behhl writes "Newsbytes says that Creative has announced a "Project Nomad" range of portable MP3 players. No actual machines are specified, and the Creative site has no news. " Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.
120 comments
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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The problem with a CD-based player is that it can skip, and thus isn't good for a portable player that will be used while in motion (a car is ok, but something to be used while walking will be problematic). Also, spinning a CD sucks tons of power. Better would be something with a CD drive to load songs, but at least 32 megs of flash memory to store a bunch of them on so the CD need not be accessed. That starts to get complex & expensive though.
I Do
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Anonymous Coward
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I have a machine in my car that uses CDs to play digital audio. I think it's called a CD player --- sorry no URL:(
Seriously, I thought the whole point (or at least why I want to have a portable MP3 player) is to not require dragging CDs around with me. I have taken all my CDs home from work because I listen to MP3s here. My CD collection is still divided between my house and my car until I get a portable MP3 player.
Creative labs is the microsoft of soundcards.
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Anonymous Coward
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CL's first soundcard wasn't even as good as an adlib card. Their first sound blaster was nothing more than an adlib with a DAC pasted on the board, and the DAC was the lowest quality one they could find. I'd say that all CL soundcards (and speakers) up to the AWE64Gold are trash. Everyone should've switched to the Gravis Ultrasound back in '92. The GUS will always have a place in my PC because of the demoscene (there's a PCI GUS project supposedly in the works, too)!
woohoo, another score for the freeloading-idiots
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Anonymous Coward
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Yeah, I guess the only things people should actually get paid for is working at McDonalds and writing database software. Cuz, nobody really wants to do either one.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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For portables, solid state is the way to go, but for a car setup, CDs look pretty nice...
Skipping should be no prob if this was done by a commercial car stereo company (or somehow retrofitting an existing car cd transport-i doubt this would be easy to do) as car cd players already are pretty good about skipping, so a little read ahead should keep your music going.
Mike.
woohoo, another score for the McDonalds Workers
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Anonymous Coward
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But someone has to flip the burgurs. The pay sucks and THAT IS WHY.mp3 is great!
Ronald M.
woohoo, another score for the McDonalds Workers
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Anonymous Coward
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radio would be better. Lower hardware cost.
My point is talent still needs to be paid. Ads on the radio benifit the station, not the record companies or the artists. Some people want free (like beer) software and music as a free ride because they don't make much money. I say, If you can't afford it, don't buy a computer (it's a money pit anyway) and just listen to the damn radio which is paid for by brainwashing (ads).
Free (like freedom) software and MP3 have much better uses than entertaining lazy people.
Not portable, but a HOME style cd-player.
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Anonymous Coward
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What would be neat is to be able to take my CD with all 15 Neil Young albums on it (that I burnt) and pop it into a CD player in my living room, and be able to listen from that ONE CD. Having it on the computer is nice, but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room. Is there any companies out there looking for a CD-Based non-portable component CD player for a rack stereo system? (IMHO) It would be neat. (I would buy one..)
Not portable, but a HOME style cd-player.
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Anonymous Coward
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What would be neat is to be able to take my CD with all 15 Neil Young albums on it (that I burnt) and pop it into a CD player in my living room, and be able to listen from that ONE CD. Having it on the computer is nice, but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room. Is there any companies out there building a CD-Based non-portable component CD player for a rack stereo system? (IMHO) It would be neat. (I would buy one..)
Creative defined an industry
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Anonymous Coward
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VHS vs. Beta, Ford vs. Chevy, Linux vs. Windows.
The most technologically sound product does not always rock the industry.
I've been there since the beginning, and most of those cards on the site you mentioned sounded like bumblebees farting even back then when there wasn't much better available. Many of those cards, plugged into a stereo, would make my PC sound as good as my Apple//e with nothing more than the original Apple speaker.
The AdLib was the first card to make a real impact, and then when the Sound Blaster line was born and we got digital playback of prerecorded sounds the games quickly took advantage of this and Creative Labs became king of all they could survey.
The Gravis UltraSound was technically superior when it came out, but by not conceding to the current royalty by burning in "SoundBlaster compatibility" they really shot all chances they had of taking off.
Incidentally, aside from MIDI maybe, I don't think there have been any appreciable strides in sound cards for the last 10 years. One of my machines has an original Sound Blaster, and another has the SB64-AWE "Value". The SB64-AWE has cleaner recording, and seems to support more voices, but nothing is stunningly different.
Although, I am eager to hear one of these newfangled 3D sound cards that actually has seperate rear channels. Are they any good? Any games supporting this yet?
MP3's
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Anonymous Coward
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Cool and if you want free mp3's go to www.mp3.com/pedophagia and there legal to. Buy the cd if you like them tho:) Natas
Creative labs is the microsoft of soundcards.
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Anonymous Coward
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I've been wondering about this. I have a spare old GUS card (which was my favorite card, until win95 came along and it stopped working), which is probably the only one I have which will work with Linux. My main app would be mp3s. How does the GUS perform/sound with mp3s? Or should I get a crappy soundblaster?
MP3's
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Anonymous Coward
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Natas.. you are evil. :) {Pengo}
How do people manage their mp3s?
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Anonymous Coward
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Use AudioCatalyst! Unfortunately it doesn't run under Linux though. It will strip and mp3 an entire CD in under realtime (usually about 40 minutes to mp3 a 60 minute CD). It has a CDDB function will automatically name the tracks and everything. It is the best ripping/mp3ing program out there.... now if only linux would have something this good.
MP3's
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Anonymous Coward
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Thankyou! Natas
Not portable, but a HOME style cd-player.
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Anonymous Coward
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"but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room"
Sounds like a hardware problem. Maybe you just need to upgrade to Wife2.0. I hear that some of the new versions are more compatable with other hardware.
I hope
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Anonymous Coward
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they put gnulix on it.
Vinyl, man
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Anonymous Coward
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You know, like, man, I got zillions of LPs. They don't say nothing about saving my LPs. Like, what if I knock over the bong and set the house on fire? I loose all my, like, Bob Dylan LPs, and Jefferson Airplane, and my Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
Ain't you guys got nothing to back up my LP collection? And, like, what if I want to verify my backups. Like, can I play from the backups to make sure they're groovy?
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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Here's a better solution: Don't jog.
I would gladly pay the $300 for something like NAiAM's MP-CD but nobody is selling one (including NAiAM -- the MP-CD was supposed to be shipping about four months ago but their site hasn't been updated in that time).
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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It's all about inertia. It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.
What about VQF?
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Anonymous Coward
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I hear that the sound quality is better and the compression is better. (128 MP3 v. 96 VQF and the vqf sounds better). Anyone know why this isn't taking off? I'd think for a portable device you'd want the best compression/sound quality you could get, wouldn't you? I suppose it's just a timing issue, similar to the stories you here about vhs/beta...too bad.
Freeloading idiots?
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Anonymous Coward
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At no point in my comment did I imply that the MP3 format caused his behavaior. I myself use MP3 in a legal fashion.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.
Depends on how long you keep it turning. Starting the thing up probably takes more juice than one second of turning, but less juice than a minute of turning (I'd bet). Therefore, if you can buffer at least a minute in advance, you'll save energy.
You'll probably also reduce wear 'n' tear on the drive.
I Do
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Anonymous Coward
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a CD can hold hundreds of MP3s.
To chime in, most of my mp3's take about 1/10th the size of the corresponding.wav file. (44mhz, 128-bit)
Therefore, 10 audio CD's == 1 mp3 CD.
I'd be hard-pressed to listen to 10 whole albums in my car in a day. I hardly ever listen to 10 whole albums anywhere in one day.
Linus is NOT gay
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Anonymous Coward
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> everyone knows he's homosexual. > I don't know why you seem to think otherwise
Come off it! He's straight! I've seen him hit on chicks now on then.
Creative defined an industry
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Anonymous Coward
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That's like saying Linux will never do well unless it has perfect Windows emulation.
That is just plain wrong.
Creative won the "sound card war" by leveraging their dominance of the market to stifle competition, much as Microsoft is doing today with Windows.
Some companies made games compatable with the Gravis, and that made the millions of GUS users happy, but most of the big name game makers simply ignored all non-creative cards and killed off the alternative soundcard market.
On top of this, system builders who bundled cards inevitably shipped sound blaster "clones", thereby keeping the industry 5 to 10 years behind the state of the art.
Luckily Gravis did ONE thing right, that being releasing full specifications for their cards. That was very much appreciated and is why their card is so well supported in systems like Linux and such.
VQF is a failure because it's not open
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Anonymous Coward
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Um. I might be waaay off here, but from what I read, VQF software is free (now that might be free beer free, not free speech free). I've also heard that both AAC and VQF are in MP4, so the MP4 source has the VQF source in it (doesn't this mean you can make your own players and such? again, please excuse the ignorance). There's a link to the source for MP4 at http://www.vqf.com/software.php3
Am I nuts?
I hope
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Anonymous Coward
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Then, I suppose, you could wire several of them into a kickin' Beowulf cluster.
You're quite original. I am wetting my pants with laughter. Really, I am.
You are missing a major point
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Anonymous Coward
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That's like saying Linux will never do well unless it has perfect Windows emulation.
You know, if Linux were a proprietary OS made by Corel or IBM or something, that statement would be very accurate. The big difference is the GPL. The GPL has assured the long life of Linux. Long after Linux is given up in the mainstream for something better, people will STILL be using and STILL be hacking Linux source.
The GUS was a proprietary piece of hardware, developed solely as the commercial product of Gravis. There is no way it could survive the long rampup time that Linux has endured.
Linus is NOT gay!!
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Anonymous Coward
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I'll say, he's "done me" hundreds of times. Now all my dresses are covered in splooge. Let me tell 'ya, he really knows how to satisfy a woman, and unlike other public figures his dumb stick is straight as an arrow.
M. Lewinsky
MP4's?
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Anonymous Coward
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Ok I have heard alot about how good they are. But how does one play a mp4 and encode a mp4. Are they out yet? Natas http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Creative labs is the microsoft of soundcards.
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Anonymous Coward
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>and the DAC was the lowest quality one they could find.
That STILL holds true today... I remember selling high-end NLE systems based on the DPS Perception, and reccommending a high-quality sound card - and hearing "You mean like a SB16?" - *sigh*
Creative defined an industry
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Anonymous Coward
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Um, thats VHS vs. Beta, Chevy vs. Ford, Linux vs. Windows.
If you were trying to get the best on the left side:). Gosh Ford trucks are ugly.
How do people manage their mp3s?
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Anonymous Coward
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I know cdda2wav does this, but I prefer to re-create the wheel
skroz on drugs
Played with one of these last year...
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Anonymous Coward
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low quality, this is not surprising to long time owners of creative products. They have always used very low quality components and their tech support is non existant. I dont care if they created sound, I would not buy another creative product. Their marketing hype is excellent and their reputation is undeserved. Of speacial note is that this new product is proprietary, which means you are at their mercy.
That's all fine and dandy...
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Anonymous Coward
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...but why the HELL is this posted here?
(BTW, as a gay male myself (and therefore and expert on the subject), I can pretty much assure you that Linus is NOT gay. Get a grip)
Creative did what?
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Anonymous Coward
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Soundblaster...how did it become both popular product? Creative Labs is still basically going for low end cheap components and "multimedia" standard compability. For instance SB Live! is there a dos driver? Or Be OS? Eh, what do you say, Win98 doesn't support anything proper?:))) The thing is Creative Labs rely much from Microsoft support. Gravis never officially got a Win95 driver out of beta for the PnP series. Nevertheless, or whatever, GUS is still as cool if not cooler than having a SB Live which is not easy to use if you write software yourself, use a non MS OS or do not do what everyone else is doing for software or hardware. I hope you do not buy a Creative Labs just because it is being hyped. If would like a professional soundcard supported with GPL licensed sources for soundcards that is as good as Gravis, here are some cards which you might be interested in...they all use the DREAM chip: http://www.anime.net/~sam9407/ http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-sam9407/ http://www.anime.net/ http://www.hoontech.com/ h ttp://www.guillemot.com/ http://www.terratech-us. com Thanks to Hanmesoft, Hoontech and Guillemot. They make great soundcards, at a better value than SB Live! Look at their downloads. Thanks to Gerd, the sam9407 contributors and all who do not buy Creative Labs to play games just.
SB Live! Does it work?
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Anonymous Coward
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Soundblaster...how did it become both popular product? Creative Labs is still basically going for low end cheap components and "multimedia" standard compability. For instance the Creative SoundBlaster Live, can it work in dos or Win95 or Win98 if it doesn't crash or Be OS? Eh? The thing is Creative Labs relies much of this on Microsoft support now. It was not always this way. Gravis never officially got a Win95 driver out of beta for the PnP series. Nevertheless, or whatever, GUS is still as cool if not cooler than having a Creative Labs Live, which you can try getting to like under Win98, good luck. I hope you do not buy a Creative Labs just because it is what you see everywhere. Hype was never cheap. There is even GPL licensed sources for DREAM chip based soundcards only a little more expensive than SB Live!
http://www.hoontech.com/ http://www.guillemot.c om/ http://www.terratech-us.com Thanks to Hoontech, Guillemot, Hammesoft for support. Thanks to Gerd, the sam9407 contributors and all who do not buy Creative Labs to play games.
Played with one of these last year...
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Anonymous Coward
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I don't understand how you can make a decision based on early alpha hardware. Think about it. If it was finished and working right, it wouldn't be an alpha unit. I'm pretty excited that creative is getting into this market. I have a Rio and I think it's ok, but Creative has a lot more clout.
You are missing a major point
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Anonymous Coward
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If what you say is true, then that means there is no way for any hardware to ever have a long life, right? Then how did the Sound Blaster itself (which is even more closed than the GUS) live up until now?
Simple: the Sound Blaster revolutionized PC multimedia. The GUS was an incremental improvement at best. Going from an AdLib to a Sound Blaster was a huge change, even though to look at the components of the two cards they were ALMOST identical.
The GUS was a cooler card, and technologically superior, but the difference with Sound Blaster was incremental and thus there was no impetus for most SB customers to upgrade (especially knowing that most of their games wouldn't work with the card).
I heard a few GUS machines in operation when the demos were written explicitly for them, and found them to be quite good for their time. Certainly better than the Sound Blaster Pro which was the chief rival at the time. But while I was known for spending gobs of money on upgrades, I never saw the need to upgrade to a GUS because most of my existing software would CEASE TO WORK with the GUS.
That's also why I didn't touch Linux until a year ago (and why I still have NT running on another machine to this day... until Linux catches up in terms of software).
Creative Sucks
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Anonymous Coward
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Creative made a sucky card for a PieCe of shit computer (namely the IBM-PC) that was way behind what other computers could do (i.e. the Amiga.)
No respect for thim coming from me.
Laptop?
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Anonymous Coward
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I have a Dell CP laptop, running Windows NT (yeah yeah, I know, run Linux... but this machine is owned by work, and I can't squeeze another OS onto the 4Gig hard drive... and I'm not about to drop $1000 on a bigger disk for a machine I don't even own!)
Anyhow, does anyone know of some way I could use an IR remote with one of the thousands of MP3 players out there? It would be sweet if I could hook the laptop up to the stereo and control the MP3 player with a remote. The Dell has an IR port on the back, and a CD-ROM in it, so hopefully this could work.
Vinyl, man
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Anonymous Coward
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Try to find a recordable Eight Track cassette deck. Blank media is still at Radio Shack.
You'll be able to record 2/3 of an LP, and never have to flip anything over.
You are missing a major point
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Anonymous Coward
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if you use dos GUS can emulate Sound Blaster Pro.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Anonymous Coward
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Aiigh! When will people realize that solid-state SUCKS? At least for now! When I take my music with me, I won't want just 30 minutes! I want 11 hours, or more! Hell, even a 74 minute CD isn't enough for me.
Let's all push for a portable CD-player sized unit that can play ISO9660 mp3 CD-ROMs. This is what we need. Battery life shouldn't be an issue. 32MB of DRAM is *CHEAP*. Just read at around 4X, fill the RAM and stop for a while. When it nears the end of the playlist, restart, read another 32MB.
This can work, and it's better than expensive flash cards that don't store much.
In a few years, when memory density grows by another few orders of magnitude, solid state will be an option. But not yet.
-=^o.o^=
Creative was successful because of GOOD PRODUCTS
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Anonymous Coward
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I've had two Creative sound cards in my life time. A Sound Blaster Pro a few years back and currently an SB32. Both have been very reliable and both sound great.
On the other side of the coin, I bought a GUS MAX once, and had no end of trouble with it. A lot of games didn't support it, and eventually it flaked out and died.
At least in my experience, Creative makes good products. They always work and sound great for their price level. (Yes, I know a $400 sound card sounds better, but... TANSTAAFL.)
-=^o.o^=
VQF is a failure because it's not open
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Anonymous Coward
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
They tried to license BETA, but JVC was already working on VHS. Read some fscking FAQs.
I'm sick of all you goddamn Open Systems revisionist historians.
Didn't Rome fall because they didn't GPL their sewage systems?
Rrrr.
Creative Sucks
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Anonymous Coward
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Damn right! The Amiga had the most kickass audio (not to mention video) hardware around--for years! The OS on those things was great, too.
The PC scene finally caught up to the original Amiga when the Gravis ultrasound, and accelerated VGA cards became available.
Beowulf...
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Anonymous Coward
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Gee guys lets get Linux running on it and a bunch of these would make a sweet Beowulf cluster.
Obtaining illegal MP3s
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Anonymous Coward
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You people don't have a god damned clue! Of course there are no illegal MP3s on the web. If you want to find the mp3s you have to go to DALnet! There are no ratios there. Everyone gives out their mp3s for free. They even have a little search engine for finding the song you want called @locator. It does not take very long to find any mainstream song on DALnet.
There's a lot of connections between open-source software and non-heterogeneous lifestyles. Why does he persist in maintaining that proprietary lifestyle, anyhow?
Wow - now if they'd only make soundcards..
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Anonymous Coward
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Gee, that's great Creative!
Now, how 'bout a real soundcard with hardware interrupts and open specs instead of this binary-only Windows driver crap that emulates hardware?
Anybody know of a REAL soundcard for Linux/BSD that I can buy new now, that doesn't require the $20.00 OSS product to run? Gottan URL?
I'd like to run cdplay (from the package cdtool) WITHOUT loading X-windows/workman and have it play the damn CD with sound and everything.
COOL - The new COLOR Palm-size PC's do MP3's!
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Anonymous Coward
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The new Windows CE Palm-size PC's not only have stereo input and output jacks, but they can play MP3's, color MPEG video, and have compact flash 2 slots, which hold between 2 and 128 meg ram cards, or that new harddrive from IBM. Plus they come with 16 megs RAM (not rom) by default. I'm not making any of this up, read the link above. Kinda makes the palmpilot a dinosour. The color looks badass - 16 bit on some devices like the Casio, Compaq is only 256 colors, but that's still 255 more than my old useless (compaired to what ce can do besides address book) pilot.
Creative labs is the microsoft of soundcards.
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Anonymous Coward
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I have an SB16-SCSI, and it's been decent, though (1) I'm no sound professional, and (2) it took all of my CPU time to play an MP3 on my 486-133 (it's ok with a P200 now, but the card came with a 486-33). Now, are there any commercially available (with specs) cards which support 22-bit audio? How about real-time multiple digital sources without choking the CPU? A new, open, more powerful sound card would make a nice EE project.
Linus is NOT gay
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Anonymous Coward
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Sigh... another lame M$ "grassroots" contribution; Go away and spend time creating an OS that actually works.
Isn't that Sendmail guy gay?
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Anonymous Coward
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Didn't I read somewhere that Eric was, er, "open-source"?
Creative defined an industry
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Anonymous Coward
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untill DVD is easyly re-writeable I dont think it will be as sucsessfull as video tape. quality has nothing to do with it at that point. people will most likely have both if not just VHS. Weather it gets to be recordable or not is up to the industry and cost/performace ratio.
Palm Pilot MP3?
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Anonymous Coward
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I have a 50 MHz 68060, and playing a 128 kbps MP3 gives me a 25% CPU load! There's no way that the 68000 inside the Palm Pilot would be able to play MP3s. It just isn't fast enough. An '030 would be the bare minimum.
yes, he is.
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Anonymous Coward
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in the back of the sendmail guide (bat book) from o'reilly it describes Eric Allman as being the original author of sendmail, as well as living with is partner of 17 years (or something), Kirk. Sounds like a guy's name doesn't it?
Official press release
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BOredAtWork
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Duh. Before ya say there's no news on creative's site, check:-). Must say, this looks like it's gotta be on my next Christmas list...
--
--
--
Just lurking, thanks!
Not portable, but a HOME style cd-player.
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gavinhall
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Posted by DonR:
just put a node in the family room. Get a small case, and incorporate into into the stereo system. All you need is a NIC and a Sound card that'll hook up to your stereo system. Control everything else remotely
Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?
How many mp3s do you have that are less than 2MB? What you need is a WinCE machine.
Hey, it lost the last line of message which said [ampersand]lt;ducking[ampersand]gt;. It showed up correctly in the preview page.
In case you missed it, the reference in WinCE was a joke.
Creative's asset is also their achiles heel...
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zonker
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"Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier."
Of course, one of Creatives biggest problems *now* is that standard they set years ago limits them today. While other companies have created some really whizz-bang products, we are still stuck to CL's older tech (ala Ensoniq, now owned by them, and the GUS). But, I agree, they did help us climb out of the primordial goo of bad PC sound...
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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Rob+Parkhill
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Current portable CD players with a 50-second anti-skip memory system never skip while walking, but skip a lot while jogging or running.
But if the same system could be used for MP3s, then you would have a 500-second anti-shock memory. It would start to skip a lot too if you were jogging for a while.
How about this idea; install a shock sensor (like the article about the PalmPilot hack a few days ago) to detect when the unit is experiencing a level of shock that won't cause skipping. Spin up that 32X CD player, and read 500 seconds of music into memory, then spin down the CD.
It will definately eat more batteries than a solid-state memory system, but it also will let you store over 11 hours of music on super-cheap removeable media. I'd love to have my entire music colection on a few dozen $2 CDs, instead of a few $300 hard drives (ala the Empeg car system).
--
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.
AFAIK, what gave Creative's initial boost was the SoundBlaster, an AdLib with an 8-bit DAC attached to it. Which looks very suspiciously like a bastardisation technique (unles they actually had a licence).
-- In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
VQF is a failure because it's not open
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David+Jao
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The reason beta lost out to VHS was because JVC kept VHS an open standard and freely licensed the technology to other companies. When an open standard goes against a closed standard, the open standard almost always wins.
Mp3 vs. VQF is likewise. MP3 is a published ISO standard. VQF is very closed and proprietary. So despite VQF's supposed technical superiority, it's not going to get anywhere in the marketplace. I admit that MP3 is not as open as I'd like it to be. Fraunhofer still enforces their patent rights to MP3. However, VQF is much worse -- the specification is not even made public.
AAC has more promise than either VQF or MP3. It will be interesting to see how open the AAC standard is.
I've been thinking about this for a while. It should be trivial to load all your MP3's into an Oracle (or other) database as Binary Large Object (BLOb) files, and write a simple C/perl program that can autogenerate playlist files based on search criteria. (and pipe the output directly to mpg123?)
-- As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
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cdipierr
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Been there, done that.
I setup a small Linux box to interface to my PalmPilot (via Serial port). Pop a CD in, control it from the Pilot, output to a stereo (it's in the same room as that), yay, 5 hours of music at a pop.
If you have a sound-capable laptop with cd-rom (I realize, of course, that these don't grow on trees!) you could 'dock' it on top of the stereo without spoiling the decor, and get a y-cable...
-- **>>BELCH
How do people manage their mp3s?
by
Paul+Carver
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· Score: 1
Sorry for the repost, but the previous mp3 article is scrolled so far down the screen and only has 6 comments, so I guess it's a dead thread.
I've started ripping some of my CDs with cdparanoia and bladeenc, but I haven't really organized the resulting files. How do those of you with huge collections deal with them? I just have them all in the same directory. I go to the playlist (I use GQmpeg) and add all.
It would be really great if there were some kind of database interface that would generate playlists based on search criteria. Kind of like the Windows softare for the empeg car player.
A lot of people on slashdot act as though they have hundreds of mp3s, so some of you must have come up with a good system. Tell us about it.
There is one coming, I want one...
by
Ryandav
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· Score: 1
As referenced in one of the replies above buried under a few layers, a company called naiam.com is making one available in time for christmas. Info can be found on this site .
What about...proprietary?
by
David+Ishee
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· Score: 1
Did y'all see this?
its "Project Nomad" players will use
proprietary technology to make next-generation, compact, affordable players.
I thought someone would have caught this by now.
and:
But the firm said it will not just make a player. It also intends to use its audio marketing muscle to make an impact on the entire fledgling industry. In an announcement, Creative declared, "Creative intends on driving the technology, direction, and strategy associated with the creation, playback, and distribution of digital audio content via the Internet."
It seems that CL wants to get a monopoly on the industry.
How about this:
The market has been waiting for Creative to make its move, said Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and chief executive officer at Creative.
Since when has "the market" been waiting for Creative to make its move? They seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. It seems the market is doing just fine without them so far.
It doesn't look to me like they want to play any MP3, but use some sort of proprietary encoding/encryption/whatever wrapped around an MP3 (I suppose to stop all those "pirates" out there)
If they want to give it a try, I say go for it. However, for all of you who have the "give me free stuff or give me death" attitude, this may not be what you want.
Film at 11.
-- Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Creative did what? - stifled the music community
by
martian
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· Score: 1
Creative had a terrible record, until recently, for not disclosing the details of the internals of their cards. In contrast Gravis had the completely opposite attitude, and much cool software was developed which was GUS only...
-- "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
How do people manage their mp3s?
by
skroz
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· Score: 1
I'm currently working on this. I'm combining a ripper/encoder with CDDB (I know, it's been done...) then storing all the info, plus the location of the resulting MP3 file, in a database. No web page for the project yet; it's still in its early stages. All of the cddb stuff works, and the ripper is, er, well... started. All that's left after that is the encoder, and cleaning up the database stuff. Should be tres cool.
-- --
Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
They'd need 1> more memory, and 2> a faster processor. That, of course, is on top of changing the audio support (16-bit, stereo, etc.) It would be expensive, and make the thing bigger.
-- --
Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Thing is, you would have to drag far fewer CDs (e.g. one), since a CD can hold hundreds of MP3s.
And then you could change which several hundred songs you wanted to listen to that day simply by switching CDs, instead of having to upload new ones vi serial port.
Before giving Creative all the credit for PC sound's initial evolution, how about taking a look at (just some of the) cards that came before (and after) the Sound Blaster that kicked ass.
Hailing Creative products, especially their early ones, is a tribute to their market share, not their quality. Watch it Hemos. You'll be reminiscing about what WFW 3.11 did for networking next.
SAVE THE BATS -Khyron SAVE THE BATS
Creative defined an industry
by
scrytch
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· Score: 1
Although, I am eager to hear one of these newfangled 3D sound cards that actually has seperate rear channels. Are they any good? Any games supporting this yet?
There's EAX, which is pretty impressive, and A3D 2.0, which is stunning, but only for two speakers afaik. Many games support both, though the quality varies somewhat. Unreal's EAX support is pretty weak, HalfLife's is amazing -- that chopper is scarier than hell when you hear it circling all around. I'd say most games coming out now support either A3D or EAX now.
But I have a nice Cambridge Microworks system, which is two speakers. I'd have to toss that to get a surround setup...
-- I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Exactly--Creative's first product was laughable
by
Trixter
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· Score: 1
You are correct. Adlib should've been the real winner here--the Sound Blaster was the same Yamaha chipset with a DAC tacked on. If it weren't for the Adlib's popularity beforehand, the Sound Blaster wouldn't have taken off.
Why? Because Creative's original idea of music for a PC was the Creative Music System, also sold under the name "Game Blaster" at Radio Shack. It was essentially four Tandy sound chips in stereo. Anyone who remembers their sound standards can easily tell you that Adlib's 2-operator FM was much better than the TI chip in the Tandy.
I like that! I've always wanted to set up a linux box in my car for MP3s and the like, but the power consumption for the monitor(or the cost of a LCD screen) was one of the big killers. Just forget the monitor, run a serial cable from the trunk or wherever, and use the palmpilot with a terminal emulator or some front end controller to run everything.
You are missing a major point
by
BigZaphod
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· Score: 1
"The GUS was a proprietary piece of hardware, developed solely as the commercial product of Gravis. There is no way it could survive the long rampup time that Linux has endured."
If what you say is true, then that means there is no way for any hardware to ever have a long life, right? Then how did the Sound Blaster itself (which is even more closed than the GUS) live up until now?
woohoo, another score for the McDonalds Workers
by
dirty
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· Score: 1
Actually ads do benifate the record comapanies, and in some (rare) circumstances the artists. The radio companies have to pay the record companies everytime they play a song, the ads provide the revenue for the radio station, some of this money goes to the record companies, then (if they're really lucky) the artists get some of the cash.
--
-matt
woohoo, another score for the underdogs
by
dirty
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· Score: 1
I doubt there will be an injunction, the RIAA tried the same thing with the RIO and failed, I really don't see how they could get an injunction against creative after that.
--
-matt
VQF is a failure because it's not open
by
Eric_Scheirer
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· Score: 1
I wrote a summary of MP4 audio and its relationship to AAC and VQF. Go here.
In summary, some of the technology from VQF is included in the MPEG-4 standard, but a.VQF file is not really an MP4 file since MP4 has its own file format, and VQF is only used in certain restrictive ways within MPEG-4.
I wrote an overview of the MP4 audio standard. You can find it here.
Technical work on MP4 was completed in October 1998, and it is in the publication process at ISO now. I'm not aware of any fully-functional encoders/decoders yet.
-- Eric Scheirer Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)
Some sort of Sound capability for a Palm Pilot would be cool, all right. What I'd like to see is an "Internet Transistor Radio": a Palm Pilot plus sound plus a Ricochet modem. You could wander around the San Francsico Bay Area listening to a college radio station from Austrailia.
Unfortunately, the WinCE world may actually be a little closer to this. The Cassandra already comes with a head phone jack (though I bet the sound is awful, voice quality only: they intended it as a dictation gadget).
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
Wonko
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· Score: 1
It's all about inertia. It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.
Why do we need to spin at even 1x? mp3's go as high as, what? 256kbit or so? That's one heck of alot less than 150kbyte(that's what, 1200kbit?). So you'd need to spin it up to less than 1/4th to constantly keep up with an mp3. I think I'd prefer to spend the extra cash on 4-8 meg of ram and cache whole songs and a bit more though. But what uses more power? Only spinning up to 1/4th single spin, or spinning up/down. Or heck, maybe a constant half spin with read ahead?:) I know it wouldn't be using off the shelf equipment to obtain these speeds, but this thing probably isn't using all that much off the shelf stuff. Am I babbling again???:p
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
crow
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· Score: 1
What we need is a CD-ROM based MP3 player. That would be really cool.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
crow
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· Score: 1
Yes, CDs can skip, but with a mere one Meg of memory, you can read ahead a full minute, so that shouldn't be an issue.
True, spinning a CD will consume batteries faster, but it will still last much longer than traditional CD players. Imagine one with four Megs of RAM: It would initially fill its memory and then stop. After playing 3 Megs, it would replenish its memory while playing the last quarter of its memory. This might need to be adjusted slightly for high bitrate MP3s, but would work well.
Or does spinning up the CD take more power than keeping it spinning for a few minutes?
Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?
For that matter, this could be a chance for Creative to get into the PDA market.
I'm in about the same situation as you, except that after using cdparanoia and bladeenc, I use id3ren to tag the files, so the artist, album, year, and such are all stored in the file, and players like mpg123 can display the info.
Unfortunately, the tags don't let you have enough characters for long names, and there isn't an entry for track number (some albums sound better if you play them in order, so I use the comment field to log the track number). I saw some reference to a newer tagging method somewhere--is there a new revision to the tagging standard?
Of course, emacs can be used to solve any problem. (That's why I run a emacs/Linux system.):)
What we need for tagging MP3s is an emacs MP3 mode. Just load an MP3 into emacs, and it's set up for editing the tags.
Anyone want to write one?
Played with one of these last year...
by
mindslip
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· Score: 1
I played with one of Creative's alpha-grade portable MP3 players at Comdex back in November.
Honestly, it sucked. It was really low quality sound, more like fm radio than CD, which by comparison to a good software player is unacceptable.
There's a chipset on the market that does hardware mp3 decoding... I wonder who's using it? Some german company whom I can't remember makes it.
Anyways, the point is, by comparison to the Saihan product that was also showing (mp-man), it was no competition. I'm waiting for the one with the 2 gig drive.
mindslip
Duh, record companies shouldn't be scared...
by
eyeball
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· Score: 1
The funny thing is, I don't see MP3's ever damaging the recording industry. Sure, there's rampant pirating going on (I'm quite a leech myself). But just like most pirated software, it's property that wouldn't have been bought anyway. I mean, am I ever going to go out and buy an entire album just so I can pick up that Pump Up The Volume remix? Never.
Now check this out. I've purchased around 15 new CD's over the last year because of random MP3's that I've downloaded. So it's really not the record companies that have to worry, it's radio stations!!! (Besides, broadcast media industries will have to face the fact that people want entertainment on demand, and that traditional forms like radio and TV will eventually be replaced by streaming on demand.)
The only thing record companies lose is the programming control they have over radio stations. But that can easily be changed by strengthening their promotion efforts in other media markets, like TV, movies, and the web.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
bonkydog
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· Score: 1
Free hardware design: The components all exist already: embedded systems cards (with on board scsi, ethernet, vga, memory, the works), cd transports, sealed motorcycle batteries, shock-mount cases, those cute hi-fi compact speakers. What if somebody (an EE student? some mad scientist NRL geek?) hacked out plans for a boombox which ran linux and that could store your entire record collection compressed as MP3s. Which anyone with a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and the ability to follow directions could build in a weekend? And published these plans on the internet along with links to all the component suppliers?
Why isn't this possible? What needs to happen to get me one of these machines? How much would you pay?
-bonkydog
-- Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. -Horace, Satirae
minds are like parachutes...
by
wavelet
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· Score: 1
i thought it was: minds are like parachutes, when they're open they only slow you down.;)
Creative labs is the microsoft of soundcards.
by
coreybrenner
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· Score: 1
Agreed. That's the only reason I continue to buy systems with an ISA slot. I have the GUS 1.37, and as long as that sound card works, I'll continue to use it religiously.
Probably the best PC sound card of all time, with the technology of the era, and will _still_ whip the pants off anything Creative can come up with.
I observed this at an ACM meeting wherein our chapter played PC demos on a big wall on the outside of the CS building. The demo machine was a P133 (still decent at the time) with plenty of RAM to spare. The Unreal Demo choked the machine because the CPU had to do all the sound sequencing. This was, IIRC, an AWE32 (or maybe even a 64). I played that demo on my 486/33 with a GUS (after the GUS patch came out), and it was perfectly smooth.
Creative simply blows heinie. I wish Gravis had been able to bring that card to prominence in the market. PC sound would be much better today if they had.
On a side note, is there any place to get a bunch of those sound cards? Surely they didn't all sell, so where did the excess go? I'd buy a bunch of them if I could find 'em.:)
--Corey
-- Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
I'd have to beg to differ. Time to pull out of that shortsighted state of mind, because the medium isn't the problem here.
There are many people who utilize mp3's in a legal fashion. Just because some people use it for less than legal purposes doesn't make it wrong, evil or term people "freeloading-idiots." Email has been used for wrongful purposes, do you see the pulp and paper mills in an uproar? Do you see them taking sendmail to court? Nope.
And as for the wrongdoing that *is* done with mp3's nowadays. Personally speaking, looking for mp3's is one of the bigger wastes of time ever. You end up spending over an hour looking for one frigging song, and what you do get is usually of a poor quality. Not worth the navigating (and closing of all the browser windows these sites usually popup). I would much prefer flipping a few bucks to get a song *I* want. And I would prefer it if the artist got the big chuck of that cash.
That's what those record companies are afraid of. I don't think they care NEARLY as much about pirated mp3 songs as they care about losing their middleman status.
Well, working things out, I make about $25/hr working. Since having a family comes into play, I'd consider my free time slightly more valueable than my work time. So, in the time it would take to find an MP3 or two, we're already at the cost of a CD.
Like I said, I'd pay for legitimate MP3's no problem.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
scheme
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· Score: 1
Also, spinning a CD sucks tons of power.
If you're playing mp3s it doesn't take a very fast rate to play. With a typical 128kb/s rate, it will take about 1/8th the speed of a normal cd player to get a good playback. Make the spin rate 1/6 of a normal cd player to be safe. So the power comsumption can be 1/6th that of a normal cd player. A pair of batteries will last about 6 times as much assuming the additional electronics don't take much more power.
-- "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Wow, that would be, like so heavy. I'm talking MAJOR bummer with a side order of HECTIC.
I would, like, photocopy them and stuff, and post them to yourself.
Peace..
woohoo, another score for the underdogs
by
Dank+Drew
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· Score: 1
This is a big ole smack in the face for the RIAA and other stupid members of the record industry who wish to keep overcharging for something that should be free. Creative is gonna have a killing in the market too, why drop $17 bucks for a cd when you could buy a portable mp3 player, and then just download the songs off the net for free?
Of course this does open up all sorts of legal issues, there will probably be injunctions to prevent Creative from selling this equipment( much the same as Sony attempting to prevent Connectix from selling their Playstation Emulator). But once again the demand will take over, and who knows, maybe the suits will jump in on this one cuz all they need to see is those beautiful dollar signs.
If only they'll do a CD-ROM player
by
Calum
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· Score: 1
I found a reference to one while hunting around for an MP3 player on the web. Check out Naiam's web site.
How do people manage their mp3s?
by
jisweb
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· Score: 1
I'm in the process of developing my own in-car PC, one function of which will be to play MP3 audio. I have been doing just what you are, ripping all my music CDs like crazy to get as much of my music collection into MP3 format as I can, and my scheme currently is to make a main parent directory (e.g., "My MP3 Collection") and just make subs inside of it for various artists, and then in those make subdirectories for each album, where finally the MP3 files will be stored, simply as "TrackXX.mp3". I am working on software which will perform functions similar to the empeg Windows app for organizing your music. You can check my website at http://home.earthlink.net/~jisweb/ next week when my new website is up detailing my in-car PC project.
Have one in development. Hopefully will be able to talk more about it in 6 months...Lets just say that it will do more than you could possibly imagine...
woohoo, another score for the McDonalds Workers
by
Wolfman
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· Score: 1
According to a recent article on Wired (http://www.mp3.com) the artist gets about 10% of the cost of a CD from a major label. OTOH, if you upload a tune to mp3.com and use their CD production and distribution service, you get 50%. My band hasn't tried that yet, but we probably will when we do our CD this summer. I don't think that people should pirate CDs for mp3s but I think that places like mp3.com sound like a great way to by-pass the major labels with their legions of suit-wearing dirtbags. FWIW.
Creative defined an industry
by
bitwize
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· Score: 1
Everybody knows Beta is a better tape format than VHS. If it weren't, countless Usenet and Slashdot arguments would crumble and there'd be a paradox of the universe. Therefore, Beta is superior.:)
Seriously, I think that Beta/VHS is a bad analogy as each tape format has certain advantages and disadvantages for certain applications. VHS was just better suited for the home market.
But all that will become irrelevant in a decade or so when everyone switches to DVD, except for a few diehards who are convinced that "metal oxide" provides richer picture and sound quality than all that digital crap.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with a CD-based player is that it can skip, and thus isn't good for a portable player that will be used while in motion (a car is ok, but something to be used while walking will be problematic). Also, spinning a CD sucks tons of power. Better would be something with a CD drive to load songs, but at least 32 megs of flash memory to store a bunch of them on so the CD need not be accessed. That starts to get complex & expensive though.
I have a machine in my car that uses CDs to play digital audio. I think it's called a CD player --- sorry no URL :(
Seriously, I thought the whole point (or at least why I want to have a portable MP3 player) is to not require dragging CDs around with me. I have taken all my CDs home from work because I listen to MP3s here. My CD collection is still divided between my house and my car until I get a portable MP3 player.
CL's first soundcard wasn't even as good as an adlib card. Their first sound blaster was nothing more than an adlib with a DAC pasted on the board, and the DAC was the lowest quality one they could find. I'd say that all CL soundcards (and speakers) up to the AWE64Gold are trash. Everyone should've switched to the Gravis Ultrasound back in '92. The GUS will always have a place in my PC because of the demoscene (there's a PCI GUS project supposedly in the works, too)!
Yeah, I guess the only things people should actually get paid for is working at McDonalds and writing database software. Cuz, nobody really wants to do either one.
For portables, solid state is the way to go, but for a car setup, CDs look pretty nice...
Skipping should be no prob if this was done by a commercial car stereo company (or somehow retrofitting an existing car cd transport-i doubt this would be easy to do) as car cd players already are pretty good about skipping, so a little read ahead should keep your music going.
Mike.
But someone has to flip the burgurs. The pay sucks and THAT IS WHY .mp3 is great!
Ronald M.
radio would be better. Lower hardware cost.
My point is talent still needs to be paid. Ads on the radio benifit the station, not the record companies or the artists. Some people want free (like beer) software and music as a free ride because they don't make much money. I say, If you can't afford it, don't buy a computer (it's a money pit anyway) and just listen to the damn radio which is paid for by brainwashing (ads).
Free (like freedom) software and MP3 have much better uses than entertaining lazy people.
What would be neat is to be able to take my CD with all 15 Neil Young albums on it (that I burnt) and pop it into a CD player in my living room, and be able to listen from that ONE CD. Having it on the computer is nice, but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room. Is there any companies out there looking for a CD-Based non-portable component CD player for a rack stereo system? (IMHO) It would be neat. (I would buy one..)
What would be neat is to be able to take my CD with all 15 Neil Young albums on it (that I burnt) and pop it into a CD player in my living room, and be able to listen from that ONE CD. Having it on the computer is nice, but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room. Is there any companies out there building a CD-Based non-portable component CD player for a rack stereo system? (IMHO) It would be neat. (I would buy one..)
VHS vs. Beta, Ford vs. Chevy, Linux vs. Windows.
//e with nothing more than the original Apple speaker.
The most technologically sound product does not always rock the industry.
I've been there since the beginning, and most of those cards on the site you mentioned sounded like bumblebees farting even back then when there wasn't much better available. Many of those cards, plugged into a stereo, would make my PC sound as good as my Apple
The AdLib was the first card to make a real impact, and then when the Sound Blaster line was born and we got digital playback of prerecorded sounds the games quickly took advantage of this and Creative Labs became king of all they could survey.
The Gravis UltraSound was technically superior when it came out, but by not conceding to the current royalty by burning in "SoundBlaster compatibility" they really shot all chances they had of taking off.
Incidentally, aside from MIDI maybe, I don't think there have been any appreciable strides in sound cards for the last 10 years. One of my machines has an original Sound Blaster, and another has the SB64-AWE "Value". The SB64-AWE has cleaner recording, and seems to support more voices, but nothing is stunningly different.
Although, I am eager to hear one of these newfangled 3D sound cards that actually has seperate rear channels. Are they any good? Any games supporting this yet?
Cool and if you want free mp3's go to www.mp3.com/pedophagia and there legal to. Buy the cd if you like them tho :)
Natas
I've been wondering about this. I have a spare old GUS card (which was my favorite card, until win95 came along and it stopped working), which is probably the only one I have which will work with Linux. My main app would be mp3s. How does the GUS perform/sound with mp3s? Or should I get a crappy soundblaster?
Natas.. you are evil.
:)
{Pengo}
Use AudioCatalyst!
Unfortunately it doesn't run under Linux though.
It will strip and mp3 an entire CD in under realtime (usually about 40 minutes to mp3 a 60 minute CD).
It has a CDDB function will automatically name the tracks and everything.
It is the best ripping/mp3ing program out there....
now if only linux would have something this good.
Thankyou!
Natas
"but there is no way that my wife will let me put one in the family room"
Sounds like a hardware problem. Maybe you just need to upgrade to Wife2.0. I hear that some of the new versions are more compatable with other hardware.
they put gnulix on it.
You know, like, man, I got zillions of LPs. They don't say nothing about saving my LPs. Like, what if I knock over the bong and set the house on fire? I loose all my, like, Bob Dylan LPs, and Jefferson Airplane, and my Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.
Ain't you guys got nothing to back up my LP collection? And, like, what if I want to verify my backups. Like, can I play from the backups to make sure they're groovy?
Here's a better solution: Don't jog.
I would gladly pay the $300 for something like NAiAM's MP-CD but nobody is selling one (including NAiAM -- the MP-CD was supposed to be shipping about four months ago but their site hasn't been updated in that time).
It's all about inertia. It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.
I hear that the sound quality is better and the compression is better. (128 MP3 v. 96 VQF and the vqf sounds better). Anyone know why this isn't taking off? I'd think for a portable device you'd want the best compression/sound quality you could get, wouldn't you? I suppose it's just a timing issue, similar to the stories you here about vhs/beta...too bad.
At no point in my comment did I imply that the MP3 format caused his behavaior. I myself use MP3 in a legal fashion.
Depends on how long you keep it turning. Starting the thing up probably takes more juice than one second of turning, but less juice than a minute of turning (I'd bet). Therefore, if you can buffer at least a minute in advance, you'll save energy.
You'll probably also reduce wear 'n' tear on the drive.
To chime in, most of my mp3's take about 1/10th the size of the corresponding .wav file. (44mhz, 128-bit)
Therefore, 10 audio CD's == 1 mp3 CD.
I'd be hard-pressed to listen to 10 whole albums in my car in a day. I hardly ever listen to 10 whole albums anywhere in one day.
> everyone knows he's homosexual.
> I don't know why you seem to think otherwise
Come off it! He's straight!
I've seen him hit on chicks now on then.
That's like saying Linux will never do well unless it has perfect Windows emulation.
That is just plain wrong.
Creative won the "sound card war" by leveraging their dominance of the market to stifle competition, much as Microsoft is doing today with Windows.
Some companies made games compatable with the Gravis, and that made the millions of GUS users happy, but most of the big name game makers simply ignored all non-creative cards and killed off the alternative soundcard market.
On top of this, system builders who bundled cards inevitably shipped sound blaster "clones", thereby keeping the industry 5 to 10 years behind the state of the art.
Luckily Gravis did ONE thing right, that being releasing full specifications for their cards. That was very much appreciated and is why their card is so well supported in systems like Linux and such.
Um. I might be waaay off here, but from what I read, VQF software is free (now that might be free beer free, not free speech free). I've also heard that both AAC and VQF are in MP4, so the MP4 source has the VQF source in it (doesn't this mean you can make your own players and such? again, please excuse the ignorance). There's a link to the source for MP4 at http://www.vqf.com/software.php3
Am I nuts?
You're quite original. I am wetting my pants with laughter. Really, I am.
That's like saying Linux will never do well unless it has perfect Windows emulation.
You know, if Linux were a proprietary OS made by Corel or IBM or something, that statement would be very accurate. The big difference is the GPL. The GPL has assured the long life of Linux. Long after Linux is given up in the mainstream for something better, people will STILL be using and STILL be hacking Linux source.
The GUS was a proprietary piece of hardware, developed solely as the commercial product of Gravis. There is no way it could survive the long rampup time that Linux has endured.
I'll say, he's "done me" hundreds of times. Now all my dresses are covered in splooge. Let me tell 'ya, he really knows how to satisfy a woman, and unlike other public figures his dumb stick is straight as an arrow.
M. Lewinsky
Ok I have heard alot about how good they are. But how does one play a mp4 and encode a mp4. Are they out yet?
Natas
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
>and the DAC was the lowest quality one they could find.
That STILL holds true today... I remember selling high-end NLE systems based on the DPS Perception, and reccommending a high-quality sound card - and hearing "You mean like a SB16?" -
*sigh*
Um, thats
:). Gosh Ford trucks are ugly.
VHS vs. Beta, Chevy vs. Ford, Linux vs. Windows.
If you were trying to get the best on the left side
I know cdda2wav does this, but I prefer to re-create the wheel
skroz on drugs
low quality, this is not surprising to long time owners of creative products. They have always used very low quality components and their tech support is non existant. I dont care if they created sound, I would not buy another creative product. Their marketing hype is excellent and their reputation is undeserved. Of speacial note is that this new product is proprietary, which means you are at their mercy.
(BTW, as a gay male myself (and therefore and expert on the subject), I can pretty much assure you that Linus is NOT gay. Get a grip)
Soundblaster...how did it become both popular product? Creative Labs is still basically going for low end cheap components and "multimedia" standard compability. :)))
h ttp://www.guillemot.com/. com
For instance SB Live! is there a dos driver? Or Be OS? Eh, what do you say, Win98 doesn't support anything proper?
The thing is Creative Labs rely much from Microsoft support. Gravis never officially got a Win95 driver out of beta for the PnP series. Nevertheless, or whatever, GUS is still as cool if not cooler than having a SB Live which is not easy to use if you write software yourself, use a non MS OS or do not do what everyone else is doing for software or hardware.
I hope you do not buy a Creative Labs just because it is being hyped. If would like a professional soundcard supported with GPL licensed sources for soundcards that is as good as Gravis, here are some cards which you might be interested in...they all use the DREAM chip:
http://www.anime.net/~sam9407/ http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-sam9407/ http://www.anime.net/
http://www.hoontech.com/
http://www.terratech-us
Thanks to Hanmesoft, Hoontech and Guillemot. They make great soundcards, at a better value than SB Live! Look at their downloads.
Thanks to Gerd, the sam9407 contributors and all who do not buy Creative Labs to play games just.
Soundblaster...how did it become both popular product? Creative Labs is still basically going for low end cheap components and "multimedia" standard compability.
c om/
For instance the Creative SoundBlaster Live, can it work in dos or Win95 or Win98 if it doesn't crash or Be OS? Eh?
The thing is Creative Labs relies much of this on Microsoft support now. It was not always this way. Gravis never officially got a Win95 driver out of beta for the PnP series. Nevertheless, or whatever, GUS is still as cool if not cooler than having a Creative Labs Live, which you can try getting to like under Win98, good luck.
I hope you do not buy a Creative Labs just because it is what you see everywhere. Hype was never cheap. There is even GPL licensed sources for DREAM chip based soundcards only a little more expensive than SB Live!
http://www.hoontech.com/
http://www.guillemot.
http://www.terratech-us.com
Thanks to Hoontech, Guillemot, Hammesoft for support.
Thanks to Gerd, the sam9407 contributors and all who do not buy Creative Labs to play games.
I don't understand how you can make a decision based on early alpha hardware. Think about it. If it was finished and working right, it wouldn't be an alpha unit.
I'm pretty excited that creative is getting into this market. I have a Rio and I think it's ok, but Creative has a lot more clout.
If what you say is true, then that means there is no way for any hardware to ever have a long life, right? Then how did the Sound Blaster itself (which is even more closed than the GUS) live up until now?
Simple: the Sound Blaster revolutionized PC multimedia. The GUS was an incremental improvement at best. Going from an AdLib to a Sound Blaster was a huge change, even though to look at the components of the two cards they were ALMOST identical.
The GUS was a cooler card, and technologically superior, but the difference with Sound Blaster was incremental and thus there was no impetus for most SB customers to upgrade (especially knowing that most of their games wouldn't work with the card).
I heard a few GUS machines in operation when the demos were written explicitly for them, and found them to be quite good for their time. Certainly better than the Sound Blaster Pro which was the chief rival at the time. But while I was known for spending gobs of money on upgrades, I never saw the need to upgrade to a GUS because most of my existing software would CEASE TO WORK with the GUS.
That's also why I didn't touch Linux until a year ago (and why I still have NT running on another machine to this day... until Linux catches up in terms of software).
Creative made a sucky card for a PieCe of shit computer (namely the IBM-PC) that was way behind what other computers could do (i.e. the Amiga.)
No respect for thim coming from me.
I have a Dell CP laptop, running Windows NT (yeah yeah, I know, run Linux... but this machine is owned by work, and I can't squeeze another OS onto the 4Gig hard drive... and I'm not about to drop $1000 on a bigger disk for a machine I don't even own!)
Anyhow, does anyone know of some way I could use an IR remote with one of the thousands of MP3 players out there? It would be sweet if I could hook the laptop up to the stereo and control the MP3 player with a remote. The Dell has an IR port on the back, and a CD-ROM in it, so hopefully this could work.
Try to find a recordable Eight Track cassette deck. Blank media is still at Radio Shack.
You'll be able to record 2/3 of an LP, and never have to flip anything over.
if you use dos GUS can emulate Sound Blaster Pro.
Aiigh! When will people realize that solid-state SUCKS? At least for now! When I take my music with me, I won't want just 30 minutes! I want 11 hours, or more! Hell, even a 74 minute CD isn't enough for me.
Let's all push for a portable CD-player sized unit that can play ISO9660 mp3 CD-ROMs. This is what we need. Battery life shouldn't be an issue. 32MB of DRAM is *CHEAP*. Just read at around 4X, fill the RAM and stop for a while. When it nears the end of the playlist, restart, read another 32MB.
This can work, and it's better than expensive flash cards that don't store much.
In a few years, when memory density grows by another few orders of magnitude, solid state will be an option. But not yet.
-=^o.o^=
I've had two Creative sound cards in my life time. A Sound Blaster Pro a few years back and currently an SB32. Both have been very reliable and both sound great.
On the other side of the coin, I bought a GUS MAX once, and had no end of trouble with it. A lot of games didn't support it, and eventually it flaked out and died.
At least in my experience, Creative makes good products. They always work and sound great for their price level. (Yes, I know a $400 sound card sounds better, but... TANSTAAFL.)
-=^o.o^=
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
They tried to license BETA, but JVC was already working on VHS. Read some fscking FAQs.
I'm sick of all you goddamn Open Systems revisionist historians.
Didn't Rome fall because they didn't GPL their sewage systems?
Rrrr.
Damn right! The Amiga had the most kickass audio (not to mention video) hardware around--for years! The OS on those things was great, too.
The PC scene finally caught up to the original Amiga when the Gravis ultrasound, and accelerated VGA cards became available.
Gee guys lets get Linux running on it and a bunch of these would make a sweet Beowulf cluster.
You people don't have a god damned clue! Of course there are no illegal MP3s on the web. If you want to find the mp3s you have to go to DALnet! There are no ratios there. Everyone gives out their mp3s for free. They even have a little search engine for finding the song you want called @locator. It does not take very long to find any mainstream song on DALnet.
That doesn't mean that he couldn't be converted.
There's a lot of connections between open-source
software and non-heterogeneous lifestyles. Why
does he persist in maintaining that proprietary
lifestyle, anyhow?
Gee, that's great Creative!
Now, how 'bout a real soundcard with hardware interrupts and open specs instead of this binary-only Windows driver crap that emulates hardware?
Anybody know of a REAL soundcard for Linux/BSD that I can buy new now, that doesn't require the $20.00 OSS product to run? Gottan URL?
I'd like to run cdplay (from the package cdtool) WITHOUT loading X-windows/workman and have it play the damn CD with sound and everything.
http://resources.pdadash.com/faqs/ ce/wyvern.shtml
The new Windows CE Palm-size PC's not only have stereo input and output jacks, but they can play MP3's, color MPEG video, and have compact flash 2 slots, which hold between 2 and 128 meg ram cards, or that new harddrive from IBM. Plus they come with 16 megs RAM (not rom) by default. I'm not making any of this up, read the link above. Kinda makes the palmpilot a dinosour. The color looks badass - 16 bit on some devices like the Casio, Compaq is only 256 colors, but that's still 255 more than my old useless (compaired to what ce can do besides address book) pilot.
I have an SB16-SCSI, and it's been decent, though (1) I'm no sound professional, and (2) it took all of my CPU time to play an MP3 on my 486-133 (it's ok with a P200 now, but the card came with a 486-33). Now, are there any commercially available (with specs) cards which support 22-bit audio? How about real-time multiple digital sources without choking the CPU? A new, open, more powerful sound card would make a nice EE project.
Sigh... another lame M$ "grassroots" contribution;
Go away and spend time creating an OS that actually works.
Didn't I read somewhere that Eric was, er, "open-source"?
untill DVD is easyly re-writeable I dont think it will be as sucsessfull as video tape. quality has nothing to do with it at that point. people will most likely have both if not just VHS. Weather it gets to be recordable or not is up to the industry and cost/performace ratio.
I have a 50 MHz 68060, and playing a 128 kbps MP3 gives me a 25% CPU
load! There's no way that the 68000 inside the Palm Pilot would be
able to play MP3s. It just isn't fast enough. An '030 would be
the bare minimum.
in the back of the sendmail guide (bat book) from o'reilly it describes Eric Allman as being the original author of sendmail, as well as living with is partner of 17 years (or something), Kirk. Sounds like a guy's name doesn't it?
Duh. Before ya say there's no news on creative's site, check
--
--
Just lurking, thanks!
Posted by DonR:
just put a node in the family room. Get a small case, and incorporate into into the stereo system. All you need is a NIC and a Sound card that'll hook up to your stereo system. Control everything else remotely
---
Donald Roeber
Look at Jukebox for a rough framework.
Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?
How many mp3s do you have that are less than 2MB? What you need is a WinCE machine.
Hey, it lost the last line of message which said [ampersand]lt;ducking[ampersand]gt;. It showed up correctly in the preview page.
In case you missed it, the reference in WinCE was a joke.
"Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier."
Of course, one of Creatives biggest problems *now* is that standard they set years ago limits them today. While other companies have created some really whizz-bang products, we are still stuck to CL's older tech (ala Ensoniq, now owned by them, and the GUS). But, I agree, they did help us climb out of the primordial goo of bad PC sound...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
the "ala" part i meant to stick in front of the "older" part... oops :)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Current portable CD players with a 50-second anti-skip memory system never skip while walking, but skip a lot while jogging or running.
But if the same system could be used for MP3s, then you would have a 500-second anti-shock memory. It would start to skip a lot too if you were jogging for a while.
How about this idea; install a shock sensor (like the article about the PalmPilot hack a few days ago) to detect when the unit is experiencing a level of shock that won't cause skipping. Spin up that 32X CD player, and read 500 seconds of music into memory, then spin down the CD.
It will definately eat more batteries than a solid-state memory system, but it also will let you store over 11 hours of music on super-cheap removeable media. I'd love to have my entire music colection on a few dozen $2 CDs, instead of a few $300 hard drives (ala the Empeg car system).
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.
AFAIK, what gave Creative's initial boost was the SoundBlaster, an AdLib with an 8-bit DAC attached to it. Which looks very suspiciously like a bastardisation technique (unles they actually had a licence).
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
The reason beta lost out to VHS was because JVC kept VHS an open standard and freely licensed the technology to other companies. When an open standard goes against a closed standard, the open standard almost always wins.
Mp3 vs. VQF is likewise. MP3 is a published ISO standard. VQF is very closed and proprietary. So despite VQF's supposed technical superiority, it's not going to get anywhere in the marketplace. I admit that MP3 is not as open as I'd like it to be. Fraunhofer still enforces their patent rights to MP3. However, VQF is much worse -- the specification is not even made public.
AAC has more promise than either VQF or MP3. It will be interesting to see how open the AAC standard is.
I've been thinking about this for a while.
It should be trivial to load all your MP3's into an Oracle (or other) database as Binary Large Object (BLOb) files, and write a simple C/perl program that can autogenerate playlist files based on search criteria. (and pipe the output directly to mpg123?)
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Personally speaking, looking for mp3's is one of the bigger wastes of time ever.
Heh. You just don't know where to look.
Try IRC.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Honestly man, you're killing me over here.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Their modems suck ass, too.
I spent over six months recording our record. Nearly got a divorce, did lose a job. Free? Are you nuts?
The thing that makes mp3's great is that it cuts out the fscking middlemen.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Is there any radio stations that play mp3's? I don't mean internet radio stations either....
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Been there, done that.
I setup a small Linux box to interface to my PalmPilot (via Serial port). Pop a CD in, control it from the Pilot, output to a stereo (it's in the same room as that), yay, 5 hours of music at a pop.
If you have a sound-capable laptop with cd-rom (I realize, of course, that these don't grow on trees!) you could 'dock' it on top of the stereo without spoiling the decor, and get a y-cable...
**>>BELCH
Sorry for the repost, but the previous mp3 article is scrolled so far down the screen and only has 6 comments, so I guess it's a dead thread.
I've started ripping some of my CDs with cdparanoia and bladeenc, but I haven't really organized the resulting files. How do those of you with huge collections deal with them? I just have them all in the same directory. I go to the playlist (I use GQmpeg) and add all.
It would be really great if there were some kind of database interface that would generate playlists based on search criteria. Kind of like the Windows softare for the empeg car player.
A lot of people on slashdot act as though they have hundreds of mp3s, so some of you must have come up with a good system. Tell us about it.
As referenced in one of the replies above buried under a few layers, a company called naiam.com is making one available in time for christmas. Info can be found on this site .
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
I thought someone would have caught this by now.
and:
It seems that CL wants to get a monopoly on the industry.
How about this:
Since when has "the market" been waiting for Creative to make its move? They seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. It seems the market is doing just fine without them so far.
It doesn't look to me like they want to play any MP3, but use some sort of proprietary encoding/encryption/whatever wrapped around an MP3 (I suppose to stop all those "pirates" out there)
If they want to give it a try, I say go for it. However, for all of you who have the "give me free stuff or give me death" attitude, this may not be what you want.
Film at 11.
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Creative had a terrible record, until recently, for not disclosing the details of the internals of their cards. In contrast Gravis had the completely opposite attitude, and much cool software was developed which was GUS only...
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
I'm currently working on this. I'm combining a ripper/encoder with CDDB (I know, it's been done...) then storing all the info, plus the location of the resulting MP3 file, in a database. No web page for the project yet; it's still in its early stages. All of the cddb stuff works, and the ripper is, er, well... started. All that's left after that is the encoder, and cleaning up the database stuff. Should be tres cool.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
That's sorta like my idea. I'm using mySQL, though.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
True, it does. And I've used it. It doesn't do EXACTLY what I want it to do, though. Besides all that, yeah... I do like to recreate the wheel.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
No... what does that have to do with his point?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
They'd need 1> more memory, and 2> a faster processor. That, of course, is on top of changing the audio support (16-bit, stereo, etc.) It would be expensive, and make the thing bigger.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Thing is, you would have to drag far fewer
CDs (e.g. one), since a CD can hold hundreds
of MP3s.
And then you could change which several hundred
songs you wanted to listen to that day simply by switching CDs, instead of having to upload new ones vi serial port.
I liked the CD + 32 MB flash ram idea.
Hailing Creative products, especially their early ones, is a tribute to their market share, not their quality. Watch it Hemos. You'll be reminiscing about what WFW 3.11 did for networking next.
SAVE THE BATS
-Khyron
SAVE THE BATS
There's EAX, which is pretty impressive, and A3D 2.0, which is stunning, but only for two speakers afaik. Many games support both, though the quality varies somewhat. Unreal's EAX support is pretty weak, HalfLife's is amazing -- that chopper is scarier than hell when you hear it circling all around. I'd say most games coming out now support either A3D or EAX now.
But I have a nice Cambridge Microworks system, which is two speakers. I'd have to toss that to get a surround setup...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Who really cares?
0 1 - just my two bits
You are correct. Adlib should've been the real winner here--the Sound Blaster was the same Yamaha chipset with a DAC tacked on. If it weren't for the Adlib's popularity beforehand, the Sound Blaster wouldn't have taken off.
Why? Because Creative's original idea of music for a PC was the Creative Music System, also sold under the name "Game Blaster" at Radio Shack. It was essentially four Tandy sound chips in stereo. Anyone who remembers their sound standards can easily tell you that Adlib's 2-operator FM was much better than the TI chip in the Tandy.
Go visit http://www.oldskool.org/pc/sound/ if you want some audio examples.
I like that! I've always wanted to set up a linux box in my car for MP3s and the like, but the power consumption for the monitor(or the cost of a LCD screen) was one of the big killers. Just forget the monitor, run a serial cable from the trunk or wherever, and use the palmpilot with a terminal emulator or some front end controller to run everything.
"The GUS was a proprietary piece of hardware, developed solely as the commercial product of Gravis. There is no way it could survive the long rampup time that Linux has endured."
If what you say is true, then that means there is no way for any hardware to ever have a long life, right? Then how did the Sound Blaster itself (which is even more closed than the GUS) live up until now?
Perhaps I missed something?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Actually ads do benifate the record comapanies, and in some (rare) circumstances the artists. The radio companies have to pay the record companies everytime they play a song, the ads provide the revenue for the radio station, some of this money goes to the record companies, then (if they're really lucky) the artists get some of the cash.
-matt
I doubt there will be an injunction, the RIAA tried the same thing with the RIO and failed, I really don't see how they could get an injunction against creative after that.
-matt
In summary, some of the technology from VQF is included in the MPEG-4 standard, but a .VQF file is not really an MP4 file since MP4 has its own file format, and VQF is only used in certain restrictive ways within MPEG-4.
Technical work on MP4 was completed in October 1998, and it is in the publication process at ISO now. I'm not aware of any fully-functional encoders/decoders yet.
-- Eric Scheirer
Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)
Some sort of Sound capability for a Palm Pilot would be cool, all right. What I'd like to see is an "Internet Transistor Radio": a Palm Pilot plus sound plus a Ricochet modem. You could wander around the San Francsico Bay Area listening to a college radio station from Austrailia.
Unfortunately, the WinCE world may actually be a little closer to this. The Cassandra already comes with a head phone jack (though I bet the sound is awful, voice quality only: they intended it as a dictation gadget).
It's all about inertia. It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.
:) I know it wouldn't be using off the shelf equipment to obtain these speeds, but this thing probably isn't using all that much off the shelf stuff. Am I babbling again??? :p
Why do we need to spin at even 1x? mp3's go as high as, what? 256kbit or so? That's one heck of alot less than 150kbyte(that's what, 1200kbit?). So you'd need to spin it up to less than 1/4th to constantly keep up with an mp3. I think I'd prefer to spend the extra cash on 4-8 meg of ram and cache whole songs and a bit more though. But what uses more power? Only spinning up to 1/4th single spin, or spinning up/down. Or heck, maybe a constant half spin with read ahead?
What we need is a CD-ROM based MP3 player. That would be really cool.
Yes, CDs can skip, but with a mere one Meg of memory, you can read ahead a full minute, so that shouldn't be an issue.
True, spinning a CD will consume batteries faster, but it will still last much longer than traditional CD players. Imagine one with four Megs of RAM: It would initially fill its memory and then stop. After playing 3 Megs, it would replenish its memory while playing the last quarter of its memory. This might need to be adjusted slightly for high bitrate MP3s, but would work well.
Or does spinning up the CD take more power than keeping it spinning for a few minutes?
Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?
For that matter, this could be a chance for Creative to get into the PDA market.
I'm in about the same situation as you, except that after using cdparanoia and bladeenc, I use id3ren to tag the files, so the artist, album, year, and such are all stored in the file, and players like mpg123 can display the info.
Unfortunately, the tags don't let you have enough characters for long names, and there isn't an entry for track number (some albums sound better if you play them in order, so I use the comment field to log the track number). I saw some reference to a newer tagging method somewhere--is there a new revision to the tagging standard?
Of course, emacs can be used to solve any problem. (That's why I run a emacs/Linux system.) :)
What we need for tagging MP3s is an emacs MP3 mode. Just load an MP3 into emacs, and it's set up for editing the tags.
Anyone want to write one?
I played with one of Creative's alpha-grade portable MP3 players at Comdex back in November.
Honestly, it sucked. It was really low quality sound, more like fm radio than CD, which by comparison to a good software player is unacceptable.
There's a chipset on the market that does hardware mp3 decoding... I wonder who's using it? Some german company whom I can't remember makes it.
Anyways, the point is, by comparison to the Saihan product that was also showing (mp-man), it was no competition. I'm waiting for the one with the 2 gig drive.
mindslip
The funny thing is, I don't see MP3's ever damaging the recording industry. Sure, there's rampant pirating going on (I'm quite a leech myself). But just like most pirated software, it's property that wouldn't have been bought anyway. I mean, am I ever going to go out and buy an entire album just so I can pick up that Pump Up The Volume remix? Never.
Now check this out. I've purchased around 15 new CD's over the last year because of random MP3's that I've downloaded. So it's really not the record companies that have to worry, it's radio stations!!! (Besides, broadcast media industries will have to face the fact that people want entertainment on demand, and that traditional forms like radio and TV will eventually be replaced by streaming on demand.)
The only thing record companies lose is the programming control they have over radio stations. But that can easily be changed by strengthening their promotion efforts in other media markets, like TV, movies, and the web.
-Eyeball
_______
2B1ASK1
oops.
Free hardware design: The components all exist already: embedded systems cards (with on board scsi, ethernet, vga, memory, the works), cd transports, sealed motorcycle batteries, shock-mount cases, those cute hi-fi compact speakers. What if somebody (an EE student? some mad scientist NRL geek?) hacked out plans for a boombox which ran linux and that could store your entire record collection compressed as MP3s. Which anyone with a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and the ability to follow directions could build in a weekend? And published these plans on the internet along with links to all the component suppliers?
Why isn't this possible? What needs to happen to get me one of these machines? How much would you pay?
-bonkydog
Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. -Horace, Satirae
i thought it was: minds are like parachutes, when they're open they only slow you down. ;)
Agreed. That's the only reason I continue to buy
:)
systems with an ISA slot. I have the GUS 1.37,
and as long as that sound card works, I'll continue
to use it religiously.
Probably the best PC sound card of all time, with
the technology of the era, and will _still_ whip
the pants off anything Creative can come up with.
I observed this at an ACM meeting wherein our chapter
played PC demos on a big wall on the outside of the
CS building. The demo machine was a P133 (still decent at the time) with plenty of RAM to spare. The
Unreal Demo choked the machine because the CPU had
to do all the sound sequencing. This was, IIRC, an
AWE32 (or maybe even a 64). I played that demo on
my 486/33 with a GUS (after the GUS patch came out), and it was perfectly smooth.
Creative simply blows heinie. I wish Gravis had been
able to bring that card to prominence in the market. PC sound would be much better today if they
had.
On a side note, is there any place to get a bunch of
those sound cards? Surely they didn't all sell, so
where did the excess go? I'd buy a bunch of them if
I could find 'em.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
I'd have to beg to differ. Time to pull out of that shortsighted state of mind, because the medium isn't the problem here.
There are many people who utilize mp3's in a legal fashion. Just because some people use it for less than legal purposes doesn't make it wrong, evil or term people "freeloading-idiots." Email has been used for wrongful purposes, do you see the pulp and paper mills in an uproar? Do you see them taking sendmail to court? Nope.
And as for the wrongdoing that *is* done with mp3's nowadays. Personally speaking, looking for mp3's is one of the bigger wastes of time ever. You end up spending over an hour looking for one frigging song, and what you do get is usually of a poor quality. Not worth the navigating (and closing of all the browser windows these sites usually popup). I would much prefer flipping a few bucks to get a song *I* want. And I would prefer it if the artist got the big chuck of that cash.
That's what those record companies are afraid of. I don't think they care NEARLY as much about pirated mp3 songs as they care about losing their middleman status.
Well, working things out, I make about $25/hr working. Since having a family comes into play, I'd consider my free time slightly more valueable than my work time. So, in the time it would take to find an MP3 or two, we're already at the cost of a CD.
Like I said, I'd pay for legitimate MP3's no problem.
Also, spinning a CD sucks tons of power.
If you're playing mp3s it doesn't take a very fast rate to play. With a typical 128kb/s rate, it will take about 1/8th the speed of a normal cd player to get a good playback. Make the spin rate 1/6 of a normal cd player to be safe. So the power comsumption can be 1/6th that of a normal cd player. A pair of batteries will last about 6 times as much assuming the additional electronics don't take much more power.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Wow, that would be, like so heavy. I'm talking MAJOR bummer with a side order of HECTIC.
I would, like, photocopy them and stuff, and post them to yourself.
Peace..
This is a big ole smack in the face for the RIAA and other stupid members of the record industry who wish to keep overcharging for something that should be free. Creative is gonna have a killing in the market too, why drop $17 bucks for a cd when you could buy a portable mp3 player, and then just download the songs off the net for free?
Of course this does open up all sorts of legal issues, there will probably be injunctions to prevent Creative from selling this equipment( much the same as Sony attempting to prevent Connectix from selling their Playstation Emulator). But once again the demand will take over, and who knows, maybe the suits will jump in on this one cuz all they need to see is those beautiful dollar signs.
I found a reference to one while hunting around for an MP3 player on the web. Check out Naiam's web site.
I'm in the process of developing my own in-car PC,
one function of which will be to play MP3 audio. I have been doing just what you are, ripping all
my music CDs like crazy to get as much of my music
collection into MP3 format as I can, and my scheme
currently is to make a main parent directory (e.g., "My MP3 Collection") and just make subs inside of it for various artists, and then in those make subdirectories for each album, where finally the MP3 files will be stored, simply as "TrackXX.mp3". I am working on software which will perform functions similar to the empeg Windows app for organizing your music. You can check my website at http://home.earthlink.net/~jisweb/ next week when my new website is up detailing my in-car PC project.
--Jason
Have one in development. Hopefully will be able to talk more about it in 6 months...Lets just say that it will do more than you could possibly imagine...
According to a recent article on Wired (http://www.mp3.com) the artist gets about 10% of the cost of a CD from a major label. OTOH, if you upload a tune to mp3.com and use their CD production and distribution service, you get 50%. My band hasn't tried that yet, but we probably will when we do our CD this summer. I don't think that people should pirate CDs for mp3s but I think that places like mp3.com sound like a great way to by-pass the major labels with their legions of suit-wearing dirtbags. FWIW.
Everybody knows Beta is a better tape format than VHS. If it weren't, countless Usenet and Slashdot arguments would crumble and there'd be a paradox of the universe. Therefore, Beta is superior. :)
Seriously, I think that Beta/VHS is a bad analogy as each tape format has certain advantages and disadvantages for certain applications. VHS was just better suited for the home market.
But all that will become irrelevant in a decade or so when everyone switches to DVD, except for a few diehards who are convinced that "metal oxide" provides richer picture and sound quality than all that digital crap.