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Samsung's "Yepp" MP3 Player
TwoSticks writes "Samsung has announced ``
yepp,'' which
they claim is the world's smallest MP3 player. ``The size
of a calling card (58mm x 85mm x 17mm), "yepp" comes with
FM radio, telephone directory and recorder function.'' "
Available later this year, no price listed. 40 megs of storage
with a smart card for more.
One second of audio? Standard MP3 files have 128 kbits / second. One smartcard has a capacity of 128 kbytes - that's 8 times more!
(it's a 'k' as in '1000', not a 'K'
as in '1024')
you get pretty good FM in the part of the
world where you live!
Stereo sucks with headphones anyway, and
64kbps mono is a little bit better than just FM.
I want a portable MP3 player, I really do. But 40M of storage isn't enough, and $199 is too expensive. When I can get 90 minutes of 128K data for $150, I'll buy one immediately. Geez, it's not like they need 168-pin SDRAMs in these things, why are they so damn expensive?
17mm? A really _fat_ calling card, I'd say. *g* Nonetheless, it's nice to see companies taking the MP3 somewhat seriously. Who was that industry dork who was predicting the MP3 would go away like disco? Wonder what his response to this would be...
Cool . Ive waited for these thingies a long time. I will get one and impress my ungeeky friends.
snowman
Another toy.
Just like every other respectable geek, I'm waiting for a portable MP3 player that does CD-R discs.
The frustrating thing is that right now there IS NO SUCH ANIMAL! I'm willing to pay just about any semi-reasonable price for this, but nobody is selling them!
I'm sick of using bulky cd players and walkmans. I hate not being able to fit them in my pocket. This is really cool..even has an option for FM radio, I hope it fits in my pocket!
They are the same thing. You can read this news article posted a week or 2 ago on maximumpcmag's inside sources. Here is the article./ 99.4.16.phtml#YeppandNomadSeparatedAtBirth
http://www.maximumpcmag.com/inside_sources/99.4
the joy of mp3s is having access to all my muisc bits without those annoying cd atoms. 40 megs, 10 songs? great, now i'd need as many smart cards as cd's.
well, at least i might be able to weld a hard drive on the automobile version.
Once again, a post from a moron gets a score of 3.
If you read the release, it says that it has enough storage for 10 songs of average length. Sounds like about 50 minutes to me. It has 160 minutes of ``recording time'' and give as an example of ``recording'' as lectures, not music.
Seriously, if memory is so cheap today, why do new VCRs still only have room for 6 programs, and caller id boxes only hold 25 calls, and digital watches only have one or two alarm settings and radios only have 5 presets, and programmable calculators do 'up to 500 steps' and my new TV only hold labels for 25 or so channels? Methinks there's a conspiracy here.
Idea! Build a player with an 8 Meg SIMM in it and a CD-Player. Quickly load the song at 32x to the memory (Probably will take 2 Secs.), and blammo, no skipping for the entire song (Probably 2 songs!). And how much is 8 Megs of memory anyways? $20? Much less than 40 Megs flash... Remember, since the song is on CD, the memory only needs to hold the single song while playing it...
This is similar to Anti-Skip on CD-Players, but they can't buffer the whole uncompressed song (unless they've started putting 128 MB in these things!) so they just buffer a few seconds. Not enouogh.
That really seems very small baterfy life for a thing that does not have any moving parts at all!!!
Why can this thing consume as much power?
Cheers,
Angel
Waiting for a Gigabyte of storage on a portable mp3 player will take to long or be to expensive if done by solidstate memory.
If done by cdrom or mini hardrive or some other spinning media you lose what I consider to be the biggest advantage in a portable mp3 player- no skipping.
When I'm out agressive rollerblading I want to be able to listen to some kickass music and not have the player skip everytime I hit a jump a little too hard. The anti-skip on a cdplayer DIES under this kind of stress.
Diamond is attempting the same thing too. Don't consider this a let-down - just purchase one early. :)
Hmm, I'm seeing this thing only allowing you to download music from them or their affiliates, a nice way to build a monopolistic empire, eh?
But its just software that would prohibit that, right? How many hours will it take for people to get around it?
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Why on earth would anyone want a phone directory incorporated to a portable MP3 player?
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Battery life, size and usable life of the machine are more important to me. Spinning media seems nowhere close to solid state in these regards.
Personally, Samsung has a bad track record with me. There's always something horrible about everything they design. I bet this thing will have a battery hatch which breaks easily, or a volume control which crackles... something dumb like that marring some great piece of engineering.
Just look at the useless Java on their website... There's a prime example.
Don't know why nobody found this one on Wired News:
Thomson is investing in MP3. Thomson owns several of the patents on MP3 technology, so it looks like they're going in the right direction.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
It seems like it can only record from the FM radio and a mic. The mic is probably mono, and it probably records at 64kbs from the radio.
Amiga - Back for the future!
Check out http://www.yepp.co.kr/product/prod uct_frame.html for more info on the cards. 8, 16 and 32 MB SmartMedia cards are available.
Amiga - Back for the future!
The player looks nice, but check out the info on their encoder: http://www.yepp.co.kr/product/pro duct_body05.html. That looks like the killer product to me.
Has anyone else found the storage capacity, and general memory in these things to always be described a little decptively? Typically they quote music times using a 64k/s format, and the 64MB Nomad is just the 32MB version with a 32MB smartmedia card bundled.
Now the "Yepp" is only expandable with "Yepp-cards" (smartcards). Notice it doesn't say smartmedia cards, just smartcards. Why would you need smartcards? They're for things like tickets, electronic wallets, etc - I know, I'm wearing one on my wrist as I type (Swatch Access). How much are they going to cost, and when are they going to be available, and what sizes?
Only the 64MB Rio Special edition appears to be quoting size, and total size when expanded, in MB - without any deception. (even then, they have fudged the play time on occasion)
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
I've been considering getting an MP3 player for some time now. If their copy protection turns out to be innocuous or circumventable I'll probably get one. Not the "deluxe" version though. (I've got a Pilot for my phone numbers, thank you very much) I hope I won't have to re-encode all my CD's...
To my understanding, MD uses a compresed format, so it does not have the same raw capacity as a CD. Thus, even if you used mp3 compresion on it, you would probably not get much more playing time than a regular CD.
-Cheetah
If MP3 players continue to be subject to the economics of flash ram, I feel that the concept of cd players that can read mp3s straight off of a cd will become more viable. Sure, the current portable players have a large benefit because of no moving parts (no damned skipping, no need for shock protection), but I'd be ecstatic if I could carry around 650-680M of MP3s on a cd and play it on a portable player.
Plus, CDRs are so cheap compared to flash ram. So right now, I'm pretty much shying away from until a well priced, "high" storage player is released.
'90 minutes of 128K data for $150'? That'll be great...
This player was announced a long time ago. I bet Samsung just felt like they had to do something so that people wouldn't give up on the whole thing. It appears that no major features have been added with the exception of a phone/address book which is just about the strangest thing you could put in a walkman. Aside from that it really isn't too much different from the Rio. Add to that the fact that Creative's Nomad is exactly the same and I'm pretty disappointed with this offering. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
You are failing to consider the benefits of
... so that
combining anti-skip technology and MP3 compression.
In fact, an entire single track could be read
off the CDROM in a matter of seconds and held
in the antiskip buffer
you could be jerking around wildly 90% of the
time -- even more (using a 2x, 3x or faster cd
player), and still listen to the music with no
skipping.
I don't imagine a "secumax" version of a ripper would be the plan, as a ripped song from a CD is still pirated (based on license for use). If I had a "secumax" based player, what would stop me from listening to your mp3's?
Sure, there are ways they could make your mp3's only work on your yepp.... as to protection schemae, check the jargon file.
Most kids these days carry around their CD-cassette-whatever walkman and their cell phone. It would make more sense to have the phone book built into the cell phone but oh well.
But, they don't have watches so they still need to stop you and ask for the time.
What would be much better is a MD-MP3 player. Sony's MD format is much more convienient for a portable player, and it's capacity get close to that of CD.
What this basically would be is the same as the current crop of MD players, except trashing the proprietary encoding algorithm and formats for MP3. They could be built to the same size, which is pretty small, and have the convenience of MP3 formats (i.e. save/format/etc from your computer).
Doing the same thing with CD or CD-R would be OK, but they are 3x the size. A MD-MP3 player would be something you keep in your pocket.
Creative Labs is marketing the Yepp to the North American market as the Nomad. I got to play with one at Internet World a couple of weeks ago. Very sweet machine. This unit can even record and encode voice! It's also rechargable, and has its own cradle.
I spoke with the guy about their claims that it stores an hour of audio in 32Mb. He conceded that they have to claim that because Diamond claims it too.
They were selling the 64Mb units at the show on preorder for $150. I took the plunge....
SecuMax? Wazzat? I worry when someone tries to decide for me what constitutes "unauthorized".
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Man, that would be great... I could fit my 3 gig collection onto about 4 cd-rs... 50 hours of music! On 4 cds! Crazy playlists! And if I had 4 cd-rom drives in my computer, I wouldn't have to use up all that space on my hard drive, I could just leave the 4 cds in the drives all the time!! OMG!!!
Ah, it's nice to fantasize. = )
Ian.
http://www.nomadworld.com/
They look identical in some screenshots. The press release from Creative does list estimated prices at $170 for a 32M version and $250 for a 64M version.
- Mike
I've wanted to get into
Binaural recording. This thing
would probably work great, put the
whole works in a hat.
mp3/digital random access walkmans will replace
tape walkmans and cd walkmans, internet or no.
it looks like samsung are going to lock this product into some kind of online service that they provide. bugger that. and bugger the
rubbish like mp3.com -- i just want a better
way to listen to my CDs!
--
Rare Window - free your photos
what software have used to make bunaural beats?
i have only make simple sin wave ones...
which are nothing compared to monroe institute's.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
AC: When I'm out agressive rollerblading I want to be able to listen to some kickass music and not have the player skip everytime I hit a jump a little too hard.
So let's make a CD player with a meg of memory -- that way it can read far enough ahead that you'd have to be shaking it for quite some time before you'll hear a skip.
--
test
Pricing has not yet been determined, but it can be expected that pricing will not be far from the $199 retail price mark unless you are an American buying it in the Yongsan Electronics market. For you, the price will be double
At 58mm x 85mm x 17mm, or about the size of a calling card (a pretty thick calling card, no less), the Yepp is pretty small....but perhaps not as small as the u-fi. Too bad it isn't quite available yet. Check out the pictures! This thing is sweet....worth waiting for, I think.
Hey, how'd you know I was lookin' at you if you weren't lookin' at me?
Once again, a portable mp3 player manufacturer makes wildly exaggerated claims about storage capacity.
40 megs = 160 minutes of music?
That's closer to 50 minutes worth of music,
substantially less than a full length CD, at
MPEG 1 Layer 3 128Kbps.
Like the Rio ad campaign, Samsong is using the
assumption that your files are 64 Kbps or less, which is FM radio quality or less.
They may have software that will help you turn
128Kbps files into more highly compressed files.
However changing from one compression rate to
another can introduce distortions you don't get
converting from original source directly to the
lower rate.
Hang on for an MP3 player that hold a GIG,
possibly a CDROM filled with MP3s. That
will be a revolution.
I found this on their web site. Take This as you like:
Q:Does Yepp play MP3 songs that are illegally available over the Internet?
A: The Yepp currently has no method to detect whether an MP3 file was downloaded from a legal or illegal web site, just as a paper copier machine is not able to differentiate between text that is being copied with or without the consent of its copyright owners. Through its SecuMAX(TM) technology, Samsung is forging ahead with ways to help protect copyrighted music and it will also participate in RIAA's SDMI initiative to identify a solution to this problem.
Q: How much will Yepp cost?
A: Pricing has not yet been determined, but it can be expected that pricing will not be far from the $199 retail price mark.