubuntu they have universally been flaky and tempermental. They also eat processor resources, which really hits laptops in hard fashion.
An external sack of firewire drives doesn't meet my definition of portable. If you can cram two 80gb hard drives in a laptop (you can, because these are about a quarter the size of an older 2.5" drive) then all you need is an external camera to feed it.
What I don't get is why no one has made an external firewire camera that has ZERO storage - price it around $300, but make up for the lack of storage by giving it better than the average $300 camera's optics and pixel rez. An external firewire drive that could do an honest 800x600 rez at 60fps progressive would offer an uncanny image and be a great travel partner in my laptop bag.
I like the neuros. It's bigger, and the ui isn't that great, but the switchable backpacks make up for all that. The open source firmware is nothing to scoff at either. Well, it does help to be a coder, but there are a bunch of nice people who help add features. And the sound quality is a bit better.
Not a sentence!
Yes, I think you'll find the huge delay between announcement of the 60GB drives and the introduction of the 60GB iPod photo was a penalty from Apple - they'ld probably arranged to buy 100,000 drives or something initially, with the expectation of buying another 10,000 a week or something and an agreement to not sell the drives to anyone else for 12 months. 6 months of not buying those drives while having an exclusive sales agreement would HURT the vendor.
Annoucing Apple will use your hardware before Apple announces it == bad. Just talk to Toshiba and ATi for references.
Nitpicking...
A CD is FAR from lossless.
I'm excited about the new formats on DVD media, but I haven't gotten around giving them a listen just yet.
Help I'm a rock.
Yeah, that PCM is a real killer - all those aliasing artifacts...
There's a reason AKNightCowboy opened with "i'm gonna get flamed for this" because his tone was arrogant. No humility in his statements. No 'sorry to bother you'. Just 'what's the big deal? there's no way the iPod could be as great as everyone says.'
/.'s had against the competition. In the comments of every review of every Archos, Creative, Rio, iRiver, and Sony mp3 player, slashdotters have already discussed the pros and cons of the competition. Meaning that while it may have been a Creative Zen review, the Archos lovers chimed it along with the iPod owners.
Fuck google. He should read any of the many reviews
Play it through a good pair of Carvers or something, and you will hear for yourself.
Also, don't discount "Private Investigations." I know it's tough to focus on the subtle pleasures of that song when you are coming down from the high of that jam at the end of "Telegraph Road", but Mark Knopfler has never played a more haunting accoustic guitar part than on that track. Play it loud enough to (on a good hi-fi system or headphones) to catch all the little string harmonics he's hitting throughout the song.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
A CD is FAR from lossless.
Agreed, but most of the CD sound problems which we once assumed were from data loss have turned out to be the result of:
1. Poor D/A algorhythms in early CD players.
2. Hi-end audio having evolved over the years to compensate for the inherent sound problems of vinyl recordings. For decades, speakers were judged as "good" according to how well they reproduced the concert experience using an LP for the source info, so when CD's hit the scene, people played them back on those "good" speakers and said "augh! The digital sound is too bright and shrill! And the bass is so much less satisfying!"
The truth is that the CD sound is measurably closer to the sound of the original master than any consumer analog format available, but on a system tweaked for vinyl, then end product doesn't sound right.
These days, a $300 Rotel CD player hooked up to a modern power amp and speakers does as well as (or better than) a turntable which costs more than five times as much.
You can still do better than CD if you spend a small fortune on a "dream system", and play Mobile Fidelity direct-to-disk records which have not been played more than a couple dozen times, but otherwise the digital format has won.
It's kind of sad, though. The arcane wizardry involved in producing "hi-fi" sound in the pre-digital era was a heck of a lot of fun. Thank goodness the physical loudspeaker (or headphone speaker) has not yet been replaced with a device that sends the illusion of sound directly to your brain, or the entire home-audio hobby would simply evaporate into mundane gadget shopping.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oops... /g/Mobile Fidelity/s//Scheffield Labs/
Mobile Fidelity doesn't do direct-to-disk recordings. They just buy and clean up existing tape masters of hit recordings.
Scheffield Labs is the company I was thinking of. They record everything directly to a wax two-track, in one of the best studios in the world.
(The engineers there are also leaders in the digital mastering industry, so you can't make a case for them simply being stubborn neo-luddites. They are just people who are brilliant at making great-sounding albums.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'm not an expert on this, but from what you're saying, because the iPod itself is constructed in thinner air, sounds produced inside of it would not be as high quality as one that someone poked a hole in and let in normal air or one that has different earbuds?
See? I knew somebody would bitch at me for something. Chill out. It's a Slashdot comment forum.. it's not like asking a stupid question uses up the last of the bits left in the world that could've went to something else like a new Linux kernel release. Sheesh. People practically jizz over iPods and what I really want to know is *why*. They are nifty gadgets, but there are dozens of similar products out there that are just as good, if not better. Quit buying shit because it's chic.
You put me on your foe list and yet you still take the time to reply to something I said?
Now I know why they're called freaks...
Really? Name a similar product that matches the iPod in smallness, easy to use UI, and physical construction quality? Now name a similar product that isn't as good as the iPod on those qualities, but whose other attributes like battery life make it overall just as good if not better.