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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]"
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.
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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.
Did you try putting your sound card on the slot fartest from the power supply? There is sometimes effects of the emf from the power supply effecting the analog parts of many cards. Try that, if that doesn't still work either it truly is a crappy card, or your just a little too picky when it comes to audio noise
According or a press release on pine's site it last 8 hours on 4 AA's
, i just want it to sound exactly like a cd!
I recommend you get a CD player then.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
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.