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."

Comments

I WANT TO PUT MY PEE PEE IN YOUR POO POO HOLE

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to put my PEE PEE in your POO POO HOLE.

Re:I WANT TO PUT MY PEE PEE IN YOUR POO POO HOLE

[Anonymous Coward]

Well come on up to Canada we'll even get you married!

Poz Needs Love!

[Anonymous Coward]

burly poz top in search of skinny neg boi for raping and breeding. into fisting, watersports, toys, shitplay, and gang-bangs. very curious to try new things! bareback only please. email pater@slashdot.org to arrange a hookup!

Will it be cheaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this going to bring the prices down though?

Oh, and FIRST!

Imagine a Beowu-- Never mind.

Size Storage

[odano]

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.

Imagine...

[Niffux]

A beowulf cluster of those, only used by old people in South Korea.

Re:Imagine...

[supergiovane]

I, for one, welcome our new fresh jokes overlord!

Re: Imagine...

[gidds]

...jokes...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Imagine...

[colmore]

By slashdot standards, the old people in South Korea joke is brand new.

Oh and uh...

1. Natalie Portman
2. ?
3. Profit!

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the strip naked and petrify step...

Re:Imagine...

[ghjm]

No, that isn't how Slashdot people think. It really goes more like this:

1. Profit
2. ?
3. Natalie Portman!

Re:Imagine...

[Per Wigren]

Me too!

Re:Imagine...

[TractorBarry]

Shouldn't that be:

In Soviet Russia our, beowulf cluster of those, only used by old people in South Korea, fresh jokes overlords welcome you ?

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

>Imagine a beowulf cluster of those, only used by old people in South Korea.

In Soviet Russia, jokes about "only the old people in South Korea use email" tell YOU!

slightly off topic but

[spiny]

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 ?

Re:slightly off topic but

[Folmer]

I dont think that theese things exists, but you can have a look at www.dpreview.com and see for yourself..
The microdrives are micro harddrives in compact flash form factor.

Re:slightly off topic but

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM Microdrive qualify as one inch drives, not 1.8 inch as the said Toshiba

Re:slightly off topic but

[iamhassi]

"does anyone know of any mid-range digicams that use these or similar drives?"

digicams or camcorder? I'd love a camcorder with a 40 or 80gig drive built-in. Since you're not swapping tapes or anything you can get rid of all those ejection-mechanisms, probably more reliable with less moving parts, no tapes to buy or lose, and how many hours would 80gigs hold? Guess it depends on the format, but I'm imagining quite a few.

The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

can YOU take a 1500G blow.

Re:The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real question is...

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

can YOU take a 1500G blow.

A 1500G blow? Heidi Fleiss sure is expensive these days.

Re:The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

can YOU take a 1500G blow.

There are a large number of IPod owners and Mac zealots on whom I would be more than happy to test that.

Re:The real question is...

[adamfranco]

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?

I'd sooner see

[gilesjuk]

* More colours, white sucks

* Better battery life

* No DRM

* Decent remote option

* Digital I/O

I don't have 80GB of music (I have a 20GB player), storage of that kind will be more useful when video playback becomes mass market.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

* No DRM

STFU, you don't have to use any files that are DRM'd.

Re:I'd sooner see

[gilesjuk]

Maybe not, but Sony's new player lets you copy MP3s onto it but not off it. Does the iPod do similar?

Re:I'd sooner see

[Morgahastu]

A thinner hard drive allows for a fatter battery.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

> * 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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[geoffspear]

The iPod will let you do whatever you want with your files. It's just a hard drive.

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[buro9]

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 :)

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[fireboy1919]

Which may or may not have an effect on battery life. After all, the new drives could consume more power.

Re:I'd sooner see

[TheKidWho]

Maybe if you had done some research you would find out that you can use the iPod as an external hard drive.

Re:I'd sooner see

[AKnightCowboy]

I know I'll get flamed for this, but 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? People seem to treat the iPod like the end-all-be-all of MP3 players, yet there seems to be dozens of different models out there. Why does anyone buy an iPod when they're more expensive than other models with similar specs?

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. :-(

Re:I'd sooner see

[KozmoStevnNaut]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[fafaforza]

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?

Re:I'd sooner see

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[buro9]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[dirty]

* 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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[superdan2k]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[squiggleslash]

The iPod does appear as an external hard drive, but be aware that this is a separate concept from music being installed upon such a thing by dragging MP3s (I mention this only because I've told people a few times "Yes, it's just an external hard drive" and it's turned out the people asking the question were thinking more in terms of how you put music upon it.)

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Malc]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Flamefly]

People buy it generally becuase it looks good, and it's understood to be a good quality product that is easy to use, and people are generally willing to pay more for a device they can 'trust'.

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Microlith]

2. The iPod gets 12 hours now. The iPod Photo gets 15. Whaddaya want? A micro-fusion-reactor?

YES

Re:I'd sooner see

[tomofdarknesss]

it's way to late to buy one of these for christmas. so far as I can tell, everyone is sold out of everything

Re:I'd sooner see

[siliconjunkie]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[owlstead]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[NeMon'ess]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Flamefly]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[g0at]

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

Re:I'd sooner see

[archen]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[shmergin]

Those of us with hundreds of gigs worth of music really need to take a hard look at their hoarding issues...

Re:I'd sooner see

[dirty]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[dirty]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have any color you want as long as it's black, er, I mean white.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:I'd sooner see

[siliconjunkie]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[JFitzsimmons]

Okay, I'll paraphrase: "White sucks. We want black." Blue and pink. Pah, who actually buys that shit?

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:I'd sooner see

[_|()|\|]

Why should I buy an iPod over any of the other MP3 players out there like the Creative Zen?

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[canon006]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[AnyNoMouse]

5. The device is compact...where the hell are you going to cram a digital I/O (TOSLink) port?

This was 10 years ago, but my original Sony Minidisc player had 1/8" input/output jacks that were both analog and optical. The optical cable looked just like an 1/8th jack, but was plastic with the optical fiber in the tip.

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[muzthe42nd]

Then buy ye the U2 iPod. It's black, and damned cool at that. Just a pity it's U2

Re:I'd sooner see

[Rude Turnip]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Unknown Lamer]

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?

Re:I'd sooner see

[ruadh80]

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!

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[usernotfound]

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)

Re:I'd sooner see

[klang]

Can you accept a gas-fueled microturbine?
http://www.telecomdirectnews.com/do.php/100/10938/

Re:I'd sooner see

[klang]

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..

Re:I'd sooner see

[usernotfound]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Admiral1973]

I used a Treo 600 with a 256 MB SD card for MP3s for most of 2004 until I got tired of constantly copying music back and forth from my PC to the card. I thought about buying an iPod for about 10 seconds, then discounted it and looked at other manufacturers instead. I have never liked iTunes and the way it forces you to tag your MP3s properly. About half my CD collection is classical music, and the CDDB entries for classical albums vary wildly in how they tag files. Listening to classical albums in iTunes is a real pain if the CDs have works by different composers or different artists -- if those works are tagged differently then they may not show up as part of the same album. Since I had ripped my CDs with an eye toward listening to them on my non-iTunes/iPod Treo/SD combo, I didn't need to focus on the tags. I just wanted to listen to the albums.

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[usernotfound]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the Apple AirPort Express has exactly that kind of dual-function jack.

Re:I'd sooner see

[splatterboy]

"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?

Re:I'd sooner see

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Admiral1973]

I don't need the database feature to organize my music -- that's what the filetree system is for. I spent lots of time organizing my music into folders, and I don't need iTunes to come along and mess with it. Which did happen once, on my laptop. Luckily I keep a second copy of my MP3 collection on my home PC. And I did end up manually editing my tags, but only so the pieces would read properly in the player screen. With iTunes and presumably the iPod, some of my classical albums wouldn't have played properly without serious playlist tinkering, and I didn't see any reason to go to that much trouble.

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[scottme]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[usernotfound]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[NeMon'ess]

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.'

Fuck google. He should read any of the many reviews /.'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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[AKnightCowboy]

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.

Re:I'd sooner see

[NeMon'ess]

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.

Is it just me

[beatdown]

or are there really not enough spec numbers in this synopsis?

Captain Obvious speaks -

[EvilStein]

"I see a new, higher capacity iPod in the future..maybe just in time for MacWorld SF 2005..."

*cues fog machine*

Sounds like women

[Anonymous Coward]

They can take 500G operating shock and 1500G non-operating shock.

so when.....

[Anonymous Coward]

will we see this in the next ipod kill.... *gets assassinated* ~kalinga

shock values

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not familiar with HDD tolerance levels. What does 500g and 1500g equate to? 3ft drop and 5ft drop? Can someone explain.

Re:shock values

[TheKidWho]

500g, as in 500 times the acceleration of gravity. Ie, since the thing has a mass of 41g, using F=ma, it can stand a force of 196N while operating and 588N when it is not in use.

The Players should be able to withstand more then that much force though.

Re:shock values

[Anonymous Coward]

eeek the mass is 51g, make that 245N when in use, and 735N when not in use.

Re:shock values

[ViolentGreen]

From my experience, with the new models, the hard drive can take quite a lot but that doesn't matter if the LCD screen breaks on a single drop. That seems to be a pretty common problem. The older ones are more sturdy

Re:shock values

[KDan]

it's an acceleration rate. G = 9.8m/s.

After a 1s fall, any object will be falling at 9.8m/s (constant acceleration for 1 s, starting at 0, will give that speed). It will also have travelled 4.9m.

If the iPod was stopped, say by the ground, in 10ms (probably in the right order of magnitude. Might be slightly shorter or longer depending the type of ground, whether you have a shock-absorbant casing around it, etc), it would have to take an acceleration of 9.8m/s / 0.01s = 980m/s^2 for 0.01s. That would be an acceleration of 980/9.8 = 100Gs.

So from 5m height, if the ipod falls straight on its side and the shock absorption of that floor + casing stops the ipod in 10ms, the acceleration will be 100Gs. if it stopped in 1ms, it would be 1000Gs.

Feel free to make your own measurements of the time it takes for the ipod to stop :-)

Daniel

Re:shock values

[ThaReetLad]

well, a 1500g shock would mean stopping from 450 m/s (or 1620 km/h) in 30 milliseconds, and a 450 m/s impact would require a drop from 10.125 km (approx 6.2 miles). In reality it all depends upon how the packaging (and impact surface) deforms and absorbs the impact. Most plastic cases would deform quite a lot, so I suspect you would probably break the case of an iPod before you'd damage this hard disk.

Re:shock values

[Anonymous Coward]

Invest in a case.

Re:shock values

[onthefenceman]

Your explanation is right but your units in the first line should have been G = 9.8 m/s^2.

Re:shock values

[rjstanford]

Your explanation is right but your units in the first line should have been G = 9.8 m/s^2.

Nope, that's the rate of acceleration. The speed (represented in "distance per time") would indeed be measured in "meters per second," as the original post had it. Its just that the acceleration rate is by far the most commonly quoted statistic that starts out with "9.8 m/s" so our brains fill in the gap. Mine did too, I had to reread it to be sure.

Re:shock values

[Jozer99]

So, 9.8M/s^2 = 1g, so my $500 iPod can take a 1500 second dro [pauses to buy helicopter tickets online...]

Re:shock values

[onthefenceman]

I was referring to the VERY first line in the post where he states:

it's an acceleration rate. G = 9.8m/s.

In this case the units should be m/s^2 because the poster is referring to acceleration. The next line where the poster says:

"After a 1s fall, any object will be falling at 9.8m/s" then the m/s units would be correct. Consider dead horse well and truly beaten.

Re:Size Storage

[ISEENOEVIL]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[worst_name_ever]

I think the shrinking of the 40hb hard drive from .8cm to .5cm is much more important

I dunno, 4000 bytes isn't really that big these days...

how about adding a port for external drives?

[djeddiej]

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.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[geoffspear]

The market of people with more than 80GB of music is probably small enough that Apple can afford to ignore them.

That's actually a neat idea, but it really doesn't sound like a feature an iPod needs.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[InfectedSector]

Well, if support for lossless codecs such as FLAC were included, there would most likely be a market, for audiophiles, tape traders and the like. Most shows come in either FLAC or SHN, and traders are usually reluctant to reduce the quality of the recording.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[nadadogg]

You know what, I don't think that "Neat as all hell" is a strong enough phrase for what that would be. I personally only have about ~12 gigs of music and a 10gig 2nd gen ipod, but that sounds like a project for me once I start getting into some EE courses at LSU.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about adding an audio input?

That would make the ipod a kickass dictaphone - good for all sorts of applications.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[NeoSkandranon]

I can see it now, an iPod with an external drive attached.

With duct tape.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[Snocone]

That strikes me as a feature best left to Belkin.

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proce ss ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id =169368

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[Ohreally_factor]

Maybe Belkin, just don't give Iomega any stupid ideas.

Re:how about adding a port for external drives?

[splatterboy]

USB? Yuck!
It already has one
You can get into it using the supplied Firewire cable/dockconnector on the bottom... You dont want/need USB
You would need a bus powered (2.5") HD and it will most likely eat your battery alive but can be done
software-access-interface is another issue, but since my 2.5 FWHD is at home I'll have to wait until I get home to give it a shot...
(probably won't work)

Re:Size Storage

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[TheKidWho]

Because that drive is so much faster too.

Unless you want a slow 4200 RPM hard drive with a 15ms seek time in your computer, I certainly don't! I like my 10000RPM SATA hard drive :-D

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[KE1LR]

This was my first thought too... that this would be a good drive for laptops. My laptop (Thinkpad T40) has a 2.5" 80GB 4200RPM drive in it. Yes, it's a bit slow but the extra capacity is nice.

Personally I think the person who suggested this would be great for digital video cams was right on target too.

Or maybe a movIePOD?

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[LurkerXXX]

4200RPM? *SHUDDER*. My laptop (dell i8600)has a 60GB 7200 RPM drive in it. That extra 20 GB would be nice, but not at that speed. I can't see bringing the machine to a crawl for the extra 20 GB unless you really need it badly.

I wish more modern laptops came with an extra slot for an extra hard drive like my old dell 8100 did. Maybe the thinness of these new drives will allow manufacturers to add a slot for them. I wouldn't mind some slow access to 80 GB, as long as I have a fast drive as well for the OS, swap, and most-used files.

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[KE1LR]

Good point. Most laptops have at least one and usually a pair of PC card slots in them. I never use mine because all of the peripherals I need (wired/wireless, bluetooth, etc) are built right in.

Perhaps this will spike renewed interest in PC Card hard drives?

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to be able to have a RAID in my laptop. Striped for speed or mirrored for security.

I bet they would suck less juice too, extending battery life. That would be worth somewhat slower access speeds.

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[ducman]

Actually, the question in my mind is, why don't we have bigger notebook drives? I believe a 100GB 2.5" drive exists, although it seems to be difficult to find. If they can get 80GB in an iPod-sized drive, why can't I get > 200GB in my notebook?

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the last time, these drives weren't made to run continuously. Ipods load a few songs at a time so the drive only spins for a few seconds per every 20 minutes or so.

Re:When will we see these in (desktop) computers?

[kfg]

When you're willing to pay the premium price to gain some advantage from the small size. It's harder and more expensive to make such small drives, but space inside your desktop case is largely determined by the size of componants other than the HD, so, as a general rule, there's simply plenty of space available.

These drives are for applications where space is, of a necessity, at a premium. For instance, my multiplayer gaming centers around a six year old game (Grand Prix Legends) that is hard throttled at 36 fps. While the physics calculations are intense if you don't go silly with graphical addons a 1ghz machine will run it a max speed. I'm currently designing a custom wheel and pedal set and with todays small componants I figure I can build the entire PC to run the game directly into the pedals. Almost nothing to carry to the LAN party but my controller.

I'll pay the premium price to accomplish this (in the case of the drive that's the cost of a 10gb iPod, and I really only need 4gb), but on the top of my desk I've got a full sized tower, because I can, and it costs less, but has higher performance.

KFG

500G operating shock

[gmuslera]

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.

Re:500G operating shock

[Enigma_Man]

Even a small drop onto a hard surface can generate 500 g's, it's all a matter of how it lands, and what you're landing on. If you hit a tiled or hardwood floor, it's going to be a lot more than landing on a carpet.

-Jesse

Re:500G operating shock

[Anonymous Coward]

500G = 4 903.325 m / (s^2)

Assuming you throw your brand new iPod with a speed of 1 m/s (not a very angry throw), if the iPod grinds to a complete halt in 1 / 4 903.325 = 0.0002s, the G-force will be exactly 500G. 3m/s will give you 1500G.

Re:500G operating shock

[harrouet]

1G = 10 N.m^-1.
The device weights 62g (80GB).
So, provided your shock lasts about 10^-6 seconds, 500G leaves you until about 580 km/h.
likewise, 1500G => 1740 km/h. ... which is plenty.

Re:500G operating shock

[Anonymous Coward]

fall one meter, stop in 2mm (compression of rubber padding or case deformation) and you have 500g...

Re:500G operating shock

[HHaygood]

A one-inch drop onto concrete generates forces of around 200G. A one-meter drop generates between 8000 and 10000G.

Even with flexion of the case, I'd suspect that an iPod falling off a belt would subject the drive to at least 500G.

Re:500G operating shock

[ceeam]

Actually, _any_ speed can generate infinite G _if_ the bodies in contact are absolutely rigid. So - if you drop it from 3 feet to marble floor I guess you can have a hell of deceleration especially if drops flat, especially with it being ultra-small and thin and all that.

Re:500G operating shock

[Pakaran2]

Ok, if 1" onto concrete is 200G, how did my brain survive when I fell skiing onto ice, hitting my head directly?

As it stood, I was dizzy for a minute.

Re:500G operating shock

[pedestrian crossing]

Your head deformed as it hit the ice, spreading the impact out over time. Also, your brain (or what's left of it!) is cushioned by a surrounding layer of fluid.

Personally, I wear a helmet to protect my "money-maker"....

Re:500G operating shock

[karnal]

Personally, I wear a helmet to protect my "money-maker"....

That's one thing our sex ed class in high school taught us as well...

oh wait..

Re:500G operating shock

[maxume]

There are two things that certainly helped you out quite a bit: You didn't sustain those very high g forces for any length of time and you have fluid around your brain that helps protect it from shock.

Re:500G operating shock

[shotfeel]

I know there's a tie-in with the 500G operating shock there, but I haven't had my coffee yet...

But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[gsasha]

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.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[iantri]

There are a few issues with this idea, though:

1. The hard drive is only 4200 RPM. Not really fast enough for video capture/editing. Maybe doable if the camera has MPEG-2 compression on-board, or something, but it is cutting it close.

2. You can carry as many tapes as you want with you. If you need more storage, you stick in another tape. The same can't be said for hard drive based cameras.

and finally (you'll think I am mad for saying this)..
3. Editing is EASIER with a tape-based system. Sure, you can't do some advanced things (such as chopping out a segment, rearraging clips, etc.), but the sort of interface needed to do these complex tasks would be very difficult and out of place on a camcorder. With a tape based system, you just rewind and hit 'REC' again to record over something. More complex editing can be done by dubbing (which is extremely straightforward itself), or on a computer.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[bhima]

I think this would look great in DSLR such as a Canon 1Ds Mark II...

Come to think of it, it would make a better fit in my PowerMac Cube too!

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[gsasha]

1. Rotational speed doesn't matter - video recording is a matter of sequential writing, and the density of this thing would more than compensate for RPM. Moreover, it's not that far-fetched to assume MPEG-2 encoding on such a device.
2. 80GB ought to be enough for quite a couple of hours o'video. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I see no use of more than 10 hours off of any single event... and moreover, you wouldn't have enough storage to keep them on your comp anyway.
3. The whole point is that you will ultimately edit all the video on your computer. Said that, the only editing feature you need from the recorder is the *DELETE* button. All the rest shouldn't be done on the device itself.
DISCLAIMER: said all that, I'm currently not an owner of any video cam, and my opinion could change when I do get one.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

They already are in the Pro video world. It just hasn't trickled down to the consumer level in an affordable way, yet. We just rented a professional DVcam with a 40G hard drive that snapped onto the back of the camera. - stored about 3 hours of video, and still had its own quirks. Its not seamless enough yet for the mass consumer market, IMHO.

Remember, part of the business model at the consumer level is to sell a piece of hardware that requires frequent purchase of other media, to keep the cash flowing. This is why I think we are seeing dvd-based camcorders sooner than hd-based camcorders.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not exactly what you want, but pretty close:
Quickstream DV

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Fwonkas]

I'm hoping these will start to appear in at least prosumer models soon. My main concerns are:

1. the time it takes to capture the footage
2. dropouts

I hate that when we shoot 45 mins of footage, it takes 45 minutes to capture it. Then another 10 minutes to copy it onto a firewire drive.

There is an upside to this, in that I'm pretty much forced to view all the footage straight through before editing, which I may not do otherwise. It's still irritating, though.

And the dropout problem can probably be mostly taken care of by using more expensive tapes, but they still happen.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd still need to transfer the data from the onboard HDD to your computer. (Unless you like to use your camcorder like a hard disk, not entirely unplausible, but unlikely.) I use my DV camera quite a bit, and love it. The DV tape stays as a cheap, viable digital backup. That alone wins a spot in my heart.

If they could come up with a 0.8" Thin HDD Camcorder, I can see the benefits of the camera being SMALL, while retaining much better video quality than the current small camcorders. It wouldn't be a low end cam, but a mid range, I'd suspect. If they could get close to a VX-2000 quality into the size of a handcam (the lens would need to be a bit larger) then I would be sold on the idea. There are some times that the VX-2000 is just way too damn big and intrusive.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[SenseiLeNoir]

I use miniDV for my entire video capture/editing.

DV is significantly higher quality than MPEG2 (each frame is stored on DV, without interfram tricks), the drawback is it requires significant more storage, but is much easier to edit (each frame is a keyframe)

Each tape costs me £1.30 ($2.50) for approx 20GB storage. I send the captured video direct via firewire to my comp, with the computer handling the cutlist.

I then edit using MediaStudio, and then render a final AVI, which i send BACK to the camcorder using Firewire to a tape as a long term master. (Tapes are FAR more robust than Recordable DVDs)

Finally, once I am happy with the end result, i would use a transcoder to convert to MPEG2 overnight (i am testing various 2 pass transcoders)

This method, despite being slow, gives better results than a runtime encoded MPEG2 camcorder.

For this reason i will not go for a HD based camcorder, especially for the robustness and cheapness of Tape.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[shotfeel]

The hard drive is way faster than needed for video capture. I've got an old 5400 rpm Firewire drive that has no problem capturing DV without a hiccup (until the drive's full).

Anything from mpeg1-4 would be a lot lower bandwidth than even that (I'd actually prefer mpg4 myself). Also don't forget that rotational speed isn't everything. Combine that with data density to see how fast you can stream.

I don't see why recording over stuff and any other operations can't be made just as easy on a drive based deck.

And to bring it back to iPods, that's why the digicam I envision would have a Firewire port to connect to any external drive. One advantage of Firewire is that it is a peer-to-peer bus.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[jackbird]

You'd still need to transfer the data from the onboard HDD to your computer.

Which you'd no longer have to do at 1x speed.

I can see the benefits of the camera being SMALL, while retaining much better video quality than the current small camcorders

It's not the encoder quality or datastream size, it's the crappy optics and tiny CCDs. The solution to which is exactly the opposite of small. Besides, really small camcorders are difficult to hold steady.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which you'd no longer have to do at 1x speed.

Agreed. However, it'll still take time. Unlike copying a few songs via FireWire to your iPod, you'd be dealing with very large file sizes. Even with FireWire800, it would take enough time to go brew a pot of coffee. (Actually, with a mini-HDD, the transfer time probably wouldn't be that much different even with FireWire400.) If the transfer takes more than a few seconds, it's pretty much the same for me. I start the transfer, and then go do something else. That's probably why the 1x transfer speed doesn't really bother me right now, since I don't just sit and wait for it.

It's not the encoder quality or datastream size, it's the crappy optics and tiny CCDs. The solution to which is exactly the opposite of small.

You missed the entire point of my last post. VX-2000 - DV mechanism + 0.8cm thin HDD = smaller than current VX-2000, with the same quality. You can't debate that. At the moment you can't shrink the size of the DV mechanism, so in order to create a small camcorder, you need crappy (small) optics and a (crappy) tiny CCD exactly as you described. If the DV mechanism could be exchanged by a 0.8cm thin HDD, then you could effectively have a smaller camcorder with the same quality.

Besides, really small camcorders are difficult to hold steady.

All consumer (and pro-sumer) camcorders are difficult to hold steady. The VX-2000 is no exception. As a matter of fact, it has very little to no digital hand-wobble correction, and is susceptible to a shaky shot much more than your el-cheapo handycams, which have (crappy) digital correction.

There probably isn't a large enough market at the moment to create a small camera with a large lens (like the VX-2000 minus the DV mechanism), but I would love to have one. I do amateur interviews, and very often I need to use a crappy handycam because the subject gets a bit un-easy when a huge freakin' camera is aimed at them. The handycams are much less intrusive to the subject. People have suggested in the past that it's the large lens that people find intrusive, but a wide angle lens adapter on a handycam doesn't seem to scare my subjects away, and the lens size is not that different from the VX-2000.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Pendragn_tk]

1. I cap video from my DV-CAM to the 4200 RPM drive in my laptop all the time. 4200 is certainly fast enough for real time DV-AVI.

2. Nothing says you can't put the drives on a cartridge and make them removable. Beside, DV-AVI is 13 GB an hour. A 40 GB drive would hold over 3 hours. Much better than the 1 hour I get now from my tapes.

3. This I disagree with. I do all my editing on hard drive now, after I wait, in real time, to transfer the DV-AVI over. If I could hook the drive directly to my PC (via usb or firewire) and copy it over faster than real time I would save a lot of time.

I'd be all over a hard drive based DV cam like white on rice.

tk

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Ohreally_factor]

You might want to consider batch capture, if your editing app supports it. You can speed through your tape, marking the i/o points, then capture it all in one batch while you're doing something else.

(This is also why a clapboard is useful, even if you're not doing double system sound; it makes finding the in and out points that much easier, and can also help with clip labeling. Also, I've noticed that clapboards are generally more accurate than camera reports, probably because there are more eyeballs to catch little mistakes).

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[ColdWetDog]

"No need for tapes, easy editing... "

One reason for keeping your old, decrepit tape-based video cam is archival storage.

The tapes seem to last longer than DVD-R disks and CD-R disks are obviously too small to be a viable backup medium. While hard disk prices are falling and my new machine has close to a terabyte, if you use the camera frequently, you'll have gigabytes of archival material that you have to store somewhere.

Tapes are cheap. Baby hard disks very expensive. Maybe later....

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, someone does make something else with these. http://www.kinetta.com/home.php uses these hard drives in their storage for uncomopressed digital movie files. An increase to 80gigs doubles their current capacity. They use a raid of 13 or so of the drives in their "Film Magazines" They get double, or suddenly it's a lot cheaper to buy more and more magazines.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[waynelorentz]

I know this isn't exactly what you're talking about -- but it's pretty close.

I have a microdrive in my Sony F-828. It records 640x480 video at 30fps. You get about 30 minutes on a 2GB drive, or a lot more if you reduce the picture size or frame rate.

There are professional video cameas that utilize hard drives. The ads I've seen are mostly from Panasonic. I assume they cost more than your typical professional video camera, which is about US$50,000. But at least you don't have to digitize the video before you edit.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[waynelorentz]

2. You can carry as many tapes as you want with you. If you need more storage, you stick in another tape. The same can't be said for hard drive based cameras.

Actually, there are hard-disk based cameras on the market that allow you to swap out drives. They hold five or six drives at once and when one fills up, you can pop it out and put in a new one.

Re:But why do they insist making Ipods of these?

[lordofthechia]

That's it! All I need is a HDD enabled cam coupled with some VR glasses and Tivo software, I could finally timeshift reality!

Need 100GB+

[Cybertect]

I've got around 1200 CDs. Even 80 GB is going to be too small ripping with AAC at 160 KBps.

Still waiting...

Re:Need 100GB+

[julesh]

By my calculation (based on average CD length of 55 minutes, don't know if this is accurate for your collection) it should fit.

1200 x 55 x 60 is a little under 4 million seconds
x 160 KBps = 640 Gbits
= 80 Gbytes

It'll be tight though. You might have to drop some of your least-favourite tracks (with 1200 CDs, I'm sure there are some on there that you actually don't like, right?)

Re:Need 100GB+

[Flamefly]

Ahh the macho my collection is bigger then yours music comparison. Kudos to you sir! but I have 1201!

1200 Songs, ~10 Songs an album, ~3 Minutes a song is 600hours of music, you know what would actually useful, putting the 400 tracks you actually listen to onto a music player and turning on shuffle. It would certainly save you hitting "next track" so much.

Re:Need 100GB+

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I have 1,149 CDs in iTunes. My library is about 62 GB.

Step one: Don't use 160 kbps AACs. You can't hear the difference anyway.

Step two: There is no step two.

Re:Need 100GB+

[Nogami_Saeko]

Sure you can hear the difference, any audiophile will tell you that...

You just need your $300 ipod hooked to your $5000 stereo amplifier with $400 "monster" cables, making sure that your $8000 speakers are precisely tuned to your 600sq/f "luxury" yuppy downtown highrise condo's acoustics.

The true sound you hear is that of money being wasted... :) An audiophile and their money are soon parted!

N.

Re:Need 100GB+

[kesuki]

I can tell the difference between various encoding rates, and no i'm not an audiophile and i don't need a drop a grand, a $50 pair of headphones (if you shop around for the right pair) should be able to make it abundantly clear that bitrate matters. IT's easier to tell with certain forms of music, for instance classical mussic demonstrates bitrate loss with exceptional clarity... There are many form of 'modern' music that are so fuill of white noise that lower bitrates are actually preferable to cut out some of the noise, but hey, it depends on the type of music you have, and if you can hear the difference --; Not everyone has a good set of ears. And frankly if you've been listing to music at 110 decibels all your life you probabbly can't hear a person talking to you across a room, much less the difference between bitrates.

Re:Need 100GB+

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:Need 100GB+

[Kufat]

Some things, such as cymbals, sound noticeably bad in 192 or 224 kbit AAC, even on the junk earphones included with the iPod. (Incidentally, I've also noticed that the same MP3 file will sound worse on an ipod than on a PC when listening with the same headphones.)

Re:Need 100GB+

[mmkkbb]

You think that's expensive?

I know a guy who is debating whether to spend $200 on a TONEARM FORCE SCALE so he can accurately measure it. He spent NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS on the wires that connect his TURNTABLE cartridge to the rest of the tonearm. Apparently you can spend 30K on just the tonearm, and a few hundred kilobucks on the turntable itself.

(he doesn't let any wires touch the floor, and they only cross at 90 degree angles)

Re:Need 100GB+

[Anonymous Coward]

A typical album is about 42 minutes, not 30.

1200 albums * .7 hours per album = 840 hours of music.

At three hours of listening a day, that's 40 weeks of never listening to the same song twice.

Even if you listened to it every waking hour of the day (16 hours per day), that's 52 and a half days on "shuffle" before the list starts over again.

Of course, what he's not telling you is that, of the 1200 CD's, eight of them are four different casts performing Jesus Christ Superstar, another dozen or so represents the complete ouvre of the Oak Ridge Boys, including their post-Elvira crossover pop attempts, and 20 of them are sound-effects CD's that he stole from the public library when he was in High School in order to provide cheap foley for his half-completed independent video project. ... and those are disks that would probably make the cut when slimming down to a 40-Gig collection of AAC files. Imagine what he was forced to leave out!

Re:Need 100GB+

[trentblase]

Too bad 80GB often means 80*10^9 bytes, not counting FS overhead... he's screwed. I'm waiting until I can have my full collection portable in a lossless format. It also has to have SPDIF out.

Re:Need 100GB+

[julesh]

Sure, but (a) I rounded up the length of the collection by a not insignificant amount, (b) it's more usually 80x10^6x1024 (I've no idea why, but that's what I've been seeing the most of lately), and (c) we're talking about a portable music player, here. I reckon on your average set of headphones, 99% of people wouldn't be able to tell 160kbit from ~128kbit VBR. Maybe you're one of the few who can. I don't think I am, at least.

Re:Need 100GB+

[Anonymous Coward]

you're kidding, right?

just turn it up. or listen to a quiet part.
either way, if you have decent headphones or a decent stereo that you're playing through, it's a no-brainer.

personally, i can't listen to less than 192 anymore, at the very least.

Re:Need 100GB+

[prichardson]

Don't use 160 kbps AACs. You can't hear the difference anyway.

I can. The jump from 160 kbps down to 128 kbps is very noticable. I use 192 kbps and I can still hear the difference between that and a CD.

Since we're on the subject, I can hear this difference with a pair of Klipsch speakers connected to the sound card built into the motherboard of my G4 Tower that runs iTunes.

Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[parvenu74]

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>

Re:Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[Gehenna_Gehenna]

In Soviet Korea, old people do YOU!

{ducks}

Re:Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[AlXtreme]

In Korea only old people rant that jokes about old Korean people aren't funny anymore

Re:Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[Anonymous Coward]

In South Korea, only old people make bitter, offtopic rants at YOU!

Re:Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[shmergin]

You must be new here...

Re:Slightly OT: Lay off the old South Koreans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Either new or giving the /. crowd too much credit for not being a bunch of juvenile eggheads who have not gotten over being the ones who everyone called names and now are getting their "revenge..."

Re:Size Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Oh my goodness,

[-acksaw]

they gave it more storage space? I would have never seen that one coming.

80Gb = 22 Days

[rf0]

So this gives approx 22 Days of music. So now if the battery last this long it would be worth it

Rus

Re:80Gb = 22 Days

[ViolentGreen]

So this gives approx 22 Days of music. So now if the battery last this long it would be worth it

This is getting as old as the windows BSOD jokes. I'm sure all the Rio Karmas an d Irivers out ther will last 22+ days.

Re:80Gb = 22 Days

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr, doesn't that depending on the bitrate? I have 100GB of FLAC files that would last less than 2 weeks.

Re:80Gb = 22 Days

[AtillaTheKilla]

The point of huge capacity mp3 players is not to have 22 days of music to play, but rather to have 22 days of music to select from.

Re:80Gb = 22 Days

[Sebastian Jansson]

And I got it to about 38 days in LAME --alt-preset-standard (assuming that it averages on 192 kbps) wich is perfectly fine quality for anyone with normal hearing. Especially considering that you probaly use less than perfect ear phones to listen to it.
Apparently he made a good compromise there. :)

Re:80Gb = 22 Days

[angle_slam]

I have iTunes on my computer with 66.91 GB of music. It says I have 32.7 days of music.

iPod is old technology

[Anonymous Coward]

but if you want to put 80gb in my mp3 playing cellphone/pda , please do it quickly :)

Re:iPod is old technology

[the_2nd_coming]

why? so it can explode and deafen you?

Re:iPod is old technology

[lost_n_confused]

You better hope for more then an 80 gig drive since you have to load your music by bluetooth or an IR port. How many days are you going to spend loading 80 gigs on your cell phone?

Re:iPod is old technology

[Admiral1973]

I hope your cell phone has better MP3 playback sound than my Treo 600, because when I moved up to an iRiver H140, the difference in sound quality was phenomenal. And I use the same headphones that I used on the Treo. Just because my cellphone can play MP3s doesn't mean it's the best option for music. I'll take a dedicated MP3 player any day over a cellphone with that capability.

Rio Karma upgrade possible?

[TokyoBoy]

So, I wonder if these drives could be used to upgrade the Rio Karma....Anyone have an idea?

Re:Rio Karma upgrade possible?

[XMyth]

Not the right form factor I'm pretty sure....

But this may interest you.

Re:Rio Karma upgrade possible?

[jaf1230]

Actually, I believe that it is the correct form factor, although I'm not sure that the drive itself will work, due to the ipod's strange formatting. You can't take a generic correct dimension drive and put it into an ipod. However, you can do so with a Karma. If the drive fits physically, it will almost definitely work with the Karma. It just needs to be ATA-5 AFAIK. Oh, and riovolution.com has some people who happen to work at Rio, so you can ask them any other questions you might have.

Great now

[reconflux]

if someone would only port MAME to the iPOD, i'd stop crying.

Re:Great now

[wed128]

Does the Ipod have the horsepower for this kind of thing? Not a troll, just wondering...

Re:Great now

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the Ipod have the horsepower for this kind of thing? Not a troll, just wondering...
They fit a horse in that thing too?? But it doesn't even have a screen? Or joysticks? What am I missing? Is it a new cliche joke? But have they ported MAME to it? Is it even really that funny? Can I make a post entirely in questions? Is it possible? Let's find out?

Re:Great now

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got a Lucille Ball fetish too?

Because people buy them

[parvenu74]

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.

Re:Because people buy them

[gsasha]

Ok, you misunderstood me. I'm not ranting about IPODs - they're nice and well. I'm ranting that there is an obvious and cool application of this technology that they seem to be missing.
I was actually planning to buy a digital video cam, but the moment I thought about the possibility of HD-based one, I decided to postpone the whole thing and wait for them to appear.
It may take a year or two, but I'm pretty confident they'll be the new rage. And all necessary technology is already here.

Re:Because people buy them

[The One and Only]

Apple Lossless is just AAC at high enough bit rates not to lose any data. I have a few things encoded in Apple Lossless and they're the exact same file format as my AAC files.

Actually it does

[acomj]

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.

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 .) 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.

Re:Actually it does

[TheKidWho]

its not an urban legend!

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/2 8/ 1429243&tid=176&tid=3

Re:Actually it does

[nearlygod]

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/28/ 1429243&tid=176&tid=3

Fixed... no space.

80 gb

[simon hughes]

... that's more storage than my laptop has. :-O

IPod? No, PDA!

[fireboy1919]

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.

I was so excited until......

[p.rican]

I realized now Apple will have yet another high capacity music player I'll never be able to afford. Thanks Steve

Re:I was so excited until......

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not that you can't afford it, it is that you will never be fashionable enough to own one, you dirty hippy. Thanks Steve!
Ohhhhh shiny....

apple marketing semantics

[beaverfever]

"1.8in HDDs are 0.8cm thick"

You mean .8cm thin. Sheesh - get with it.

Re:apple marketing semantics

[krough]

"1.8in HDDs are 0.8cm thick"

Pick one measuring system, please!

God news for iRiver H120 owners

[Ulbrekt]

The 40 GB drive will fit in an iRiver H120! My old 20 GB drive is almost full.

Do some math...

[dark-br]

80GB storage
6MB mp3 file
--------------
13.334 songs
99 cents/song
--------------
1.326 bucks to full load the damn thing!!!

Re:Do some math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all mp3s cost money. Thanks to http://www.archive.org/audio/ I have about 60GB of mp3s at no cost to me.

Re:Do some math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you need to check your math. That would be $13,199.99

Re:Do some math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math is a little off there, buddy

Re:Do some math...

[smatthew]

I think you are off a few decimal places......

Re:Do some math...

[jxyama]

1) iPod doesn't need to be full.
2) mp3 or whatever the format used need not be 128 or 192 kbps. in fact, i can see 80 GB being filled quite easily by classical music enthusiasts who may be able to at least consider using AIFF with such a large capacity.
3) if you have 200 to 300 CDs, which isn't all that rare, that's already over $2,000 in investment you've made and will give you over 2,000 songs. it's surprising how much investment over the years we've made in various things. CDs are one of them. video games are another. (Think of how many titles you own... multiple by $20 a pop, add $200 for the console/accessories...)
4) off topic, but considering the U.S. centric nature of /., you may want to reserve "." to designate the decimal point and not the 1,000 separator. :P

Re:Do some math...

[justforaday]

Why do so many people think that the only way you can get music onto an iPod is thru the iTMS???

Not to mention, if it only cost a buck thirty to fill one up, I'd be all over it...

Re:Do some math...

[2nd Post!]

80 GB storage
6MB mp3 file
14 songs per CD
975 CDs
$10 per CD
$9,750 to full load the damn thing

So let's flip the logic.

What if, IF, you already have 50 CDs? 200 CDs? 300 CDs?

If you have $1,000 in music, or $2,000, or $3,000, the cost of an iPod is CHUMP. What's $249 for 4g? $299 for 20g? That's essentially nothing when you consider the ability to access almost 1,000 CDs at any one time.

Where before the iPod you could only access 1, maybe 10, CDs depending on your mp3 player.

Re:Do some math...

[doodlelogic]

the ability to access almost 1,000 CDs at any one time

The iPod only has one stereo jack...

Re:Do some math...

[Anonymous Coward]

cut him some slack. he works for NASA.

Re:Do some math...

[Espectr0]

I think you are off a few decimal places......

In countries where people use the metric system, the decimal notation is the comma (,) and we use the periods as separators.

I just wish they were buyable....

[Kjella]

...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 :/

Re:I just wish they were buyable....

[grioghar]

Apple's been using up all the stock generally, or at least that's been my understanding from a lot of the articles I've been reading. The tech will eventually move over into the commercial retail/OEM sector, but it'll probably be a year or two more before that happens.

Total speculation, as I can't find any of my articles I've read to back that up.

RAID mirroring in devices

[dangermen]

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

Re:RAID mirroring in devices

[wahsapa]

this might actually help with the camcorder idea posted further up

Oh so very close

[ihatewinXP]

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 ;)

Re:Oh so very close

[Anonymous Coward]

By then you'll have 209GB of music.

Re:Oh so very close

[pklinken]

Well, you could store 80 gigs on ur new ipod, and the other 9 gig on ur old one :)

Re:Oh so very close

[deiksac]

I don't believe you are able to listen to it all. To me a decent size of a collection is somewhere around 20 Gigs - when you get some new stuff, you delete the one you had not listened to for last six months.

Another point is that your "precious" collection will have some 300 Gigs when the 200 GB drive is out. Or will be gone due to some hard drive failure or theft :)

Re:Oh so very close

[angle_slam]

Just because you haven't listened to something in 6 months doesn't mean it's not worth listening to. In encoding my collection, I've come across CDs I haven't listened to in years. Guess what? I still like them.

Compact Flash Type II deminsions .5cm thick

[cmiller173]

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.

Re:Compact Flash Type II deminsions .5cm thick

[agent dero]

.5cm is 50mm

100mm == 1cm

Re:Compact Flash Type II deminsions .5cm thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. NO. 0.5 cm = 5 mm. 10 mm = 1 cm.

Re:Compact Flash Type II deminsions .5cm thick

[agent dero]

gak, whoops, worthless room-mate, he's supposed to know these metric conversions :P

Re:Compact Flash Type II deminsions .5cm thick

[mirabilos]

You'll be soon supposed to know metrics in and out,
e.g. take a look at the 14th line of
http://mirbsd.bsdadvocacy.org/cvs.cgi/src/gnu/ usr. bin/cvs/doc/cvs.texinfo.diff?r1=1.8&r2=1.9&f=u
which you are supposed to read too ;-)

anyone know how thick the ipod mini drives are?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

HDD on digicam

[parvenu74]

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.

Re:HDD on digicam

[gsasha]

I don't know. Is a HD more power-hungry than a tape drive? Doesn't sound intuitive to me, but I may be wrong.
Any concrete data?

Re:HDD on digicam

[XMyth]

Yea...that and a HD based video camera could be much bulkier (allow for a larger battery) than the iPod can.

Re:HDD on digicam

[shotfeel]

Seems to me a hard drive would be a lot more efficient.

Another factor is that a major part of the cost and bulk of your basic camcorder is tied up in handling the tape. And those mechanical parts (and aligment) are usually what fails.

Re:HDD on digicam

[John Harrison]

Why limit it to flash memory? It could be standard ram, which is generally cheaper than flash anyhow and is plenty fast. It makes no sense to think only in terms of flash.

Re:HDD on digicam

[MacDust]

Why limit it to flash memory? It could be standard ram, which is generally cheaper than flash anyhow and is plenty fast. It makes no sense to think only in terms of flash.

Are you talking about using standard RAM instead of using a HD to store video?

What happens when you turn the camcorder off, if you only have standard RAM?
You would loose all your data when you turn it off!Besides, HDs are still cheaper per MB/GB than flash or standard RAM.

Re:HDD on digicam

[John Harrison]

No, the RAM is for the cache, so that the hard drive doesn't have to be spinning the whole time. You store a gig in ram, then write to the HD. If you turn it off, then it writes to the HD before shutdown. I am just saying that RAM makes more sense for the cache instead of flash, and that you should keep the HD.

Re:HDD on digicam

[MacDust]

Ok, I understand what you are saying now. It sounds like a good idea, but if I am not mistaken Flash Memory consumes much less power than standard RAM.

It's a good idea, but the trade-off would be the battery would not last as long as the 8 or 12 hrs it does now.

Re:HDD on digicam

[John Harrison]

it depends on the type of ram. Also there are different ammounts of power involved for different operations. For instance SRAM takes power to flip a bit but very little if any power to keep it that way. DRAM doesn't takes some power to flip but also some power to maintain the state of a bit. Flash takes power to rewrite a bit and then it stays static until rewritten again. The disadvantages that flash has are that it is very slow compared to the others and it can only be rewritten a limited number of times before failing. These limits are always improving though. In any case DRAM is cheaper and faster, while not consuming an enourmous amount of energy. Certainly much less than constantly running a hard drive.

Re:Size Storage

[Black Perl]

> I think the shrinking of the 40hb hard drive
from .8cm to .5cm is much more important

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.

Stack two 40gig drives...

[bs_02_06_02]

Stack a pair of 40gig drives to get to 1cm.
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 .5cm drives?

Re:Stack two 40gig drives...

[Ohreally_factor]

I was actually thinking along these lines for laptops.

But if one were to RAID 3 of these, you wouldn't have three separate volumes. I guess it depends on the RAID scheme, but wouldn't one have either one big volume or a mirrored volume (if RAIDing for redundancy?)

Re:Size Storage

[Jucius Maximus]

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.

Great

[Remlik]

Now can I please get a 10 or 20 gig IPod for $99?

Bastards.

Re:Great

[2nd Post!]

Have you tried eBay?

Re:Great

[Nexum]

Unfortunately, the cost of making any drive is still going to have a basic foundation level of cost. So if Toshiba did go back to making 10GB drives (maybe they still do) then it's really not going to be much cheaper than the larger sized ones.

Re:Great

[System.out.println()]

A $99 MP3 player is efficient. It's cheap.

Two things, however, it is not:
1) Cool
2) Profitable

A $199 iPod might be feasable, but you can get older models of them off ebay for less than that. That's been Apple's strategy with computers for awhile - If you want to spend less than $x, you might have to buy used.

Re:Great

[IdntUnknwn]

Hm, I have personally tried eBay, unfortunately I have been unable to purchase an iPod at anywhere near $99. Meanwhile, I have seen some incredibly stupid behavior, such as pushing prices above the original retail value. What is wrong with these people?

Re:I'd sooner see [OT]

[pedestrian crossing]

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.

Next steps for Apple

[Mr_Silver]

Although I am in no way an expert regarding Apple's strategy, I'd love it if they create a 60 gig version of the non-photo iPod.

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.

they should stick to making only ipods!

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of dumping defective eMacs to the public...

That fucking "raster" defect has made me take my eMac to the AppleCentre for 5 times now! What a waste of money, good OS though. Good OS, fucking crappy hardware.

Also since its my first time using a Mac, i'm not impressed. This is the last time I'll bbuy anything Apple! I'm sticking to a Windows OS (and hardware) where it may be crappy but at least the hardware's STABLE.

Re:they should stick to making only ipods!

[the_2nd_coming]

what the fuck are you talking about? I have an eMac ad have no such raster defect.

Re:Size Storage

[kirinyaga]

Hb is harpibyte, hb is hectobyte, 100 bytes indeed.

Re:Size Storage

[the pickle]

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

What about Neuros?

[duffbeer23]

they already have an 80G drive model

Re:What about Neuros?

[maskedbishounen]

I'd love to buy one, actually. Well, except for the fact that they've been promising Ogg Vorbis and FLAC since at least a year ago, and more recently Musepack; alas, they've yet to deliver on any of them. For the price, I need to know it's actually going to happen first.

At least they're giving some thought to those of us who don't want to transcode our entire collection to MP3 (quality loss), or spend weeks re-ripping our CDs all over again.

Someone wake me up when you can plug one of these drives into a PDA with enough juice to last a week or more, and has a player that supports more oddball formats than you can shake a stick at....

ZZZZZzzzzz

Re:What about Neuros?

[duffbeer23]

from what I can tell (don't own one...yet), they *DO* support OGG Vorbis

spec

and I would expect FLAC support from these guys sooner than Apple or anyone else for that matter

Re:What about Neuros?

[lost_n_confused]

The reason they do is you are carring a brick in your pocket. Go anywhere size: 5.3" x 3.1" x 1.3", 9.4 oz. Look how thick it is. What if I ducktape my iPod to a 3.5" hard drive and have 400 gigs of storage bet that would really imperss some people. People want the small size and weight and putting a laptop drive in an MP3 player doesn't achieve what the bulk of the people want. I have never even seen a person with a Neuros. On the other hand I see iPod owners all the time.

Re:What about Neuros?

[maskedbishounen]

Aha. I was looking at their site just yesterday, and looked no further than their FAQ entry that still says it's coming in 2003.

I guess they should update that, one day.

modern design: black and red

[wwwillem]

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.

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....

Moderators on crack

[denjin]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Re:IPod? No, PDA!

[kryptkpr]

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.

Ah! They learned their lesson.

[nativespeaker]

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.

Video will kill the MP3 star

[The Mutant]

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.

Re:Video will kill the MP3 star

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't drop the iPod - that'll void your warranty.

Re:Video will kill the MP3 star

[Anonymous Coward]

An integrated remote? Sounds convenient...

Re:Size Storage

[weenis]

this is great!
the option of having all my music stored in an uncompressed format is becoming closer to a reality!

Perfect for the New Newtons!

[Johnny Mozzarella]

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?

Re:Perfect for the New Newtons!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypercard stacks are for homos. But don't worry 'cause "it's OK to be gay".

Re:Perfect for the New Newtons!

[shotfeel]

Because we all know the new iPods they're announcing use Flash cards!

finally "collection in a box"?

[chuckychesthair]

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

Re:finally "collection in a box"?

[ChocoboKnight]

Apple does support a lossless compression format with the iPod.

With iTunes 4.7 http://www.apple.com/itunes/, you can encode to Apple Lossless Format, which can compress to half the space an uncompressed song would.

Re:finally "collection in a box"?

[xirtam_work]

Of course, the iPod doesn't support lossless compressed formats

Wrong! Apple have their own Lossless compressed format called 'ALE' - Apple Lossless Encoding.

Re:I'd sooner see [OT]

[XMyth]

Except the iHP recording is buggy....

http://www.misticriver.net/boards/showpost.php?p=4 9159&postcount=8

The math is right

[Anonymous Coward]

The math is right, you yanks ought to find out how the rest of the world formats their numbers.

Re:The math is right

[utexaspunk]

no, i think the yanks are right on this one. which makes more sense to you?

one thousand, three hundred and twenty six

or

one thousand. three hundred and twenty six? Periods end things, commas separate them. That seems to be true for most European languages, anyway...

Re:The math is right

[klang]

well, there is a zero missing from the amount .. doesn't have anything to do with numberformats ;-)

I would love to pay you 1300 dolars for about 13000 songs .. I would have a tough time selecting that much music though ...

Re:The math is right

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "the rest of the world"? As a "yank" I am unfamiliar with this concept.

Other applications?

[amichalo]

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.

why not do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

retro fit a lot of camera models with this. Will get fully uncompressed digital video. Yum with a cherry on top.
reel stream

Go 'yank' yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

No text for the fucking countrist.

Re:Size Storage

[Matey-O]

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.

Re: Video cam that uses a hard drive...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.jvc.com/presentations/everio/

I think you are onto something

[ihatewinXP]

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...

Re:I'd sooner see Battery Life & more Battery

[threeturn]

Lots of people posting comments like this: * 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?

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.

How about a car version that looks like an 8 track

[bitingduck]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[shotfeel]

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!

Re:Size Storage

[shotfeel]

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...

Ogg

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:Ogg

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Maybe you should keep your fingers crossed

I think so too.

G5 Powerbooks, Ogg-playing iPods and OSX Tiger... *drool*

iRiver iHPxxx has this

[Anonymous Coward]

a mini toslink which you can set to be a digital coax.

Speed issue could be resolved...

[bennomatic]

...by putting in two drives and a RAID 1 controller.

Re:Size Storage

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:Firewire

[atomicbirdsong]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Reignking]

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).

Re:Size Storage

[nolife]

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.

Re:80Gb = 22 Days WRONG

[usernotfound]

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

iPod Hack

[Pooldraft]

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....

Re:iPod Hack

[jaf1230]

In short, no. I was looking into it myself, and the ipod uses a strange formatting. Seems to me you can't even buy a 40gb ipod and take the hard drive out and put that in your 20gb (no point, either). The security Apple uses has not yet been cracked.

Re:iPod Hack

[Vizzue]

Well, that's a cool idea, but I doubt it'll happen soon. The industry's catching up with hacks and such, and I'm pretty sure they'll stay ahead. There's that, and that most people (definetely me), would probaby fry the whole thing, and never have an iPod. I'll stick with store-bought.

Re:Size Storage

[RainbowSix]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Ohreally_factor]

Dude. Smell my iPod.

Would you rather...

[Atragon]

Natalie Portman pour hot grits down your pants in every single thread?

Re:Would you rather...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Korea, only old people pour hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants! And she likes it, uphill, 40 miles, both ways! And in Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman pours the grits onto you! In 3 feet of snow! Profit!!!!

Re:Would you rather...

[adpowers]

I love that, even when new memes arise, the old ones still live on. Many of these were around from when I first joined /. a number of years ago.

Is this needed?

[Vvornth]

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!

Re:Is this needed?

[Cnik70]

I need 2 250GB drives to fit all my cd's ripped to MP3's...and those are only sampled at 128bps. It's one reason why I never will buy an iPod.

Re:Is this needed?

[angle_slam]

I've encoded 891 albums, taking up 66.91 GB of space. I still have two drawers full of CDs that I have yet to encode and I still buy 4 or more CDs per month.

Re:Is this needed?

[Vvornth]

Is your name Donald Trump by any chance?

Re:Is this needed?

[angle_slam]

4 CDs per month = about $40. You don't need to be Donald Trump to afford $40 per month. On the music mailing lists I'm on, there are more than a many people with over 3000 CDs.

Re:Size Storage

[Ohreally_factor]

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!

dtgjgd

[templest]

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.

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.

Drives Available On Froogle

[meehawl]

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.

Plug and Play

[meehawl]

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.

Re:Plug and Play

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Because being able to quickly plug in digitally to a nearby amp for playback (parties!) or record (DJs!) is cool.

Ur. Maybe. Except in my experience most equipment you're going to find at places like that isn't going to have an optical input. It's going to have a balanced XLR input. But there's always an exception, I s'pose.

And as for the rest ...did you really feel your comment was improved by the vulgar sexual imagery? Everything was going fine until you decided to get gross. Keep that in mind next time.

Captain RTFA speaks -

[Ohreally_factor]

Toshiba says it will ship an 80GB 1.8in hard drive in Q3 2005

=)

Re:Size Storage

[stemcell]

Or, have a 40 Gb model the same thickness but with oodles more battery life.

Re:thin air

[ExMember]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Matey-O]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[BasilBrush]

You don't have nice enough gadgets.

More Than Slightly OT

[coachvince]

In Soviet Russia, hard drive makes YOU thinner!

Too many factors

[Anonymous Coward]

(Incidentally, I've also noticed that the same MP3 file will sound worse on an ipod than on a PC when listening with the same headphones.)

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.

how about a REAL audio input?

[commodoresloat]

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.

you want DV, not mpeg, dude

[Anonymous Coward]

Recording to MPEG is terrible for editing. At least DV throws out less information and is easier to edit.

Re:you want DV, not mpeg, dude

[shotfeel]

You're right. As has been explained to me enough times I should know, mpg1,2,4 are good for a final product, not for something to be edited.

For that you do want DV. The only down side being size. That 80 GB drive will still hold over 6 hr of DV though. That would be enough for me.

In related news

[3nuff]

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.

Re:In related news

[darkshadow]

I thought the special Paris Hilton Edition was going to be in Night-Vision Green...

Re:Size Storage

[keytoe]

Wow! That's almost a full Shitabyte!

Re:Size Storage

[shotfeel]

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.

bigger disks, excellent

[bwhalen]

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?

Re:bigger disks, excellent

[ludlow]

Probably like many others out there, I have been trying to find every little iPod gadget available for the holiday season. I think some of the new accessories are really going to benefit from a new drive -- one in particular I was looking at was a headphone amp (I think it's called the A1) from some company named Simpl Acoustics. I honestly do not know what sort of a product this is (would love any thoughts), but having invested in a pretty nice set of headphones awhile back -- they claim that this new amp will not only drive my headphones, but also will allow be to hear a wider range of sound within them (assuming of course that I used an uncompressed sound equivalent such as lossless). This poses a bit of a problem to me as I will obviously need about 10x more space to encode all of my music in lossless. I think the iPod will only go from great to greater if I can actually have the space to encode everything via lossless and then use some product to actually hear the differences!

Sold Out? I Call...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:Palm movies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here's a great guide from Brighthand.com if you are interested:
http://discussion.brighthand.com/palm handhelds/sho wthread.php?s=580904de21df8bd7cd1f085f1fc4f364&thr eadid=64511&perpage=10&pagenumber=1

Need ~ Schmeed - Gimma a 1 TB iPod!

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget U2 -

How long till the Library of Congress is available on an iPod?

I wanna catch up on my light reading...

Dirty

[meehawl]

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.

Re:Dirty

[Twirlip of the Mists]

And anyway, okay, maybe one dongle is required.

Going from Toslink to AES over XLR isn't job of a "dongle." It's the job of a piece of rackmount gear that's about nine and a half inches by two by six.

Going from a mini jack to analog XLR, however, is a piece of cake.

Which kinda demonstrates that optical digital out of an iPod would be a big ol' waste.

Perpendicular recording

[Gogo Dodo]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Golias]

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.

Sodoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Dot or comma he's still off by a factor of 10, limey. Even with a shite US education I can figure that.

Re:Size Storage

[trentblase]

well if we're going to be nitpicky, might as well point out that it's really just 40 * 100 BITS.

you're joking, right?

[poptones]

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?

Re:you're joking, right?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

They're called "CDs," dumbass. See, back when you were just a wee little boy, we had this method for delivering music that predated the Internet. It's called a "CD," and it's a shiny piece of metal about six inches across. A whole album could fit on one of those. Back in the 80s and 90s, lots of people bought lots of them. Now they're using that modern miracle, The Computer, to turn them into music that even a mouth-breathing hatchling like you can recognize.

laptops

[poptones]

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.

Podcast

[SuperKendall]

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.

Or around for quite a while...

[SuperKendall]

...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.

Re:Or around for quite a while...

[jaoswald]

I think you mean to refer to OOG, the OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN. Although I sometimes enjoy OOGG.

iPods most definitely support lossless enocoding!

[jstockdale]

Since when have Apple Lossless Encoding and WAV been "lossy"

I think I missed the memo on this one :)

-S ...

itunes?

[poptones]

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?"

Re:itunes?

[adpowers]

What the fuck are you talking about? No wonder I have you on my foe list. Where did you get off that he was brainwashed by Steve? He said, "I have x CDs in iTunes." WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?

Correct!!

[SuperKendall]

Too many stories about OGG around, but I did mean OOG. Thanks for the correction.

lets be honest

[rubee]

do any of us actually have 80 GB of music we would want to listen to? I don't.

(obligatory)

[roesti]

49,517,601,571,415,210,995,964,968,960 bytes? You'll never fill that up.

Re:(obligatory)

[notthe9]

You obviously don't pirate like I do.

Portables have different requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

here goes nothing

[roesti]

I, for one, welcome what Jesus would do to Natalie Portman's in Soviet Russia, where all your imagined beowulf cluster are belong to old people in South Korea and are run Netcraft-confirmed DeadBSD... you insensitive clod!

(Did I forget anything?)

Re:here goes nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no hot grits.

Or cavemen shouting.

I've been on this site too long.

Re:Size Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Size Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well, besides that tape is cheap

[beetle496]

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)?

Re:laptops & portable RAID?

[quarkscat]

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).

Not exactly portable

[poptones]

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.

Why not a neuros?

[DMUTPeregrine]

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.

Re:Ah! They learned their lesson.

[Large Green Mallard]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[prichardson]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Xyde]

Yeah, that PCM is a real killer - all those aliasing artifacts...

Re:Size Storage

[Golias]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Golias]

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.

Re:Size Storage

[Golias]

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.)

Re:thin air

[maccam94]

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?

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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...