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Dell Launches Flash Music Player
desert island writes "Dell launched a new flash-memory digital music player, named DJ Ditty, to compete with the iPod Shuffle. Both devices are $99 and come equipped with 512 megabytes of memory. The biggest difference between the devices is the Ditty's 1-inch LCD display screen, which helps users navigate their music lists. In addition, the Ditty can receive FM radio and sport a rechargeable lithium polymer battery that can provide up to 14 hours of continuous play."
The main difference between the ipod and this player is that the ipod plays AAC files (and not WMA) and this dell player plays WMA (and not AAC).
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Since the linked story doesn't have pictures of the MP3 player in question, here's the official page from Dell. Enjoy.
--
RumorsDaily
fyi its P. Diddy
If you're going to post an article about a new product, it might be helpful to post a link to the product. I kind of like being able to see pictures of what the article's about...
Flash stick mp3 players? Doesn't PEZ make these now? Who cares!
It'll probably never be in the nano though, that thing's pushing it as it is on size.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productde tails.aspx/dj_ditty?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
My spirit takes a journey through my mind...
Why no radio? Well, it makes sense to us Apple users. The iPod, and the entire Apple experience, is intuitive for a certain kind of person. Artists, fashion mavens, leftists, and other creative personalities can sit in front of a radio-free portable media player and just "get it," but accountants and everyday pencil-pushers don't have a prayer. Squares should stick to Rios and DJ Dittys. iPods are for different thinkers.
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Evidence?
http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/7792/img08079i
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3600/img10156rv.
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2539/soho0uj.j
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5614/img66606p
http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/6756/img64271jj.
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5082/bleeder0w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1672/img85083c
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7234/img82642a
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/787/img60047ow
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/4819/img58719t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/9681/img46882w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8519/img45081g
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/3102/img39464t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7783/img07414p
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5816/img07328r
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5096/img07309m
Versus:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3118/ms1by.jpg
http://img270.imageshack.us/img270/7789/linuxnylu
FYI - He dropped the P.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I realise I'm feeding a troll here, but you do realise you can still buy music on CDs and rip them with iTunes, don't you?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For a couple more bucks you can get an iRiver which are much better players.
some of us use them for listening to other types of audio media which sounds OK at 64kpbs - like PodCasts, etc. At least with the Dell, I have the option to use a lower encoding bitrate. It says 220 songs, which typically implies music, which typically implies things that will sound like ass at 64kbps. And Apple lets you use any encoding you want so I'm not sure where that statement came from...
...and that's all there is to it.
iPods can be put into one of two modes: player mode and storage mode.
In storage mode, it becomes an external hard drive. Music files copied to the iPod in storage mode cannot be played when the iPod is put into player mode. Unless, that is, one uploads one of the many third party pieces of software that allows you to do just this.
In player mode, one does have to use something akin to iTunes to transfer files. But that something does not have to be iTunes. There are many third part programs that will suffice. This is how iPods can be used with Linux, which doesn't have iTunes available.
So, out of the box, your friend is correct. But one can easily fix the problem by installing third party tools.
Unlike Apple, Dell actually sells something other than digital music players.
Are you trying to troll here? Apple sells lots of things other than digital music players; it's just that their main market right now is the iPod. It may shock people to find out that Dell sells more than just inexpensive home computers but it's true. Actually Dell and Apple have very similar product lineups on their online store with the major difference that I can see is that Dell doesn't have their own software line and just resells Microsoft's.
Dell's offering
:P
As you'll notice its a little longer thinner (depth) and not as wide. I doubt the Zen Nano was packing extra space inside just for the heck of it. Dell also has a 5 band equalizer compared to the Zen's 4 band.
So the conspiracy theorists can go back in their holes now
-everphilski-
Diddy =/= Ditty = "a short simple song"--very music-related. What the fuck are you talking about, troll?
http://www.dellditty.com/
What happens, I bet, is that Dell realized that Ditty is going to be an utter failure following iPod Nano, and decided to save marketing dollars on it.
Part of the reason the iPod works so well and has such a responsive interface is that it keeps a detailed database of all the MP3s and playlists stored on it. This database has to be updated each time you add songs to the iPod, which means you need to use iTunes or a third-party application to transfer the songs over.
Otherwise, the iPod just acts like a Firewire hard disk - which it is, when it's hooked up to your computer.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
64 kbps WMA
It seems that every single player that can handle WMA uses 64 kbps as the song estimate. Some label them as "x songs, x/2 songs in mp3". Something tells me that this is a part of Microsoft's PlaysForSure campaign that tries to encourage the use of WMA, by only licensing it to those people who will advertise it like it is a Messiah.
Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decade's worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell.
Meh. I do not see Apple's design to be superior. A bit different, and definitely higher quality that the average crap, but nowhere close to revolutionary.
badness 10000
This article analyses and explains why the shuffle sounds the best of all major mp3 players: Shuffles Secret
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
For those whose browsers don't link outside of
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Thats true, all their players have an option to mount as extenal hard drives. It hides your music library, and the remaning space can be used for whatever. You'll be able to view any text notes, address books, and pictures (if you have a color display) directly from the iPod, but anything else isn't playable or viewable. But its nice to be able to carry a few movies and documents with you. As far as filesystems, you can format them in "PC Mode" or "Mac Mode", which I imagine refers to Fat32 and Ext/Reiser/whatever the hell OSX uses, respectivley. I'm aware the later is probably a technicaly superior filesystem, but I don't see a practical advantage, since OSX can read PC Mode and PC's can't read Mac Mode. Anyone out there have a little more insight?
Anyways, they're not trying THAT hard to keep you from manipulating the library, it's really not much more than a hidden folder. But the file and folder names aren't very human-readable, they're hashes (I'm not positive if this is done to discourage manual editing, or is done for efficency to reduce disk seeks or something), and I believe an index is kept as well.
So a drag and drop into the library won't work, and editing by hand would be tedious, but there's a lot of FOSS stuff out there to manipulate it. Of course, none of them are as pleasant to use as iTunes, but if you don't feel like running Windows or OSX or want to copy from an iPod to another machine, you're in luck.
I have an Ipod. And I have a Dell DJ30 (for Rhapsody to go). And the Dell sucks in unimaginable ways compared to the Ipod in terms of user interface. It's slow. The controls don't respond instantly. The little scroll wheel is MUCH too sensitive and impossible to use while riding a bike, or driving a car, or walking fast. The feature set is lacking in terms of playlists and shuffle/repeat modes. Ok to give you an example, Say you hit pause to put the player to sleep because you don't feel like holding the tiny power button down for 6 seconds. When you want to power it back on you hold down power for an eternity and it finally comes up. But none of the buttons work for the first 10 seconds after turning it on because it's CPU is being used to initialize everything, but the display is siting there showing the last song you were listening to. Finally after now 20 seconds since you hit power the buttons start working. You hit play and wait, and wait and wait and finally it begins to play the song you were listening to when it went to sleep. You are listening to a track and want to listen to the next or previous song so you hit a track button. It takes 5-10 secons to change a track. This doesn't sound unbearable unless you consider it takes almost 30-45 secons to go forward 6 tracks. This thing is unbelievably slow with regards to changing songs, loading playlists, etc. My ipod on the other hand is instant. It changes tracks as fast as I can press the button. The DJ? To fast forward through a song you have to hold down the track change button. And hold it. And hold it. And 15 seconds later it finally begins to fast forward through the song. Dell screwed up big time by under powering what ever process they use for the operating system. The sound quality and everything is fine, but the interface is so slow and clunky that if it weren't for the wma to go capability I would have sent it back. And I don't see this new ditty player to be any better.