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Stereo Component for Digital Audio
An anonymous reader writes "The techs over at Tech Radio interviewed Lydstrom, Inc. about their recently announced Songbank MZ3-5000, a digital audio player meant for the home that uses compression technology from Lucent to store up to 5000 songs on one player. Apparently the quality of the output is better than MP3, but the device is also MP3 compatible. They posted the interview on their Archives page. "
My guess is that a huge number of us have hacked together stereo
components to do this already (I use xmms & the IRMan plugin for
mine- although I wish it had better handling of large numbers
of playlists). Interesting tho.
According to the interview, the system's "reccomendations" are essentially push advertising, trying to get you to buy new songs online. I mean, we've all suffered suggestions from these "altavista reccomends" and "ebay reccomends" type things. Do I want to be assulted with advertising while I'm trying to dial up a playlist?
Second, to do this they have to profile my musical tastes. That's demographic research, and there's little to no reason for them not to turn around and sell it. Privacy paranoids take note.
Third, as the guy also mentioned, lucent is a big name in the ongoing SDMI debate. The unit's OS is flash ROM updated, so when phase II of SDMI gets implemented, no more MP3 support.
It's just an embedded system with a propriarity UI and a propriarity codec designed to get people to buy more (music / hardware).
Thus, I urge people to keep up work on the open source hardware front.
Get a good pair of headphones, and then encode some nine inch nails music. The mp3 lossy compression really messes up nine inch nails, especially stuff from The Downward Spiral. Stuff like white/grey noise, fuzzy synthesizers, harmonics, and large volume changes all get messed up with mp3 at 128kbps. 192kbps sounds pretty good, however. I've noticed similar problems with a lot of other industrial music, but even with normal rock music I can tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps with a good pair of headphones.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sounds like a problem with either Netscape or your particular setup. A browser should not crash under any circumstances, no matter how badly formed the HTML is.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yeah, but the problem is that vinyl doesn't keep its sound quality. My 15-year-old CD, as long as I don't scratch it, will sound the same as a new CD. A 15-year-old vinyl will not. My parents' 35-year-old vinyls sound absolutely terrible (warped surfaces from heat changes and deepened needle grooves from excessive play).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Depends on your music. Simple stuff like techno
and normally "noisy" stuff like alternapoprock
tends to sound about the same. But if you listen
to something clean and complex (jazz, stuff with
a lot of horns or strings, clear vocals) you can
definitely hear the difference.
I've kicked the bitrate up to 256 and gotten
pretty good results, but 256 kinda sucks as far
as space goes.
All I can say is this thing is sweet! Here are the details from the site, for those too lazy:
:)
o approx 250 hours of songs
o IEEE-1394 connector for extra storage units
o auto detect song title, artist, etc (if stored on CD)
o smooth fade between songs and beat matching for DJ-like transitions between songs
o "CustomDJ": "...an intelligent agent that watches how you listen to music. As it learns about your listening habits, it will automatically play the songs you like at the right time and day of the week."
o touchscreen remote
o 3 stereo (analog) outs - play different selections in different rooms at the same time!
Plus its good looking. Costs $699 - $999 depending on when you want this thing and which promotional offer you take.
Are there any software mp3 players that have the beat matching and DJ abilities this has? Those are the kind of features I would put in a design of my own - can't do that on a CD player (without having your own personal DJ
Complexity Happens