Slashdot Mirror
Rip CDs Directly to Your iPod
Kevin writes "A company out of Taiwan has released a device that rips audio cds directly to your iPod. It converts them to MP3 and even does all the tagging for you." Zettabyte, the company producing the units, hopes to hit market within the year and while it could work for any MP3 player, it is being marketed exclusively for the iPod right now.
How long til the RIAA finds this out and makes them disappear from the face of the earth. Good idea, but I have a feeling it won't hit the market, and if it does, it won't be there long.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Will it cost less than the iPod itself? I mean, yeah it's cumbersome dragging out the laptop and stuffing CDs in it, but I already have it. I'm not going to shell out US$200+ for yet another device to clutter up a desk drawer during the 98% of its life that I'm not using it...
Just junk food for thought...
Really, once we know the iPrice we'll know if the iUpload would be worth it. For now it seems like a strange thing, after all, if you have an iPod you pretty much HAVE to have a computer, yes? Why buy something to do something that you already have a computer to do it? This is not something that is completely portable either. Honestly I just don't see much use for it - "oh no, I don't want to have to use iTunes or [insert CDripper software] to make mp3s! I'd much rather have yet another thing to plug in to do something my computer would do if I just clicked a couple of things!" Next we'll hear they have a iUploadremote to operate the iUpload from accross your living room...
fak3r.com
This device from Zettabyte will also save you from using all your ten fingers when changing or revising your playlist as everything is automatic.
As much as it's dumb that iTunes is supposed to be the only interface to your iPod, I do like the ability to visually manage playlists and create smart playlists. I don't think this device will be able to automatically decide that I want $song on $playlist.
Sometimes I feel like +1 Reasonable should exist.
Another company beat them too it, called it iLoad.
http://www.iload.com/index.html
They could be vaporware, but they were hitting the news sites in January. It didn't take long for an Asian company to rip off the idea though. Hopefully iLoad got a few patents in place first.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It's too damn ugly.
/Mac and iPod owner
Direct away from face when opening.
Notice the three (apparently) buttons? In, synchronize, out? Offering to burn CDs from your iPod, or back up music to an internal drive?
Interesting. I wonder how much hardware this thing has. It looks big enough.
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
Oh great, more crappily-tagged songs. I don't think there's a CD tagging service out there currently that's not half-crappy. I sure as hell wouldn't want stuff on my iPod until I've been able to run it through MusicBrainz and get things cleaned up and presentable.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
What is the actualy intersect of people who own digital music players but don't own a computer? It's hard to imagine too many iPod owners out that that don't have a computer...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...also known as .m4a, also known as AAC. The vast majority of players support the standard (and by vast majority, I mean the iPod plus maybe a couple others. And an increasing handful of cellphones).
BTW, is QuickTime/iTunes still regarded as the best MPEG-4 audio encoder, or did FAAC ever get its (rather mediocre) act together?
If you look closely, you will see a cable between the CD reader and the iPod.
I can't really see a situation where I would have a need for something like this.
I can't think of more than a tiny handful of times in the past 6 years that I've wanted to rip a CD but haven't had a computer nearby. Furthermore, this thing looks heavy, or at least bulky, so what exactly are we supposed to do? Carry it around in a little pouch just in case someone has a CD we want to rip? You're probably going to need to keep it at home, which further negates the entire point of having one. iTunes - for all of the perplexing, intense rage people have towards it - is incredibly good at doing what this device does and it doesn't charge you a dime for the privilege.
On top of all this, the industrial designer obviously put this together on his lunch break or something as it just looks incredibly shoddy.
Well, what if you're at a friend's house and (s)he, uh, sells you an old CD. Yeah, sells it to you. But, you don't want to take the actual CD with you, because you're afraid your car will get broken in to. So, you, you know, agree to leave the actual, physical CD at your friend's house, for, you know, safe keeping. You'll probably get it later, anyway. But, you'd really like to have those tracks on your iPod, like, now. So, you whip out your iUpload device, plug it into your iPod and blam!, now you have your newly purchased, perfectly legal music in your iPod.
So, there you go, one reason why you would buy something to do something you already have a computer to do. And it's perfectly legal!
Maybe.
--
Sig nificant
After all, don't you find it weird that you have to have a bulky device like a desktop or a laptop just to transfer a very small file into an equally tiny device?
Why do I need yet another device to do something that my existing bulky desktop already does?
What we really need is a hardware device that can rip MOVIES to iPod video format quickly. Waiting hours to rip a DVD is just insane. Why can't they come out with a super fast way to rip them to an iPod??
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I don't know what's funnier, mods moderating his post as "insightful" vs "funny", or the two replies (as of now) that actually answered seriously?!? Man, people around here need to lay off the caffiene :)
I've already got a tiny device that rips music directly to my iPod.
I think it may actually be smaller than the iUpload, but I had to BYODKM.
If they're not from Taiwan, where ARE they from?
(remember, you said they are "out of" taiwan, not "in" taiwan, so if they're "out of" taiwan, they must be somewhere else....)
Sorry, dude. Had to.
Sweet informative mod.
If you look at the box an iPod comes in, or at any of Apple's ads for the iPod, they have a definite trademarked logo. It's the word "iPod" written in a particular sans-serif font.
And at least on my 3G unit, it's printed on the back of the device itself, right under the Apple logo. Maybe they've stopped doing this on the newer ones.
And printed down at the bottom of the back side, near the FCC ID, it reads "Copyright 2003 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved." (Actually it uses the Copyright symbol but I think Slashdot will eat that.)
So yeah I'm pretty sure they're going to have to change that part of the iUpload's logo. Although Apple does have a licensing program that lets you use various trademarks, I very much doubt that they would let someone incorporate an Apple trademark into the name of a third-party device. It might make people think it was actually an Apple product by mistake.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why not just get an Archos Jukebox or any other mp3 player that already has the feature to record from any audio source?
Sure it won't automatically tag the files for you but it is much more convenient being able to record anything while anywhere...
Heck, mine has a standard audio in, an optical audio in, and a built in mic.
I just keep a patch cable with it and I'm good to go.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
I work in in the merchant marine. On board ships I work a large number of us have laptops and MP3 player. Ripping to a player seems obvious to us. I have the opportunity to talk with a number of people out here who don't have either. Several have asked if there was a way to buy and ipod preloaded as they have no desire to buy a laptop.
Seems this device would hit the older crowd who would like the advantages of the ipod without having to learn several new piece of technology in order to use the IPod.
MusicBrainz is hardly the bastion of correctly-tagged anything. The way CDDB works is far better and doesn't rely on some vague "sampling" method. I've seen lots of times where MusicBrainz figures out tags for half an album, and half of those are labelled as coming from a "Best Of" rather than the original album.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
So why not just buy a portable disc player and be done with it?
There are absolutely no legal uses for a device like that here. The very job it is designed to do is completely illegal, even though most people still do it and no-one prosecutes anyone for it.
The problem is that we don't have legal fair use here, making everyone who has an iPod and most people with a CD burner or a VCR a criminal.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Your criticism may seem to be logically sound, except for the fact that it's premised on a fallacious and flawed assumption, i.e. that the RIAA itself behaves in a logical and rational manner. ;-)
Buy Creative. Seriously, why are people still buying iPods when they still have these ridiculous limitations? They're not even technically mp3 players!
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
Hell yeah! I bought an Archos AV420 last spring and have never regretted it once. I was watching my ripped DVDs while riding trains and planes across europe before the iPod video prototype even existed!
:)
There is really no excuse for any proper geek to own an iPod besides trying to look cooler than they actually are. iPods are overpriced and under-featured. There are many good mp3/mpg4 players which are much cheaper and provide far more functionality than the iPod. Of course they aren't designed with your grandma in mind, but anyone with even a little computer experience should be able to figure out how to use them properly. Some of my friends scoffed at mine until they saw that I was watching episodes of Family Guy during my lunch break
What possible objection could the RIAA have to feeding MP3 files to your iPod from this gizmo
They think it's illegal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Trade dress
You can register the use of a sans serif font, *in a certain context.*
Sorry guys, but from that photo, I'm not convinced that this "product" is anything more than an early April Fool's joke.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You are incorrect. You cannot trademark the sans-serif font (I believe that would be copywritten by the font foundry), but you can definitely trademark a particular word, written in a particular font. It's called a "Typed Drawing" in USPTOese.
Apple has half a dozen different trademarks on the "iPod" name, for various uses, but the 'Typed Drawing' trademark, as opposed to the trademark just on the word itself (the "standard character mark"), is 78089144. Here is a link, although I'm not sure if it will work. If it doesn't, you can also just search the USPTO's site for the trademark number.
And in looking at the iUpload's logo again, even if this weren't the case they might still be infringing, since when you look at their logo, becase of the font difference, "iPod" is readable almost as a distinct word from the rest of the letters; even if they just changed the font I think they'd still run into Apple's standard character mark.
At the end of the day, you also have to consider how much money Apple has, and how much cash they could burn protecting their trademarks. They've done it before -- with the vague iMac lookalikes a few years back -- and eventually won. So even if their case was lacking in merit, they could probably bankrupt a small firm through aggressive legal action (although in this case I think they'd have more than enough grounds).
(As for colors, you can trademark them also. Kodak, for example, has a trademark on a very distinct shade of yellow, when used in particular contexts. More on trade dress at Nolo.com.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."