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Hardware MP3 Players
Watchman writes "EE
Times Online Mag has a story about the new MP3 HW players
like RIO that are being developed by upstarts around the
world. Most of the article is about the Linux powered
empeg-car unit from the UK.
Also some stuff about the MP3 controversy with RIAA and the rights to the MP3 format."
after all, in free countries property rights derive from physical realities not government mandates (copyrights & imposed secure music standards??). and don't copyrights violate the most fundamental law of free-market economics (the law of supply and demand) after all the limiting factor is peoples skills, not the information - so why have the government impose copyright monopolies on it?
Some people just don't get it, this movemnet is as much about copyrights being fake as anything else!
If the empeg player had radio capabilities too, then I'd consider buying one. Certainly if it could play audio CDs as well, as I have a ton of those. But if it ONLY plays mp3s... well, I get tired of even those at times (my mp3 collection is not as large as my audio CD collection).
I would pay $2000.00 for one easily. The Empeg is not just an MP3 car stereo. this is a AutoPC platform that is 1000 times more powerful than the clarion crap. In fact to get a working auotpc from clarion you need to actually spend $3000.00 over $1200 for the head unit, another $300 for the gps interface $900.00 for the cd-changer and more for the other modules that are required. I've looked at all advanced car audio systems and the Empeg is the cheapest, highest quality, and the best solution out there, unless you want to watch DVD movies in your car while driving at 70mph (Dont laugh my car audio magazines have morons doing this, installing DVD players in their dashboards.)
The Empeg? I have a standing order for 3 units, and I will want one more to expieriment with... this unit all out rocks and makes all other car computers or mp3 solutions looke like crappy toys.
I can add a 6 disk changer to the Empeg in 3.6 seconds.
It would take no effort to do so while using standard audio components
umm, copyrights are based off a presumption that granting creators a monopoly on copying will encourage more people to create usefull works and therefore benefit society. That monopoly is often treated, and refered to as if it were a right, like property rights, freedom of speech, etc.. , but it isn't. copying really harms noone unless you fradulently claim you created somthing when you didn't. also, copyrights in practice tend to lead more to mnopolies like microsoft and RIAA, rather than true beneficial creation. you might want to check out IP not for some more arguments and links if you haven't already.
Nah - the ideal solution would be those multi-megabyte (or already multi-gigabyte?) flash-discs. When I heard about them for the first time they were considered (or proposed) for use by the american army as helicopter black-boxes.
... if it's good for the generals, it's good for you too" :)
"Ada -
I'd buy one if the sound quality wasn't so shotty..those overtones in the higher frequnecy range are really wishy-washy. Mp4 sounds decent to me. Bah, all this hype for something second rate in sonic quality.
I don't think it's that copyrights are "fake", although in a way they are (they're a legal construction).
What gets me is that the RIAA thrusts out this emoticon of "we're only protecting the artists!" while it is perfectly happy that its member companies basically get artists to sign away every right they might have on their work.
Sure, the artist might still hold the copyright on the music, but if they've signed, they've generally given up any current or future rights they might have about how their material gets produced and/or distributed, letting the recording company "manage" these rights for them.
What do artists get back from CD sales? $1? How much does a CD sell for? $12 on a good day, $18 on a bad one. Where does all this money go? *NOT* to the artist's pocket.
That, of course, is one of the major points that none of the mass market media actually seem to talk about when it comes to RIAA vs. MP3. MP3 threatens the current business model of the RIAA and the companies dependent on it. So, instead of figuring out how they can best benefit from the new technology, they choose to fight it, anyway they can. labeling the major use of MP3 as pirating. Dissing any use by individuals that mimics what they can do privately with other recording systems. Constantly pressuring that MP3 is mostly used for illegal purposes. Etc.
I have discovered a way to solve your C.D. problem. Clarion makes a radio/C.D. player that is only $179. You can order it from CRUTCHFIELD.It has a pair of RCA Jacks on the back! You can plug the output RCA from your EMPEG player into it. Then just press AUX on the radio and your MP3's are playing! It fits perfectly in NISSAN's who have an empty compartment under their radio. |---------------------------------------|
| CLARION RADIO/C.D./AUX |
|---------------------------------------|
| EMPEG |
|---------------------------------------|
Here is a company that makes a Car MP3 Player that is idential to EMPEG's for only $299!!! MPEG-CAR. It's awesome, I have one in my explorer and in my Camry!! It has a remote, touch COLOR screen, and more!
A lot of folks gripe about the nearly US$1,000 cost of the empeg but keep things in perspective... the AutoPC (love child of Microsoft and Clarion, retails at over US$1,200.
The empeg also is a low production unit, totalling only a few hundred units in this run. If someone like Pioneer or Kenwood or someone like that buys them out, expect the price to come down considerably in 10,000 unit production runs. Especially once the other competitors hit the playing field.
The empeg sounds sweet, certainly. But for the money I can think of better ways to get rid of unwanted cash.
One problem that really needs to be addressed, and this is out of Hugo's hands really, is the temperature problem. Right now you need to remove the empeg from its chassis and take it with you whenever the inside temperature of the car will get very high or very low. Considering how cold it gets in, say, South Dakota and how hot it gets in Arizona, it'll be a wonder if the thing can ever stay in the car for five minutes unattended.
We need to see severe duty hard disks available cheap for this to really take off.
Can anyone but me view this thing with Netscape 4.5? Mine crashes the second it starts pulling data.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Posted by Assmodeus:
its about time someone built one of these for the car. i was fretting about having to go buy a laptop with an enormous hd just to hold all my mp3s, and then running a cd to tape converter into the stereo so i could listen to all my music. i would gladly plunk down 950 dollars for a unit like this if it proves to be a quality product. call me crazy but i really dont care....
I wonder if any types of removable mediums like zip disks or optical disks or something are durable enough for this kind of thing. Maybe the operating system could be in memory, and all of your data could be on removable disks. Then even if your disk did go bad, if you had a PC that could read the disks, you could write a new copy and slap it in. Probably all sorts of logistical reasons why this is a really bad idea, but it's a thought, anyway...
Shawn Asmussen
It's interesting to note that the empeg isn't
:) ), with the ability to handle multiple
really a hardware MP3 player. It uses the
Xaudio libs from the people who make mtv.
On a side note, we were talking about this
in #linuxos last night. There are MPEG1 and
MPEG2 encoder/decoder cards right? Why not
a pci card that actually does hardware MP3
encoding? Preferably IRQ-less and integrated
into a sound card (we don't all have 12 pci
slots
simultaneous streams. That would be so sweet...
Decoding isn't such a big deal. But the 2hours
of audio it takes me under 10min to rip from cd
takes me close to 9 *HOURS* to encode at 160k
(using bladeenc). A dedicated, specialized board
could get it done *A LOT* faster.
I mean, technically, if we have to pay royalties
to frauenf*c*er, I'd rather it go towards hardware.
It might be. The problem is, the Xing
encoder is win32 only as far as I'm aware...
It doesn't crash, but my Netscape (4.06 for Solaris/SPARC) renders it as a completely blank page. I can read the HTML fine with "View page source"...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Here's a Zip-drive player that I found last Friday. I'm not sure how well Zip's play in portable use, except when they're stationary.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Fraunhofer discusses that they have redused the required number of DSP from 5 down to one, and that you can get their system for broadcasting MP3 streaming content. The problem is in the Real-time encoding. Fraunhofer is being very protective of their intellectual property, and don't want anyone else to create high quality, low bit rate audio without giving them money. A real-time encoder is very expensive. From a bussiness perspective, this makes perfect sense. As anyone who has encoded their own MP3's knows, encoding CD quality audio is time consuming, and even a DSP hardware implementation is usually two slow for a real-time application.
In the mean time, HW decoding soluions are just now becoming a viable option. Several companies are now creating IC's with MPEG 1-Layer 3 (and Layer 2.5) decoding, but these are recent developments. Prior to the release of these chips, only DSP implementations were posible. MP3 decoding is avalible from some sources in the from of a PCI card, my roomate is also trying a different approach using these chips for a school project. Decoding is a reality, but encoding is a few more years down the road for the average user. This means that a real-time MP3 CODAC is not a viable concept, yet.
Baggio
Time flies like an arrow;
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Why shouldn't it be in Linux?
:-(
Windows CE would require substantial royalties, and the Linux world is obviously going to produce a cornucopia of software for the thing (based on the extremely high level of enthusiasm I see for it here).
I predict that it stays in Linux, but you may have to dig to find that out - I doubt that Linux will be used as a marketing tool by a mainstream company. They'll just package the best free applications and poof.
I think mapping software, a GPS receiver and a larger display would all be good ideas. This is one place where American cars have a significant advantage - their form factors for car stereos are much more generous. Pity I hate American cars for other reasons.
D
i don't have any problem and neither does the guy across the hall from me.
It seems rather bogus that they're claiming CD quality audio - MP3 is nothing of the sort. It's compressed - and audibly so. It might well be that in a car environment you don't miss it, but what happened to truth in advertising?
... then why didn't it succeed? For exactly the same reason - compressed audio isn't CD quality.
The Sony MD's audio was "just as good" as a CD
I've see this many times with netscape. Basically on the same pages... Try turning off java/java script (Had a high hatred for it anyway =)
Might not help, but it's only my few bits
1001 0011 1100 1010 0101
Lab test show that use of micro$oft causes deadly cancer in lab animals.
One dosnt have to spend a fortune getting a portable mp3 player. Or even buy a rio with its proprietary memory cards. XAudio has released a very functional mp3 player for WinCE, and the newer WinCE units have stereo headphone jacks and quite functional audio hardware. And with the advantage of using standard off the shelf Flash Ram cards, its probally cheaper and easier to expand. Besides, you can use it as a pda if you can stand the WinCE platform. New Wyvern class P/PC devices (Palm PC) will probally all have color displays and stereo headphone jacks. They will also use standard compact flash cards, which most geeks already have a bunch laying about from digital cams and the like. A final word, I have tested Xaudio's MP3 player on a hp320lx, hp660lx, and a Nec Mobilepro 750C. On the later two, the mp3's played back with all the fidelity one would expect from a mp3, aka FM radio :) On the 320lx, it just sucked badly due to a slowassed cpu coupled with a shitty OS. But since I already have a WinCE device mounted in my car as a mobile GPS unit (using Solus Pro from Delorme and Rockwell GPS receiver), I figure I might as well use it to play MP3's as well.
When the cost comes down, the empeg car player would be worth considering. I'm not ready to set down $999/shipping quite yet though..
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