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iPod Casualties Offer New-In-Box Bargains
An anonymous reader writes "For the last few years makers from Creative to Virgin have proclaimed their latest digital audio player to be an iPod Killer, only to watch those portables flame-out in the marketplace. This doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them, in fact some were pretty decent. They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype. It turns out that this pattern has created a huge sub-market of new-in-the-box stock, sold for pennies on the dollar to overstock vendors who then pawn them off cheap to the public. For the price of a basic iPod Shuffle you can now acquire some well-equipped units from a few years back. Examples include the 40GB Toshiba Gigabeat F40 and AlienWare's CE-IV with external speaker system."
This one works for me. Tiny, 1GB, $50, plays mp3, mp4, wmv, etc. Charges USB, formats fat. Works with linux. I blogged about this earlier today. There are instructions there for converting DVDs to a format it can use. They have bigger ones, but who needs to load up three days worth of AV?
Note: this is new, not remaindered I don't think.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For linux intergration, the best company I have seen is iRiver. They make quite capable players, and there is software for the non-hard drive ones to interface with a linux machine, though you need to look for it. Also, their firmware comes with the ability to play the ogg format, making them all round more useful with linux.
The iPod does not require you to use DRM'd music. It plays regular old MP3s (or AACs) ripped from your CDs or downloaded from P2P or flown in on floppies by carrier pigeon, whatever source you may choose. It has the ability to purchase songs from the iTunes store, but you don't have to and if you prefer another jukebox app you don't even necessarily have to use iTunes with it.
E.g., I remember going to a few shops in '99 to get an MP3 player. (Yeah, one of those "back in my day" tales;) There was the iPod or there were some things that qualified as one or more of:
The iPod was released in October of 2001. And if I remember correctly it was priced very high. It was also Mac only for the first year.
And you can just plug in the USB cable for an iPod and drag and drop music files on it without having Apple's software or (under GNU/Linux) miscellaneous third-party software specifically designed to rebuild the proprietary file structures on the iPod installed on your computer? The last Creative music player I had access to, from what I remember, did not require any special software. It plugged into my Gentoo-based laptop and I was able to copy music files to and from it using nothing other than Linux's USB storage driver, as though it were an ordinary USB thumb drive. Can't remember the actual model (the device didn't belong to me, but to a friend whom I don't see all that often), but it was definitely a Creative, and probably 2003-2004 vintage.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
iTunes doesn't have DRM in it. The iTunes music store does. iTunes is just an MP3 playing piece of software that CONNECTS to a service that sells "DRM-piece of shit" music, SHOULD YOU ALLOW/CHOOSE IT TO.
Yes, the iPod requires you to use iTunes to put the music on it. How is this different from Sony's godawful players, and so many more? So many require their own proprietary software to allow you to download music from your PC onto the player. If you hate that, then get a player that doesn't deal in that crap. It doesn't change the fact that the iTunes program, which plays normal MP3s, can transfer those normal MP3s, without re-encoding, onto the iPod, still as normal MP3s.
NO DRM, UNLESS YOU'RE STUPID ENOUGH TO BUY IT.
Well, you can use rhythmbox, amarok, gtkpod, and others. You're not solely limited to iTunes.
Of course, it still sucks that you can't just use rsync or unison to synchronise your music. This is a major deficiency and is one of the reasons I won't buy an iPod.
Completely, 100%, wrong. No DRM is added to non-DRM'd files you put on an iPod using iTunes, gtkpod, or your own favourite iPod syncing tool. The music is stored in a hidden folder, and re-named to a hash value, which was done on the early iPods to make searching the collection fast on their slow processors, and is retained because legacy stuff like that has a habit of staying around.
When you plug the iPod in to any computer, it shows up like a USB or FireWire mass storage device. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from copying the music from the hidden folder to your computer. The tags are preserved, and so you can generate human-readable file names easily using a number of tools, if you wish.
Please stop spreading FUD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
look for the Cowon iAudio players (here's some). Cowon's website proudly states linux compatibility, and they support FLAC and ogg vorbis.
There is one reason I use an Ipod, One.
That it's interface (not the screen the butt connector) is 100% open and interfaces to a huge range of equipment.
I can dock my ipod in the kitchen wall dock and see the LCD readout of what is playing in the garage, basement, living room and bathroom on my whole house audio system's touchscreens. In the car I see the information and can browse the songs and playlists on my car's stereo screen while the ipod is safe in the glovebox out of view when I leave the car. I stop and park the ipod pauses and shuts off, I start the car and the ipod turns on and plays from where I last left off at.
NO OTHER mp3 player on the market has the level of integration. The Zune cant do that so it's already a dead body because microsoft was too short sighted.
That is why many people select the Ipod. I love my iRiver, it actually records in stereo with manual level adjustemnts at full 320Kbps mp3. The ipod cant record anywhere as good as it, but the Ipod has integration that no other mp3 player even bothers to duplicate.
That is where every single other player fails. Have that charging/dock connector be 100% open and documented and allow companies to make crap for your product without paying extortion fees back to you.
THAT is how apple sealed the deal with the ipod.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The folder is hidden in the UNIX sense that it starts with a . (or has the 'hidden attribute set on FAT filesystems) and so is only advisory. Finder won't show it, and neither will Explorer if it's set to hide hidden files, but most file browsers have an option of showing it (and you can always get to it in the terminal). You don't have to guess the hash unless you were using the filename to store metadata (in which case, it won't be displayed on the iPod anyway). If you have tags containing the correct information, then it's trivial to re-import it. In iTunes, you can just say 'Add to Library' (File menu) and point it at the folder and then 'Consolidate Library' and it will copy all of the files from the iPod into your iTunes music directory and construct file names from the tags.
Yes, Apple could have made it easier, i sharing music had been a primary aim of the iPod. It wasn't. The iPod is a device for letting you to listen to your music collection while mobile. It can also act as a mass storage device for transferring files between people.
There was no reason to make sharing music trivial, because 99% of the target audience do not have music collections that are either in the public domain or for which they own the distribution rights. When it came to a choice between adding a feature that would be of no (legal) use to 99% of their users, or extending the battery life by making the searching easier in the first iPods, they chose the second one. Unlike Microsoft, however, they did not add any technical hurdles preventing people who did own the distribution rights to their music collections from copying them off. They do not apply DRM to music that does not come with DRM. There are no technical copy protection mechanisms that prevent you from extracting the music without violating the DMCA. The only thing stopping you copying the music to your friends is the law.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I didn't say that it did. I said that it made copying files back off onto an arbitary computer awkward, so the DRM'd stuff looks less bad in comparison. As has been mentioned elsewhere, if you want to copy a particular track onto a friend's machine you have a choice of the "official" way, which means "authorising" your iPod for their copy of iTunes (or is it the other way round; I always get confused by that...) or the unofficial way, which means being able to navigate to a hidden folder and then identify the file you're looking for from its deliberately munged filename. Oh, and you'll need third-party software to restore the filename to something human-readable.
Compare and contrast to an iPod running Rockbox, or any other "proper" MP3 player, where you plug it in under pretty much any OS, it shows up as a drive and you just copy the files you want on and off of it. Apple may say they maintain this system as a "legacy", but they are quick enough to drop all "legacy" support in, say, Quicktime, if they think it'll force users to upgrade and thus invalidate their "Pro" licences so they have to pay again.
And if you want to pull your music off without any tools then, actually, iTunes will help you do that.
1) Put the iPod in harddrive mode
2) in iTunes go into the options and choose a temp directory as your "music directory"
3) while your in the options dialog, make sure "Have iTunes organize my music and copy to music directory" is checked (it will organize it in this temp directory)
4) Import the hidden music directory on the iPods harddrive into iTunes. 5) Voila! iTunes will create every directory and rename every file and copy it to your temp directory, even the encrypted mPa's. Use QTFairuse for those.
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
The Cowon A2 runs Linux and you can even get the source code for it's O/S.
No, you really don't win.
I tried out a 2GB Zen Microphoto. The "windows explorer" interface that people such as yourself insist on being so "intuitive" took over 3 hours to find and drag every song from the file system to fill it from a particular playlist. The iPod took 10 seconds to select "Sync Music from Selected Playlist" and then all that was left to do was wait a few seconds for the songs to transfer.
In iTunes one can drag individual songs from the library to the iPod in the exact same manner as you "windows explorer" types, if we so chose to do so. With all the additional things we can do in iTunes that you cannot, there can never be made a serious argument that the file system approach is better, in any way. All you need is big storage to play music cheap? I have 80GB of music that goes everywhere with me and I did it for $349. And sorry, but the interface on that Zen Microphoto was horrible, particularly that ridiculous scrollbutton on it that has three sensitivity settings.