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Pine Introduces New Portable MP3 device
TheTomcat writes "Big deal. Another MP3 player, huh? Not quite. This story at news.com talks about a new MP3 device that plays MP3 CD's, audio CDs and comes with a built-in FM tuner. While it has no capabilities to store songs (like the Empeg or the Diamond Rio), this would be IDEAL for my car. Hook it up to a decent power supply, an amp, and voila, out goes my current CD deck. It even comes with 10 seconds of anti-skip for Construction season (aka Summer), a remote control, and a built-in EQ. I'm drooling. [scheduled release: November]"
I don't know what the rest of you are smoking, but I listen to a lot of classical music mp3's (where encoding artifacts are very noticeable, if only due to the fact that I've trained my ear a bit more). Fraunhoffer's codecs give you the best quality mp3's at 128 kbit, but Bladeenc is slightly better (if you go up to 168). 192 is a bit overkill, and anything over that is just wasting space.
In my experience, Xing sounds like crap. It makes lots of 'cymbal splatter' sounds. It's fast, but the quality degradation isn't worth it. I use BladeEnc, personally. It's free, works in the background, and I've never heard any problems with MP3s made with it.
The *best* bet is to use the Radium-enhanced Fraunhofer codec in HQ mode.
If youre going to be encoding at 320kbps your best bet is iMedia MPEG Pro from QDesign (www.qdesign.com) or their stand-alone codec. These create mp2 files (playable by winamp...not sure about this new player). The sound quality is just as good (if not better) than FhG at 320/hq and the encoding takes a fraction of the time. Give it a try.
Dude that must suck to have an ISP with only a 14.4k Internet uplink.
Burning CDs is within reach of everyone these days. Hell...once place on pricwatch.com is selling a Mitsumi ide cdr for $109. The person writing the preview of the Pine thing was pretty lame tho saying its not practical. Its way more practical than a Rio as far as I'm concerned. Great...96MB of memory...big whup.
right now I have a 10 disc CD changer in my car. I don't think I'll be getting one of these new devices, despite how cool they are. They ofter about the same playing time as my changer. CDs sound better (unless their CD-Rs of MP3s) it's easier to switch out music that I don't want to listen to...on the downside..track access is slower..the CD changer is large..has more moving parts...is very inconviently placed in my car..skips like hell (but this one is my fault). If I were starting over, I'd get an MP3 player..but for now I'll stick w/ my CD changer..of course my amplifier has 2 sets of RCA inputs...so I could just have both.
I still don't think it's worth $300. You could put together a very simple car MP3 system for a lot cheaper. If you have the parts to do it, great. If you don't, get an old Pentium motherboard ($30), Power Inverter ($40), a decent size hard drive ($100), and a cheap sound card ($20).
Yeah, you could weld together a car out of a Radio Flyer wagon too and it would be plenty cheaper than goin' to wonna them fancy dealerships...
Besides the disadvanteges already mentioned, you can take this thing ANYWHERE -- it's not bolted to your car.
Like many of you, I've been waiting for one of these things for YEARS. Unfortunatly this is all still vaporware. What's not encouraging is that the first company that attempted it (NAiAM) went under after months of promises (and they had other, non-mp3-related products on the market at the time!)
At least now there are TWO companies working on this...hopefully at least one of them will manage to ship a product!
mp3s are compressed audio.. if it also buffered mp3 as mp3s (not decompressed mp3) then we would have around 120sec (2mins) of audio... ofcourse here I mean that my mp3s are at 128... there are artifacts, but W(ho)TF cares about sound Q when driving...
you oughta watch the road.. and be able to hear the car horn (or is it ?klakson?), or the screams of pedestrians you drive over...
They make audio dvd's with incredible sample rates now... Mark
The difference between 256kbps and 320kbps mp3s encoded with bladeenc is quite possible to distinguish on some music, so 192kbps is certainly not an overkill, IMHO. I haven't tried the Fraunhofer radium encoder, though. After some quick tests lame seems to be a bit worse than bladeenc at high bitrates, but YMMV. However, it takes some listening before the artifacts at high bitrates become obvious. After listening to 256kbps mp3s for several hours the quality artifacts may become quite annoying. However, many people probably can't really tell the difference and some probably only THINK that they can hear the difference. Another mp3 killer is that most pc sound cards produce pretty bad output compared to low- to medium-end CD players (around $200-$1000). Signal/noise ratio in particular is usually unacceptable. With $200 computer speakers this will probably not be a serious issue and this can be cured by using digital output and an external high-quality dac.
$300 is way to much for a portable player. You can buy a "decent" stereo system for that money. The moment we have more competition for portable CD MP3 players you can expect street prices to drop under $200. I doubt the cost for such a device is over $50-$80
...when I get my second CPU I should be able to about double that.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, wouldn't the encoder need to be multithreaded to take advantage of the second CPU?
Do what everyone else does: download the MP3's for free off someone's site. Don't bother encoding them, someone has done it for you already.
True, 128kbit mp3 is rather lossy. But use bladeenc to encode a track with 320kbit/s and you probably won't notice much of a loss. With 320kbit/s you can still fit about 3hours on a regular cd, which is plenty for me. Or if you want to compromise the quality slightly use 256kbit encoding.
Is there an OSI version available for this hardware?
I would rather not pay for it.
Mp3 _could_ sound better than minidisc. Just for some reason no one compresses it at a rate that would produce a high sound quality. Personally, I'd rather get 5 CD's compressed onto one CD at 256kbps MP3 (Should be better than minidisc...), than 10 CD's at 128kbps MP3 (A little better than FM... But still very obviously overcompressed. Just listen for the "underwater" sound when the encoder runs out of bitrate to do a decent compression job.).
.wav files to the CD. Then compare them to the original song...
But I rant. I just live with using CDs. You can still get "free" (okay, "less than 'licit") music by copying other people's original CDs. Don't even think of getting me started on the "but burned CDs aren't as good" thread. People who say this have no clue at all. There can't be any difference, or else, how the hell would people be able to install RedHat from _CD_ and get it working? Binary data is binary data... If you don't beleive me, record
On the Pine website they also announce a device similar to the Rio with 32M + 32M flash card.
Now if they can combine the Rio-like device with the ability to play MP3's stored on CDs they will _really_ have something!
(Actually, I've heard of people playing with their decks standing up vertically, using rubber bands to keep the needles firmly in the groove of the record.)
I've seen someone scratching at a party in Brixton with one turntable at about 45 degrees...
Was a bit too trollied to check how he was doing it though.
pompomtom
If you have a good system and good taste I recomend LP's.
I've used a few opti cards before 9?c929, 9?c931 come to mind. Not bad for the price, but hiss needed work on the outputs. Wasn't good enough for a stereo component.
:-)
Personally I like my Dianmond Monster Sound MX-300 with MX-25 SPDIF out. Sure, the line outs on the MX-300 are hissy too, but with the digital out to my stereo, sound is (virtually) perfect! Plus, AC-3 for DVDs to boot!
umm...perhaps you mean Lincoln Navigator or else,Mercury Mountaineer ??
Canadian AC CanadianAC@NOSPAM.telebot.net
The so called 'MP4' format is not actually a MPEG standard. MP4 was trademarked by some unknown company trying to get their compression known. Its not the 'next' version of the MPEG Audio Layer codecs. It really sucks too. =) I believe the official title for the newer mpeg audio codecs is AC3, however I have not really looked into it lately, so I'm not 100% sure about that.
they say the limit is 100 songs... that is the hardware limit of audio tracks a cd can have.. what if they force you to have all songs as that? 1. you will need special writer software (as most current check if audio data is a valid wave file) 2. you wont be able to use it anywhere else.. reading fats is a bit problematic.. which ones to support.. Joliett is the most popular one.. havent seen much of rockridge or any other ones.. where to get song info? the id3 tags.. or hwat? no tech data? maybe their solution to this is so 'innovative' that no one else though of it.. some cd players require for you to store cds in a third directory from room /[author]/[album]/01.mp3 they suck terrible... if I was to design one I would force users to write mp3_nfo.lst file, which would be a small text file with a list of all mp3s and their type (bitrate, size, lenght) their location on cd (for playback) as well as the id3 info... that would rule... but what would I do with my current 60 mp3 cd collection?
Well, ever since I first heard about the Rio, this is what I've actually been waiting for.
For the first time, I can have a portable music system that can carry enough tracks for me not to have to work out in advance exactly what I'll want to listen to.
This isn't going to be popular with the Music Industry however - the backlash on this is going to make the Rio injuction look like a polite discussion amongst friends. Having already been threatened with tax on blank CDs, this might be the final straw and encourage government action.
Still, I'll put it in my list of toys for Xmas...after all, I did buy the Rio just for sheer gimmick value!
~ Bruce
Fscking brilliant, the empeg is cool - but this thing is perfect. I've been holding out on getting a new car stereo for my Jag till someone produced one of these. The article writer doesn't rate this as too useful - moron. Which is easier, carrying a CD from the home to the car or lugging the whole stereo, connecting it through a cable and downloading etc etc. It's the most convenient option yet. Its awkward keeping more than 10 cds within reach in the car - which just isn't enough - unless you can get 5-10 cds on each cd. At $299 the price is right too, as long as sound quality is reasonable.
Bladeenc faithfully reproduces all the bugs in the ISO reference encoder. These bugs really trash the sound quality. Blade sounds OK at 160+ but on a really good sound system you can still clearly hear the difference. Mpegenc at 160+ and Lame (3.2x betas) at 192+ sound MUCH better then blade at 256 on a really good system.
Mpgeenc (FhG) has passed EBU's tough tests at 224Kbit as perceptually lossless to highly trained listners. Recent copies of Lame usually meet (sometimes) exceede mpgenc at those high bitrates. If you have a good system and good taste, I'd suggest you use mpgenc @224Kbit or lame @256Kbit.
This thing sounds wonderful actually, especially since it has 600MB of removable (but not writable) storage. Sure beats a regular CD player because of its added functionality, and since it has no more moving parts than a diskman, it should be just as portable. Even though this has nowhere near the capabilities of the empeg(and almost none of the hack value :)) i think it will be a big success because of its price tag. At $300 almost any person who purchases audio equipment can afford one. Even me. The only real problem is that not enough people can burn their own cds yet, however, almost everybody knows someone who can do it for them.
but it can be helped. you may want to try a different encoder or higher bitrate mp3s. even then things aren't perfect, but you can get much much closer to the real thing. I'm sure if you ask people for advice you will just start a flame war, and it will just end up as a "my dick(encoder) is bigger(better) than yours" argument. do some of your own tests, because to the best of my knowledge there isn't a comprehensive benchmark for identifying the best encoder. my personal advice would be bladeenc at 256kbit/s, but i didn't even say that because i don't like flamewars
Agree? Disagree?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Radio Shack sells a 110v adaptor, though.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(Actually, I've heard of people playing with their decks standing up vertically, using rubber bands to keep the needles firmly in the groove of the record.)
Radio Shack sells a 110v adaptor, though.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
$300 is more than reasonable for this thing, IMO. (And, yes, it truly is *not* high-end stuff, but it's a nice toy nonetheless.)
A lot of slashdot readers seem to be poor whiners, which seems odd when so many of them are in the IT/CS industry and should, by rights, be swimming in money.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Repeat after me.. READ before you post..
He's asking about how they are stored on the CD, as in what file system to use, etc..
It doesn't matter how their encoded, yoyo..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I was about to ask the same thing.. It's kinda scetchy, but since it does buffering, I'm guessing it must just be raw data..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
When is the anti-skip car turntable going to be perfected?
When they come out with a car power adaptor for the Technics 1200? =)
... I just got the new Crutchfield catalog yesterday and on the cover was an in car DVD player. I'm not sure who the target audience is. The picture looked like an ordinary PC CD or DVD drive, there was no screen. If DVD-RAM prices drop maybe someone will built a DVD based MP3 player.
Sure you can get a cheap sound card for $20 by scraping the bottom of the barrel. Do you really think that's a good idea if you're building the system specifically to play music?
I tried that once. I took the recommendation of some Slashdot poster on what sound card to buy for playing MP3s. Guess what, the music is filled with quiet static in the background even when playing wav's instead of MP3s.
If you're going to build your own MP3 player plan on spending $100+ on a high end sound card or else plan on buying several different cheap sound cards until you get lucky and find one that's decent.
Cironian was asking whether the MP3 decoding circuitry would significantly increase the power drain. That is, he realizes that this thing has the same mechanical and optical parts as a CD player, plus the additional chips for the decoding, and he wondered whether this addition would cause the battery life to suffer relative to a CD player.
Hrunting pointed out that, for reference, a Rio lasts longer on one battery than a CD player on two, from which we can conclude that its decoding parts take less than half the power of the CD player's mechanical and optical parts. Even less, really, since both also have the load of the actual output signal. Hence, with the addition of the decoder, the whole thing should take at most half again the power of the ordinary CD player, probably a lot less, reducing the battery life by at most a third, probably a lot less. So it was a perfectly good answer, if not fully explicit.
My addition: common sense says that a microchip should draw far less power than either a motor+laser or the output signal (though I'm just guessing, since I don't have any numbers), so to answer the original question, I would expect the extra load to be dwarfed by the others -- practically lost in the noise. I don't think it would make much difference at all.
ObDrool: I really want one of these, though I'm still pretty interested in one that would work with an IBM MicroDrive (340 MB, 1", same form factor as complact flash cards). The article on the RCA "Lyra" was the only one I saw that mentioned this possibility, but wouldn't it work with anything that accepts a compact flash card? Specifically, does anyone know if a Rio can take a MicroDrive? If not, why, and if so, why don't they advertise it?
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Pine is a text only web browser??? Gee, and all of this time I have been using it as an e-mail client. Perhaps you were mistaken, and are actually referring to Lynx. ~Cyberphreak
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Why not use MP3 compression on the sound buffer? You could use a low quality setting to fit a lot of sound into that "10 seconds' worth". I don't think that most listeners would notice if the sound quality dropped a little for just a few seconds.
You could do this in two ways: encode things into low-quality MP3 on the fly and store the most recent minute or so in the buffer, or if you are playing MP3s to start with, use the buffer to hold raw MP3 data, which doesn't require any extra processing power.
However, this doesn't match your suggestion of sucking in an entire song at once. You might be able to save quite a lot of power by buffering 60 seconds at a time, and when the buffer becomes nearly empty, spin up the CD again and read the next bit. But I don't know about how much power a CD drive uses relative to memory, how much it costs to spin it up, and so on. There must be a best compromise between reading from the CD all the time (requires lots of power to keep the motor turning) and slurping the entire CD (requires lots of power for 650MB of RAM!). But I don't know where the optimum point is.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The network card, in conjunction with a 25' RJ-45 cable, is used for what else, but uploading more mp3's to the computer. (And downloading cracked distributed.net blocks. Try cracking encryption with Pine's player.
I don't need a display, or a full keyboard. My design uses a PS/2 Numeric keypad for input, and I know what song is playing by listening to it. (Hey, a radio doesn't have a display. Why should my mp3 player?)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
The Rio was a neat gizzmo, a cute little geek toy to further ones hip style statements...but it was an idea simply filling in a transition gap.
Rio costs a shit load of cash to get a mere hour worth of music. It costs me $1.50 (at most) to get at least 10 hours on a cd, 50 hours if im burning my old time radio stuff. You do the math, its not all that hard.
The one thing that has stopped us from having this is the litigious record companies and the fear they are spreading across the globe. Even Rio is bowing to the new "laws" set down by the recording industry, the next version will start in on stoping the play of certian files.
Yes a solid state device has its places, having no moving parts makes it ideal for joggers and the like. The option is there, expensive and all. For most every other use though the CD is still the best cost media around.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
This would be cool if you could use a CD-RW to play your MP3's from. Then I could just add and subtract my MP3s without having to burn a full CD every time I want to change my playlist. I can't tell from the specs, though, if this is possible.
Also, I know the Rio has problems with 128 kbps MP3's, and you need to make them 96 kbps... does this have that same limitation?
>>You mean, like, reinventing empeg ?
Yes, but for about half the price of empeg.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If you're really discerning, you won't be happy with MP3... It's whole kick is that it throws away data that falls into the area's where we (humans) shouldn't notice - Kind of like JPEG, MPEG, etc...
:)
You sacrafice a little sound quality for a much smaller file. If your priorities are for the best listening experience rather than the most available music, you'd be best to avoid MP3...
But then if you care that much, you should probably shun CD's and go back to Vinyl...
TheTomcat hit the nail on the head when he suggested this device is better suited for a car than as a lug-around/portable player.
:-)
The IBM microdrives seem like the next logical step for portable MP3 storage. This technology will lay the foundation for true second-generation players. These players will be as small as the Rio or Nomad, but hold 5 1/2 hours of music instead of 30 minutes. Connectivity will probably be via USB... maybe Firewire.
Or maybe I should just wait around until we have a Holographic Memory Cube with 540 exobytes of storage. THEN I won't have anything to bitch about.
Just for fun, figure out how many 4 minute songs you can store with a 540 exobytes. Can you guess?
A: 1.29 x 10^15 songs at about 4 minutes each. But if you drop the encoding down to 96kbs you could probably squeeze on another thousand trillion tracks or so
For the most part, I agree with you. But, I have found that by encoding all my mp3s at 256 kbits rather than the accepted 128 kbits, the sound quality is improved tremendously. They take up twice the disk space, but I think that the improvement in sound quality is worth the sacrifice.
Caffeine underflow (brain dumped)
Personally, I believe it'll be M$ Jolly-ett, though.
P.S.: I know, I know, better use IDs than filenames.
--
f y cn rd ths y mst hv bn sng nx
--Hunter
I dunno if Audio CDs have a 100 track limit or not, but I can assure you that CD-ROM filesystems (e.g. ISO 9660) are certainly not limited to 100 files. How many files do you think are on a Redhat or Windoze CD? :-)
Hmm, you brought up searching, that makes me wonder... If I have a MP3-CDROM with 103 songs on it, and I want to listen to song #95, I'm not going to want to press a button 94 times. Equipment like this is going to need a better user interface than what current Audio CD players have.
---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
download the MP3's for free off someone's site. Don't bother encoding them, someone has done it for you already.
One of my Linux boxes has a nice Samsung 32x CD-ROM drive that can rip audio files at 2-3 times playback speed. Encoding at 128 kbits with bladeenc takes longer, but all that means is that my RC5 keyrate drops. (I've got a K6-2 at 333 MHz and a Celeron at 400 MHz.)
On the other hand, my connection to the Internet at home is a 14.4 kbps modem. But that's not important, because the modem is not the bottleneck during downloads -- my ISP's network is.
You do the math.
Until broadband Internet access becomes the norm, ripping from audio CD is going to be much more feasible for me.
The article says that this device has a 10-second anti-shock buffer. Hopefully, that is 10 seconds worth of data, not 10 seconds of audio. Assuming 128kbps (about the best you'll be able to hear through headphones), a buffer capable of holding 10 seconds of CD audio can really hold about 2 minutes of audio if it's compressed as an MP3.
To consider further, if the buffer can hold that much, the CD only needs to read 10 seconds' worth of data every 2 minutes. Assuming the CD drives in a portable like that run at about 2x (otherwise, how would a conventional CD player fill up that buffer), that means the MP3 player only needs to be able to read the CD for 5 seconds out of every 2 minutes. That sounds like a MUCH better idea than to try to pack in 30 or 40 seconds worth of buffer in a regular CD player. It probably saves the batteries too. Saves them for the chip decoding the MP3.
Which brings me to my final thought: what's the runtime on these things? Portable CD players now will run anywhere from about 10-20 hours, depending on buffer size, shock, batteries, etc.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
..except..
this is portable.. It's not a problem to build a system to be able to put into your card, but a system to be able to carry with you? With 10Sec buffering, it will easily playing while traveling.
For $300, you can move it from car to car, take it to the gym, and use it at home.
Burners are dropping in price, and the media is dirt cheap now. No longer an excuse.
..burn baby burn..
There is already one on the market that will get you out of Texas. :) Empeg is the name of the player. Slashdot has had several stories already. It is like a Rio for your car, so not cool in the same way as this device; CDs aren't an option. But it does have an FM tuner and "Up to 28.2Gb of disk storage, with approximately 17 hours of CD-quality stereo audio per Gb." ... And it runs linux! Bloody expensive though. ~$1000 for the 4GB version.
C'mon....8 hours....please! I have a $100 Panasonic unit that does 24 hours of AA battery time with the anti-shock turned on. For the amount of music you're getting, I'd almost expect more battery efficiency.
In other news, nice idea. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Hope it works out for them and more companies realize this is a viable solution. Hopefully they'll create some good documentation for burning those CDs, or partner with a CD-burner company and co-develop a kit.
--Bernie
Shouldn't bounce *too* happily - it'll make the CD's skip!
;-)
A little planning goes a long way...
If only some company would come out with an mp3 player with a CD Changer interface - so that it coule easily interface with current decks.
-Nick
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
I can speak to how nice this concept is, since I took a Powerbook along with me on a car trip from New York to Wisconsin. The PB was powered by the cigarette lighter, and the audio out was piped nicely into the in-dash tape player using a CD car adapter "tape with wires" that came with my portable CD player. Reading data from a CD-R, the PB had no problems with skipping, and one CD played for hours and hours. With the track-shuffle and playlist capabilities of the MP3 decoder software, it was as full-featured a music jukebox as I could hope for.
The PB went down on the floor between the driver & passenger (Taurus wagon, lots of room there). You could skip to the next song by tapping the space bar with your foot. The only problem with this solution was the size of the laptop. For me, the ideal car companion would be an eMate-sized iBook or similar. I would run mapping software for navigation and MP3 (and/or normal CD audio) for tunes. A solution likely to come sooner is a Palm-based device that does mp3 & mapping s/w....
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
True, true, BUT - I'm more interested in having an MP3 player that you don't have to boot up! Not to mention, there's problems with control (you really want an entire keyboard in your front seat?), display (how do you know what song is playing, when you've got 150?), and skipping (PC CD-Roms aren't known for their skip protection).
I've actually made one of these, though. It used a MediaGX board and fit in a briefcase. No hard drive; it created a ramdrive (lots of memory!), unzipped win95 to the ramdrive and booted off that. For display, I used the old SBTalker speech->text synth to read the name of the song that was playing. Fairly slick, but took a while to boot. I had the whole keyboard up front, but you can get a keypad-only keyboard for about $25. I solved the skipping problem by having Winamp cache the entire file. Still, I'd rather have a tiny unit. =)
They could spin the CD at 1x long enough to fill a large buffer...
Not as described. They said it'd have ten seconds of anti-shock storage, which seems to indicate that it's not storing any more of the song.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
I just had a conversation with my Dad last week about how pointless the Rio was---I mean, you only get a bit more music than you can fit on a CD, and you have to download a new set of music onto the Rio whenever you want to change it. "Why not," I said, "have a player that could play MP3s off of CD?" Et voilà! For my car, this is perfect, so I don't have to deal with packing the ten or so CDs I want to listen to (which I'll have to listen to twice on a 1000-mile trip), I can just pack one MP3-CD per day!
For that matter, I may hold off a bit on getting a new stereo. I had gotten tired of my old one, which could only handle one CD, and had planned on getting a 5-CD changer; but if this Pine player is in the portable market, it's not long before an equivalent thing makes it into the stereo market... it's like having a 10-CD changer, only cheaper, and you can randomise the playlist without listening to the player whirr and click as it changes the CD between each song. :)
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
While portable mp3 players are cool, I think home audio players is kind of silly (why not just get an old computer), it would be great to get a true headunit for my car that had radio tuner and could play cd's and mp3 cdr's. Till then, count me out.
we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent
even more off topic, but where i live (dallas), to take public transit to work would require: 1 hour ride on bus to downtown, 15-30 minute wait for the next connecting bus, 1 hour ride on bus to station close to where i work. from there it's about a 30 minute walk to my building or I can wait another 15-20 minutes to catch another bus and get dropped off in front of my office. Even riding in the HOV lane on the freeway with my sister and mom(both of whom work near me) It still takes over an hour to get to work. I could move closer, but i can't afford the rent. So, I think a device that'll hold enough songs that i won't have to listen to the same stuff twice in one day would be fine.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
The 12Vold DC power from a car battery would be readily adaptable to use by such a device, and you ould get an enclosure from Radio Crap.
You mean, like, reinventing empeg ?
See Empeg MP3 car player if you want that...
I agree with you absolutely here. My plextor can rip at something like 24x, and my encoder can encode at something like 6-8x, and when I get my second CPU I should be able to about double that.
/artist/album directory on my mp3 jukebox.
Also, most of the music I listen is NOT available on mp3 sites. I have yet to see more than a handful of songs from Einsturzende Neubauten, Rollins Spoken Word, Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Curve, Recoil, Portishead, or Firesign Theatre on these sites. It is so much easier to pop the CD in the drive, have grip grab the CDDB stuff, and RIP it all automatically, and then have my perl script schlub it all into the correct
I've been waiting two years for someone to come out with one of these things. Finally I can drag mp3 music with me wherever I go. My car stereo already has a line-in jack, so I am set. I have something like 8 gigs of mp3's ready to be burned onto CD-R's. $299 doesn't sound too bad either for 12 or more hours of playtime. It looks like it doesn't have an LCD for song titles, but such is life.
Now the important question is of course, when is it shipping?
Crikey, you're right, I did indeed miss that. I guess I didn't see it when I read the article, and looking at the picture on pines site, I didn't see a very large LCD panel, so I assumed that it just showed track numbers. My bad.
I have to wonder if this is going to send the RIAA into spastic fits or force them to change their business models. It seems one heckuva good way to bring non-geeks into the MP3 world, assuming they've been living in some dank,dark cave somewhere...
Plus, I can finally enjoy those seven hour car trips to the 'rents house...
That which doesn't kill me will not be allowed a second chance...
For instance, all my MP3 CD's are burned using a subdirectory for each album or artist.. It needs to be able to access subdirectories, otherwise I'd have to reburn my CD's to use it.
- =^o.o^=
Last week i was at the IFA in Berlin (europe's largest consumer electronics fair). There was a chinese manufacturer named "Shinco" which showed a DVD-Player that also played super Video CD, Video CD, MP3 CDs (!!!) (iso9660 with mp3-files on it) and normal audio CDs. Should be available soon (at least in Germany). The mp3-mode was menu driven via the tv-set. Yummy! -Detlef
I've been waiting a long time for a player like this! I've burned quite a few of my favorite songs to cdr's. (Off my own cd's, thank you.)
Mmmm.
Possible Birthday present.
I saw the same catalog item in Crutchfield, and had the same thought.
;) ) could build a system for your car for a couple of hundred dollars -
/.
Why should a car-mountable DVD drive cost $1000 instead of $200? You can get a PC DVD drive nowadays for around $80. So conceivable, you ('one'
- small case
- invertor for the DC/AC dance
- hard drive enough to hold the OS / drivers to ru the DVD player
- sound card
You would need a video card, monitor and keyboard to get it set up, but once it was running I don't think you'd have to keep them; better to use one fo the mini-LCD displays / touch-button panels as have been used on the several home-brewed MP3 players feaured at various points here on
And considering how much data a single DVD can store, a DVD-based audio player seems like a sensible idea.
If anyone builds it, post some pix!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
while mp3's sound quite fine on my computer sound system, when i've tried it in other places such as my car, i find the sound to be a bit lacking. Mainly, i mean, before i invest in hardware to play mp3s, are there any superior file formats waiting to steal the sound? I am not interested in the useless copying security as are most file format innovators these days, i just want it to sound exactly like a cd! And not have the high hat turn to mishmash when the vocals come in.
Juln
I know, I have lived in America and I realize that if I still lived there now I would probably be getting a drivers license and a pollutomobile as we speak, but it is only because you have built your cities that way.
Dallas is a lot bigger than Stockholm (x2-x3 I guess) but you don't need to look around to long to find cities of comparable size where it is possible to get by living a normal life without a car.
-
I hate big bulky boxen for portable music. I love my translucent blue-green Rio. Just pop 2 or 3 CDs of music in and I'm set for the day - perfect for busses.
On the other hand, I might pick up the version that has FM, recording, and MP3 as well, but am waiting for price to drop a bit.
Will in Seattle
there's another company called evhi that i promising to release the same kind of product, with a car audio version in the works. from their faq it looks like they will support iso9660. no real word on battery life. they quote a price of $110.
One of these would be cool for my car. You could burn a "road" CD kinda like I use to do with tapes for those long trips.
MoatBuilder
Why not use MP3 compression on the sound buffer? You could use a low quality setting to fit
a lot of sound into that "10 seconds' worth".
yes -- that's how I got 4MB = one song. Sorry. should have been more clear.
*drool*
Jippy
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I am still going to wait for my empeg...
Hehe, you'll have to change the batteries on this thing more often than you change the CD. I think I'd rather have the tiny Rio 500 and load up a dozen songs every day before I skip off to classes. Is it true that the Rio isn't happy with most bit-rates?
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
I had this idea years ago. Back then I thought I was the only one who ever thought of this, and that I would be rich and famous some day. Hah! Lots of people have had this idea, and it's about bloody time someone implemented it. However, you really have to be wary of sound coming through FM. That's gotta deteriorate the quality somewhat, no? I find nicely encoded MP3s at 128 bits stereo sound great. No one I've tried it on can figure out the difference between MP3 and CD of the same song. I say, bring it on!!!
And when are we gonna see DVD-MP3 players? Imagine, your entire music collection on a single DVD.
By the way, check out my new site, a Slashdot-like thing for Math/Science/Technology discussion, at http://www.mindwire.org
hehe, opps!!! faux pax... :o)
what I meant was..
can it send EMAIL... ?
I musta been up too early or somethin'
see what happens when you HAVE to use winblows at work? All the term apps seem to melt into each other... and ya get all gui'd out. Anyway- I want mine to send email, AND surf the web, AND play cd's and mp3's. Oh ya- they already have one of those, its called a lapdance, or is it lapTOP.
Does it come with a text only web browser?!?!?1
well i am not so jumpy about the mp3 flormat as much as the envestment . in all of the extra stuff involved . mainly batterys , a cd burner , software , copy right crap , its going to get involved , i like the idea alot. but who knows its kinda bad when a chunk of 300 buck hardware is kinda useless unless you have burner to use it to its full potinal and lets face it the included cd will suck . but i think i will get it any way just for the technology of it , i have a mini disk , a rio and a few other things and i enjoy them all
The article mentions the lack of a storage device, and while that maybe a disadvantage to some, I frankly could care less about 128MB flash cards when a cd will store 650MB of mp3s. Sure, if you get sick of a song, you can't delete it or change it, but all you have to do is burn a few more cds. Hell, my entire mp3 collection will fit on about five or so.
I agree with you on issues 1 and 4. But I don't see where you're coming from on the rest of the post. /horrible/ skip protection, was very fragile, and sucked batteries like a goat.
For #2, this is just a personal opinion, but I hate the silver discmans. Not to mention that every discman I've used has had
#3. I don't think it'll be too bulky at all. I can just place it in my backpack and walk to class. And it might not have swayed me if I already owned an mp3 player, but that's why I held out on buying one. Plus, I want something that won't break if I accidentally drop it.
P.S. An empeg would be nice, but if I got one, I'd feel iffy about getting anything less than the 28gig model, which would set me back $2500
My only issue is that it doesn't have a control stick like the portable MD players do. This means that if you are walkin around with the player in your backpack and you want to skip a song, you have to get it out and press the button and put it in...
This is something I've been waiting for. Unfortunatly this unit is too expensive. How much would an equivalent cd player cost, with the radio and 10 second anti skip? I'd say 80 bucks max. I'm sure the mp3 decoder chip doesn't cost the company $220. Granted this is a new, small company, so the high price doesn't suprise me that much. But that price is almost absurd, I'm not to pay a premium price just because it holds 600 megs on a cd. If it were 600 megs of SRAM, that would be another story. Of course then the price would be...well, pretty damn high. I'd still buy one of these particular players though if I wasn't still a poor college student :)
Once these players (SRAM or cd based) start hitting better price points with more capacity (for SRAM based), I think they'll reall start taking off.
The glory days for the big 5 are numbered...
I think they just used the number 100 for terms that the average moron understands. 650 megs or whatever doesn't mean much to the average person, I guess.
Reminds me of stories I read, about some company expanding/upgrading some internet/LAN lines:
"these lines can carry data, voice, video, or graphics."
You mean you don't need a seperate line for each one? Amazing.
Grip has an option to encode 2 mp3s at once, using 2 processes, one on each cpu, that is if you rip faster than you encode
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
I have been thinking the same thing.. THink about it. If you were to take and put a small ammount or RAM in the thing. What do we consider small these days? 32 MB? Even if 16 MB was considered small you could buffer songe from the CD and load them into RAM. This should not take more than a few seconds. Then the CD could be allowed to spin down (Conserving power) and also you would not have any more moving parts. Of cource it takes more power to get the CD spining tham for it to continually spin, but at what size of a "cache" would it take to be more efficient? With a 16 MB cache having the CD player start spining every 13 minutes or so to replenish the buffer seems to me like it would conserve more energy. As for the ammount of energy it takes to decode the mp3 this is very small (I am sure their are people who could talk a lot more intelligibly than me about power consumption by a small motherboard and CPU.)
I have built an mp3 player for my car and I initially had the idea that I could use both the CD drive in a way similar to this and also hsve the Hard Drive store songs. Then I would be able to burn CD's to play whenever I felt like it, and I could have the hard drive in my car full also. This appealed to me because of the simplicity of putting a CD in the CD ROM drive and letting it play. Right now I am working on finding an easy (AKA Cheap) way to add/ remove songs from the player (The most idea way I can think of is through a wireless ethernet connection, just elave it running and remotely log in to it and do whatever needs to be done..)
Imagine, one of these day's car's will just come with this stuff standard.. We will be able to be in our cars accessing our mp3 collection that is on our home PC's and also have access to all of our friends collections! Isn't the music industry gunna love us?
Hope I didn't get too off subject
Ice_Hole
"I couldn't give him (Bill Gates) advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology." Linus Torvalds
Did you read the article? It says it does in fact display song titles.
rm -rf ~/.signature
You've got some good points.
:) (being a record company and all). But another one of the big electronics powerhouses. We'll need a half dozen competitors before we get 'look and feel' choice.
1. Perhaps. Maybe they could fit in a super tiny membrane keyboard, or label the numberpad like a phone, so we can access songs by name. You'd just need the first two letters..
Also, think 'playlists', more than one. Wait while it indexes it? If we have to do that, someone hasn't done their job.
I guess I'd end up using it mostly with random play turned on, and hit the back or loop arrow whenever it got to a song I was more interested in.
2. Too bad Sony or another big name wouldn't put some of their muscle into this technology. Ok, Sony's a bad example
3. Hmmm. Yeah. I don't think the extra pair of AAs is going to sink me. And I don't think I'd end up listening to music while walking or going everywhere all the time. But I do want to carry it to and fro destinations, backpack it, etc.
All in all, it has the potential to go sour really quick on technical issues. Also could go the other way (pray pray pray pray).
When you go to bed tonight, remember to ask your God for a breakthrough in technology or economies of scale in solid state persistant memory tonight. Then we wouldn't have to wait for all this voodo to get sorted out.
Why have only ten seconds of anti-skip? RAM is cheap. Buffer the whole song. It doesn't have to be static RAM.
Hope this thing has a connector for an AC adapter or a cigarette-lighter adapter. The motor will make it suck up a lot more juice than any Rio or Nomad.
Maybe this is a limitation of cd's? I recall reading from somewhere that a CD can only have 99 tracks. If this device requires one song per track this 99(100) song limitation might well be true. Of course you can join mp3s together but searching becomes harder. This, of course, depends on the way mp3s are stored on cd's. Maybe it uses some kind of a file system to circumvent the 99 track limitation..
You can look for a lot more of these kinds of devices coming along very soon. Asian manufacturers have been producing home-audio component players that play pretty much everything:
VideoCD 1.0 & 2.0
Interactive VideoCD 3.0
DVD 1.0
Super VideoCD
CDDA
MP3 on CD
the draft spec of Audio-DVD, a subset of DVD 2.0
I have also heard of portables that play the CDDA, MP3 and Audio-DVD, but haven't seen anything yet. The console players have been available in China and Taiwan for several months now. I have one and it rocks. Expect smaller companies stateside to be OEM's for these very soon. Sorry I can't name names, but I'm sure all the cool stuff will be announced here when it's time.
Are we supposed to burn mp3s as raw data with one per track or does this device support iso9660 filesystems? Naming conventions for tracks? Some proprietary system for storing mp3s on a cdr? What data rates does it support? I find the lack of details troubling(it takes a while to encode all my cds so better start early). And it does look a little bulky compared to a sony discman too.
Anyone know if there are problems with spinning a CD beneath 1x? (Does it grind to a halt or something below that speed?)
Well, the Diamond RIO runs for quite a long time (exactly how long I don't know) on it's single 1.5V AA battery, so it can't draw *that* much power. My current CD player requires two AA's and it dies out well before the Rio.
One thing about mp3 is that the quality can vary significantly when you change the bitrate, encoder, or player. Looks like you need to find the right combination.
For getting as close to the original CD as possible, I've found bladeenc and its 168, 192, and 256kbit/s encoding modes very helpful. It cuts down on the typical mp3 "cymbal splatter" that is so annoying when played through real speakers with good high end response.
Of course, this won't help you with low quality mp3's you've downloaded from the Internet unless you can get the author to re-encode them, but you can at least re-encode audio CD's you own at a higher bitrate. You'll fit less mp3's on one CD with a higher bitrate, but you'll also be less annoyed by quality loss.
We're finally getting somewhere! I have held off buying a Diamon Rio due to their tiny storage size. I mean, what's the point of using MP3 if you don't have enough space to keep your -entire- music collection at your fingers at any time?
The one this I wished this article would mention is how long the device will run on a charge. Currently I've been hauling my IBM Thinkpad 390E notebook around with me to do me CS projects on -and- be my "portable" MP3 player. With 6GB of disk space and two Li-Ion batteries installed, I can listen to my entire collection for over 9 hours each day without carrying the wall brick.
1.) A CD Player
2.) Walkman-ish FM Tuner
3.) MP3 Decoding
Now, while the CD Player/FM tuner is a traditional combination, the MP3 decoding is a nice addition. But the unit doesn't store MP3s, and it relies on other sources. Okay, so what exactly would those sources be? Is there an IDE plug in the back of the device? Or do you have to burn all of your MP3s to CD, then use the CD in the player? (If that's the case, forget about Music CDs. That's really cool. The [>>|] and [|<<] buttons could skip files similar to tracks.)
I still don't think it's worth $300. You could put together a very simple car MP3 system for a lot cheaper. If you have the parts to do it, great. If you don't, get an old Pentium motherboard ($30), Power Inverter ($40), a decent size hard drive ($100), and a cheap sound card ($20).
Having your very own computer in the car, and MP3 System?.......Priceless.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
The article does not say anything about the CD format. So quite possible that it will require also a Pine CD recorder and some bla bla running under windows only and etc, etc, etc.
;-)
So the overall price may as well come to be god knows how much (That is besides buying a PC for windows
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
With HD prices coming dow like they are (I just got a 10gb Maxtor for $149+tax) All I'd need is a Single Board Computer (SBC) with audio out and I'd be in business.
I could run a small quick Linux distro like Trinux, and all would be good.
The 12Vold DC power from a car battery would be readily adaptable to use by such a device, and you ould get an enclosure from Radio Crap.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I've been waiting for something that'd play MP3s off a CD for quite a while now. What I'd like to know is how it navigates the CD - do you need to dump all the files in the root dir, or can you have one dir per album, etc? Either way, I'm likely to get one...
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
1) "Instant" track access - how easy and quick will this be when there are 150+ songs on a disc? There could be a fair delay when you first put in a disc and it indexes it, and just imagine pressing >>| over 100 times to get to the track you want..
2) This thing looks horrible. If I was dropping $300 on an audio device I'd expect a sleek metallic device similar to the high-end Sony Discmans(men?).
3) It'll be too big and probably too heavy to be truly portable. Doesn't matter for in-car use (better off with an empeg though), but it's not going to sway many Rio or Minidisc users.
4) Support for every bitrate under the sun *must* be there. With the memory limit (in effect) now 650mb, there's no need to re-encode stuff like you have to for the Rio (just to squeeze a decent amount of music into that 32mb)
I've been saying "some sort of CD-based device for mp3 would rule" for some time, but thinking about it the only place it would be really good would be in a cheaper version of the empeg in-car player. I certainly wouldn't lug one of them with me when I'm just walking to/from places. I ditched my discman for a MiniDisc recorder for that very reason..
qube
Is the counter on the player limited to 100? Because you can certainly fit more than 100 mp3's on a CD-r. At a meg a minute, say 600 megs would be 100 6 minute songs. Most songs are 3 to 4 minutes. You can get more than 150 typical songs on a CD-r. I suspect the unit has a 2 digit counter to select the track.
Other than that, this is what I've been waiting for, now I just need a CD-r drive. The radio is a great bonus too.
According or a press release on pine's site it last 8 hours on 4 AA's
They could spin the CD at 1x long enough to fill a large buffer (5mb would be big enough to fit most songs, longer songs could be re-buffered when the buffer gets near empty). Then the cd spins down and you get the power usage of a Rio, until the next song comes.
Woo! I have been waiting, hoping, and sweating over a device like this! Although the article says you can store up to 100 mp3s on one cd, that's a little off. You can get ~11.5 hours of 128k encoded mp3s onto a 650mb cd-r/w, which, figuring an average of 4 minutes per song, is 172 songs.
I already have a bunch of mp3-cds made, and listen to them at work with Winamp all the time. I would LOVE to be able to use these cds in the car, or anywhere. Definitely worth the $300 to me.
There's also another one of these devices coming soon, called the Eclectic CP200, from Vertical Horizon, Inc. They're currently in a beta testing process. Check it out at http://www.evhi.com/ and click on the Portable one. Also, check out the way cool headphones with built rio-type mp3 player.
I wonder how exactly they expect the MP3-CD format to be. Sub-folder seperated by artist? Can you switch between playlists, or just folders, or just song-to-song? It sounds like it supports ID3 from the article.
Yes!! I'm excited.
Ian.
Um, no. This is a a CD player that can decode MP3 files from a CD. A RIO (AFAIK) has no CD motor to spin so there is little use in comparing its battery life here.
1) RAM is relatively cheap compared to what it was before but it's still expensive enough that adding 5minutes of buffer would make a dent on a $300 device.
2) adding RAM would consume power itself.
3) spinning down the CD would be a tradeoff, spinning it up is more expensive than keeping it spinning for a while. I'm not sure where the tradeoff is.
4) Any number quoted for shock protection these days already takes into account compression. In fact even standard CD players with 40s shock protection are using lossy compression to give you that. The best ones allow you to disable it for a noticeable improvement in sound quality.
Personally I don't see the point with this thing at all. Ok, you can now burn a cd with more music on it, but you are still burned by physical media, and the player is still big an clumsy.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I read somewhere that the most important music market in America is the car, since you people are always driving around (* cough * cough * its my fucking atmosphere too) while in Europe and Japan walkman style portables are most important since we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent. But even if I did have drivers license or a car, I think that if all that mp3 has to offer us is a higher density CD the hoopla is a little exagerated.
True, the current flash based players have to little memory to be good for anything but short trips, but they represent a much more interesting direction (music stored as data, and treated as such).
What I want: A portable player with 100+ mb memory (enough for the train to school/work back, and any dead time inbetween) that can patch into my lan and pull mp3s off a server, as well and a stationary unit with a large harddisk and ethernet connection to replace the linux pc currently in my bookcase with the stereo (which works great but is a little noisy for true listening).
Actually, come to think of it, what I really want is a PDA with enough power to do decoding in software - gonna need that for running cracked SDMI players...
-
I had an idea about this: basically, add more ram. Ram is cheap from a power perspective. Instead of buffering 10 measly seconds, buffer the whole song. 4 megs of memory is free these days. Now you can just spin up the drive once every song, suck it all in at the optimum speed (40x?) and then play back at leisure.
.12x (1X == 150KB, so 128 Kb ~ .128X) -- which would explain the measly 10 seconds anti-skip.
Or it could be that the best strategy is to read the CD at a constant bit rate of
Does anyone with powermanagement skills have an opinion?
This is cool. Now, let's see a 10 Disc DVD changer version for the car. That way you'd get around 4 months of continuous, unrepeated music. (It sucks when you start to hear the same music after less than a month of continuous listening...)
I hope the batteries will last long enough. Does anyone have an idea how much power an mp3 decoder unit might draw in addition to the regular CD parts (laser)?
:)
Cant wait until they ship the first units over here.
Pine makes more than just this new device, according to there web site, though i have never heard of it until now.
http://www.pine-dmusic.com/
the important stuff is right here, however. http://www.pine-dmusic.com/specs/specs.htm
according to this site, the thing will last up to 8hrs...with FOUR AA's! it's gonne be big and heavy!
Portable MP3 / Audio CD Player Specifications
CD digital audio MPEG type
Analog volume control
Built-in charger
FSTN LCD ( Title display)
Dimension : 130(W)x138(D)x31(H)(mm)
Output 1: headphone
Output 2: Audio line
Battery : 4 x AA (Rechargeable or
Alkaline) (8 hrs with Alkaline)
Voltage 5 V
This is one of those things that you think of the moment you hear of the pre-cursor technology.. you think to yourself "aha! Now they just need to make this and it'll be killer!". And it's so obvious to you that you just can't imagine no-one jumping all over it.
:)
And then the free market system goes and ignores it for two years, evenutally producing some other less powerfull stuff (but more widely appealing for the regular lUsers and induvidhuals) that doesn't come near to satisfying your original thoughts.
The Rio's nice, but 32Mb? Through a serial connection? For _how_ much? Ok, if there's nothing else... Or if I'm an audiophile and my cassette deck just doesn't cut it.
From the day I saw mp3 way back when, I dreamed of 12 hours of music in my pocket!!
Ok. Quiz time. What's the killer service to accompany products like this?
1) Rip-n-burn services (requiring you to bring/send in your original CDs, you know, fair use and all).
2) K-Tel records (or whoever else has the guts) producing their big anthologies, all the 70's on one cd. All the 80's on one CD. The top 150 songs of 1992!
3) "Buy-your-CDs-from-us and we'll burn for free" services.
Ok, there's one huge problem with all of this. The RIAA will freak out and sue everyone to death, (in spite of fair use) and that threat alone will prevent anyone except us CDR/CDRW owners from being able to use this stuff. Now this will cost us more denero due to the economies of scale being massively reduced. Guess that means less money to buy CDs with
(Attn RIAA: Thanks for nothing you boners.)
... car trips
... the architecture studio
... the party
On average, a CD will last me about 80 miles. Get one of these, plug it in, and I could drive for over 700 miles without having to change the music. It's still not enough to get me out of Texas, but it's close.
As it is now, CDs allow the time to pass. Put in a CD, listen, work, the next thing you know an hour's gone by. Put in one of these babies, listen, work, the next thing you know, four projects are done and you're still dancin'.
As it is now, even with a 5-disc changer, my party runs out of music 5 hours into the dang thing and something's gotta be changed. Put one CD in one of these babies and voila! You've got yourself ten hours of non-stop partying. Given my current rate of being completely smashed about eight hours into such an event, and I'm all set.
Given the anticipated popularity of this device, I only hope that they a) take advance orders and b) can handle production so I have one of these for the drive home over Christmas.