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80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player
atu.com.au">Venebulon writes "A new mp3 player will make its debut at Comdex, November 15. Similarly sized as a PalmPilot, and containing a 4.62Gb internal hard drive, this new device will be able to store 80+ hours of music, with anti-skip features. " I'm going to COMDEX, I guess I'm glad that I finally found something I want to see there (well, besides maybe the porn con next door or Barry White)
Well you would have to consider the size constraints/price constraints. They are probably using laptop tech. drives. As far as I know, laptop drives havn't reached those massive sizes yet. If they have, they are still expensive and you lose your price optimization.
V
Where are the MP3 players with affordable removable storage? I have a Sony Minidisc player and have a hard time accepting the idea of portable MP3 players with either small, expensive flash RAM or large, permanent fixed disks. It just seems really impractical.
Flash ram is expensive and has too low of a storage capacity. 80+ hours of fixed disk seems more appealing, although only if the player allows one to logically group tracks into directories (albums, collections, whatever you want to call them). I can't see having to sit and hold the Skip button for 10 minutes to get to another part of the disk.
I mention the Minidisc player becuase it seems like the ideal type of hardware platform for an MP3 player -- the MO discs are tough, and could hold nearly 140 minutes of MP3 music, and area inexpensive compared to flash.
Although Sony has a lot invested in Minidisc, I'm kind of surprised they haven't been pushing a combination Minidisc/MP3 portable. I could even see a VAIO/MD-MP3 combo pack, using USB to connect the two together.
That would solve the uploading problem. Better yet make it firewire.
But that would be overkill. However, since this thing has a 4.6Gb drive, I won't discount anything being possible...
has archives of 3 yrs worth of personal and business emails in Eudora.
Off Topic to the article, but why don't you just burn that onto a CD-R and keep your HD files smaller?
I archive my Eudora Pro folder quarterly, and delete all non-essential emails so that I won't lose anything important.
YMMV
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Spinning a hard drive takes a LOT more battery power than keeping a few megs of ram alive.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
(Um, XMMS, get on the ball here! I can't listen to MP3s off of my DVD drive under Linux!)
That's odd, XMMS has no troubles playing my MP3s off my CDROM.. (or the network, for that matter)
Now who's stupid?
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
...THE MEMORY. If you're trying to tell me 32 - 64 MB of memory costs $15 - 20 I wanna know where you're getting your RAM!!
Before the recent memory price hike, 64mb PC100 SDRAM could be had for $26 (US)
This was finished product that was available to end-users, not required to be bought in x1000 quanities.
2 months ago I would have believed that a RIO could be made for $20 worth of parts.
I think that someone (a SlashDot author in particular) is going to find it nice to have a whole The Who concert playing without skips.
More power to ya,
Matthew
_____________________________________
sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
See http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/itsy/
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
You're getting mixed up between kilobytes per second and kilobits per second.
No, you're getting mixed up.
The statement I made is that the drive is 4.6GB not 4.6 Gb like the title says. GB is gigabytes and Gb is gigabits. I'm not mixing them up, the poster is.
Unless its $99, its a rippoff, since a PSX + ADAPTOR is only $140 at most.
I'm the same way - I will listen to anything except for what I call the "Squeeze the cat" form of country. (Non-STC country is OK and can be cool.) And even if the batt needs charging every 10 hours - I'mn assuming this has an external power jack for a car hookup.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The main problem with MP3 portables is that loading in a new selection of music is awkward (connect to a computer and wait for the files to transfer) compared to a CD/tape player (remove one, insert another). What I'd like to see is a player that could read MP3s from a CD with enough buffer memory that it could store a good chunk of the contents and only occasionally have to spin the disk.
As for the battery life, 10 hours is plenty if the batteries are a standard off-the-shelf type, but not if they're sticking the purchaser with a proprietary design.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
How about using the tape motor to drive a generator...
No batteries, lasts for a lifetime
Try looking back in Slashdot... Immediately after WMA's release, it was cracked. I believe the program was called "unfuck.exe", and it had /. coverage.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Check out www.empeg.co.uk.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
There is one. For Cars. There are basicly two reasons. CDs are big. A drive for them is not likly to fit in your pocket. Secondly, a CD is even more affective by mecvhanical forces than a hard drive. Not that it will breake; there is no read head floating over the CD on air that can crash into it. But a very small chock, just like those you get from jogging, may still move the CD enough to bring the laser off-track. This is reasonable while working with non-compressed data; the gap in the sound will not be that long. But with compressed data, the size of the gap is also "decompressed", enlarged.
Oh, and there may of course be other reasons that I've overlooked, too...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
There are a few - you can buy them here in Denmark, so you should be able to buy them in the US too.
a renr=4&gruppe=mp3
n r=15&gruppe=mp3
Here are a few of those you can buy:
http://www.mmvision.dk/default.asp?action=vis&v
and
http://www.mm-vision.dk/mp3.asp?action=vis&vare
The site is in danish, but there are a picture of them, and some of the text is also in english.
AFAIK, they are for you regular stereo, and plays CD's with MP3-files.
I've seen a player which could have 3 CD's and shuffle between them, and a player which had room for one CD and a normal harddrive.
This one (according to the manual , which is found on the site too) plays both DVD, VCD, MP3 CD's, and has a lot more features:
http://www.china-shinco.com/dvd/dvd.htm
I bet they snuck a patent past the USPTO about this "Jitter Elimination Technology." Just increase the cache size, and presto! No more jitters! The novel research these days amazes me.
I hear Redmond might try to patent a Crash Proof Operating System that is touted to be available in our lifetime...
It's marketing BS. Any decent filesystem/MP3 player has buffering/caching capabilities, and in many cases (Winamp at least) it's adjustable. (Um, XMMS, get on the ball here! I can't listen to MP3s off of my DVD drive under Linux!)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Sounds like a player that would read mp3's off of a cd would be the best idea. I wonder why i have heard no one try this....
Are you on crack? http://www.pjbox.com/ does say GB, not Gb
How well can hard drives take the bumps etc. from say jogging in the long run?
PS: First post?
My collection of mp3's have now been growing for about 2.5 years. Evolving in terms of bitrate following the "standard" of the internet, starting at 128 kbps, staying a short while with 160 kbps to finally end at 192 kbps.
:-)
:-(
That means that I have about 200 cd's (130 GB) of mp3's with using all kinds of different bitrates.
I can't use this thing http://www.pjbox.com/
for anything other than my oldest mp3's, since it only supports 128 kbps.
Ohhhhh, now I see the fatal comment.
"CD music downloaded to this Jukebox after converting to MP3 format at the same time"
Pretty odd quote - things happens at the same time, and yet after each other ?
That just means that I have to use their software, it has to have the cd, because it will encode the music while transferring it to the jukebox. And finally, all this will take place @ the astounding bitrate of 128 kbps.
I think I'm getting sick of this - I'm still in the wait for a perfect unit.
/Jail
I knew when I ordered the stereo for my truck this weekend, I should have waited.. This thing sounds wicked. -k
Someone is going to hack an IDE or SCSI controller for this baby and have a super-Jazz drive.
Sure, the cases can handle shock, but... RUNNING?! I can't imagine that the drive head wouldn't damage the platter with a good jolt, as it was running!!!
Maybe i am just out of touch... miracles of modern technology and all...
Are there any decent players that would, say, read mp3's off a cd and play them like a regular cd player? This sounds better to me than a bulky hard drive (if it is) and expensive low size flash memory.
----------
Isn't that what they are worried about... the commoditization of the music industry? That's why SDMI is trying to make electronic music such a pain...
80+ hours of music seems like a bit of overkill when the battery life is only 10 hours. I'd have thought 20 hours or so would be enough to have a good random shuffle play capability.
If every ten hours you need to charge up the batteries then you might as well download a different chunk of music while you're at it.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
The Danish copyright-holder association (part of the European association) recently announced that they will sue anyone doing any kind of copying from digital media to digital media. Period. As they are part of the European copyright-holder association, I would assume that the same rules applies all over Europe. They conduct a campaign with the headline "We'll sue you all the way into hell". (See http://www.koda.dk or http://musik.netch.dk/pirat/ if you read Danish). It does not matter whether the copying is loss-free or not, for personal use or not, or anything. No digital-to-digital copying, in any format, in any way, allowed number of copies=0. So with this thing it is legal for you to record ... nothing really ... in Europe (Denmark). How are the rules in the rest of the world? I have nothing than the MP3's released by artists for promotional purposes on my HDD as a result of the rules outlined above.
-- From Denmark
(I herewith claim ownership of the idea of cc-sized mp3 players for automobile use...)
Use The Source, Luke!
Im no hard drive expert, but as far as im aware the 50G is only for warranty purposes, but drives can withstand much more than that... (depending on the type of shock, 50 G can be generated from tapping the harddisk on a desk, or droping it from head hight onto grass...) But more importantly, as I understand it, the 50G is while the hard disk is stopped (i.e. spun down) (well, that is the case with a particular Quantum HDD that I dropped)
Now i can listen to the dulcet tones of Al Gore on MP3 for a much longer time!
Where have our academic standards gone? The US is going to be a third-world country in about 20 years at this rate.
I've been waiting for one of these for a long time. 60-100 MB of memory just doesn't cut it, one of the reasons I love being able to use MP3 and listening to my music through it, is being able to very quickly load any music I want, or put together a long, varied playlist.
Nothing before has sounded like it could really handle it, and an investment in a CD burner seemed more appropriate - you could bring multiple CDs with you if needed for your CD player.
I wonder how much these things will cost?
Yum.
i've used a cassette adapter in my car for awhile now on my laptop, and i really didn't notice that much sound loss. of course i don't have air conditioning so anytime i got over 30mph i couldn't hear much of anything w/o turning it up.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
It probably does cost a bomb.
No, you're not being Stupid/Lame. Your solution obviously is the best. It's the managers/marketing departments/... being far too stupid to come up with such a simple solution. Well, perhaps (hopefully!) one of them reads /. so we might be able to buy your hybrid device soon.
If this continues, there aren't going to be many executives left in the music industry...they're all going to be in church, having seen the signs of the end of the world.
OK, a bit apocalpytic, but no more than some of the wild eyed predictions we hear about all the time. Everyone else is allowed to make insane and unrealistic proclamations. Why not one more.
In all seriousness, a 4.6GB MP3 player is a significant technological advance. Consider that, at those sizes, the device literally needs to be able to allow file upload/download--the fact that people can and will use this as their primary storage not only for their music data but all of their portable content is beyond likely--it's probable.
Issues such as resilience to shock are worrisome, but should this product function as advertised it will cause shockwaves throughout the industry, if for no other reason that it will utterly eliminate the coming marketing flood backing WMA(forget security, it's twice the music on the same player, they'll say.)
The Compaq involvement is critical--there are serious fortunes to be made, even in the short term. They plan to sell 10,000 of them(their stock for the year) at $810 apiece($10 an hour * 81 hours). That's $8,100,000 revenue in three months--combine that with the amount of venture capital(and outright purchase offers from media corporations looking to suppress the technology, thus increasing the value of the company) that these guys could get their hands on and you have some serious money involved.
To say this should be interesting is an understatement. Now, all I need is to convince the company I'm worthy of a pre-release version to play with. You know, because I just don't listen to enough music as is or am in front of a computer enough as it stands...
Oh well. All else fails, I'm getting this $279 MP3CD player the moment it comes out.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I dont agree. IM(H)O storage space IS the most important factor. It's not that big a deal to load the batteries every night if need be, just plug it in before you go to sleep. It IS a big deal to start downloading music - not just because it takes time but because you have to figure out which music you want to listen to. As soon as you have space enough to store the majority of the music you listen to (presently) you're rid of one major hassle...
As for size; the headphones is still cumbersome enough for the size of the player not to matter that much, as long as it's smaller than a walkman.
I know this is *totally* off topic... but what the heck is "squeeze the cat" country?!?
Sounds vaguely immoral.
mindslip
Naah, it wasn't cracked, the program just intercepted the music stream after it'd been decoded.
Isn't it when the hard drive starts spinning that it pulls the most energy? Starting and stopping the drive would dry up the batteries in a hurry? Wouldn't it?
If/when this puppy becomes widely available, I'll probably buy one and crank it right into my car.
Presumably they'll sell a lighter adapter, so no battery worries, and I'll never have to dub my CDs to cassette again.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that you can't spell "dollars" and don't know the distiction between "your" and "you're" (or even moderately proper sentence structure, for that matter), or the fact that you actually made it into some "college" yet can't manage to spell that either.
Actualy, I can tell the diffrence between 'you're'(a contraction of you and are) and 'your'(possesive form of you). But I aperantly wasn't paying much attention to what I was writing. The same thing with the word "dollars". "Collage" is actualy a hard word to spell. I don't relize if you know this or not, but for some people spelling is an extremly difficult thing to do. As far as 'academic standards' goes, acording to my ACT score, I my score was in the top 7% of all entering freshman, so I'd guess you'd rather live in a contry where collage attendance is only 6% of what it is currently. (FYI, I got a 28).
I'm currently attending Iowa State Univercty, and I was able to test out of the first C++ class without ever having taken a formal computer programing class in my life.
I'm not aware if you know this or not, but most collages let you run your documents through a spellchecker (and let you correct grammar) before you turn in in. But of course, if you took that into consideration, you wouldn't ahve been able to be a Jackass AC, would you?
btw, I normaly spellcheck/look over longer slashdot posts of mine, but not this one.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
By the way - a 27 on the ACT is nothing to be proud of
I said that I got a 28 on the ACT, not a 27. I guess 'reading' is below you oh great mighty one.
I suppose I mistakenly assumed that you were a sane person, as opposed to someone who would brazenly insult everyone in the Midwest as being idiots and taking the ACT, standardized test of heathens and barbarians, as well as all but the smartest 6% of the population (actually, much smaller, as I'm in the 93 percentile of all graduating seniors in 1999).
But I guess I was wrong. I find it amazing that you would take this opinion. But then, statistically I'm likely to me much smarter then you, and I'm constantly amazed by the absolute idiocy of some people.
ISU is accredited, and therefore a 'real' school. Its academic standards are extremely high, and it's ranked as one of the top 100 schools in the country. I noticed you didn't mention where you attended school.
As I stated at the end of my post, I chose not to run it though a spell checker as I usually do with longer posts (and I knew that I was spelling college. I guess the humor was lost on you. Not surprising, however. )
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
My CD-ROM can play audio and read data, right? Why can't my car's disc changer do the same?
:-) Ahhh the life of a married man. :-)
Because they're completely different.
Audio CD players don't 'care' what the data is like data CD drives. They read in a little bit of control info, de-interleave the raw audio data and spit it out a DAC. When there's a bit error in an audio CD, the audio drive makes up the data by interpolating the known data points and coming up with a "good guess" of the missing data points.
You can't do that with a data disc. There's much more precise 'control' over how the data is handled and as such, the audio CD doesn't have that capability because it adds cost to the control electronics.
I recently acquired a drive out of a notebook which was checked at the airport. the faceplate's missing but otherwise it's a 6x toshiba CD-ROM. Perfect. I also have an external SCSI CD-ROM drive which is intended to be used for notebooks without drives but with PCMCIA ports. So I have a pair of drives which would work great for MP3 players. I figure I'd use my EZ-Kit Lite (Analog Devices' DSP eval board with enough balls to decode MPEG 1 layer 3 in realtime) and make a nice little player for my Jeep.
However, that's after I am done playing with a little HUD I'm designing, changing out the incandescent bulbs for brake and signal with LEDs, etc, etc... oh yes, and finishing drywalling my upstairs
I read through all the comments before posting in hopes that someone else would have explained it..
You don't anti-skip a HDD like you do a CD. It's a different beast, entirely. The heads on a coin-sized HDD don't move like a CD head does. All I can figure for "anti-skip" is a large playback buffer (maybe a couple meg) so it can maybe power down the HDD for a min or so to help conserve battery life.
Also, those 50G and 75G shock ratings for HDDs are when it's POWERED DOWN, if I'm not mistaken... I wonder how long these drives will last with the heads constantly scraping the platters with every bump and nudge... I'd much rather see a CD I think.
Sony has a conflict between making the coolest music gadgets and protecting their music copyrights. Remember the fuss over DAT? The record companies insisted that the sampling rate be 48KHz so that you couldn't digitally record CDs. Sony is probably still trying to hold back the inevitable tide of MP3s. Also, if they embraced the future and made an MP3 player, they'd probably try to use it to promote their proprietary "Memory Stick" flash RAM cards that they currently sell with their non-floppy-disk digital cameras and VAIOs.
I have been thinking about picking up an Empeg Car player to throw all my stuff onto, but it's still way too expensive. This new 4 gig drive player may be just what I need. And my main use will be car playing, so I can use the cigarette lighter adapter.
There are also some cool players that will use MP3-CDs that are supposed to be shown off at comdex. Check out http://www.pineusa.com/ and http://www.evhi.com/.
I'm sorry to all the MP3 zealots out there, but it seems like a waste of tech to me.
4.6GB of storage in a portable the size of a Pilot?? And it's used as what? A Walkman?
I say slap a color LCD and some decent battery life on that puppy!! Make it a computing device, not an audio playback device.
Certainly, entertainment has driven technology more than any other single pursuit (short of DoD interests), so something like my PDA on 'roids is probably waiting in the wings, but still..
Seems like misdirected effort to me. Then again, I'm not that much into MP3 just yet to see the full glory of two man-weeks of continuous music.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
You're getting mixed up between kilobytes per second and kilobits per second.
4.6 Gbytes in 80 hours works out at 16kbytes per sec. But at 8 bits per byte that's 128 kilobits, so top Q stuff. and no worries.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Bzzt, wrong answer! Actually it's 16Kb/s and 16*8 = 128Kbps.
Should be fun. My CD drive will collapse before.
netbsd has had USB support for a while now, and linux (at least on PPC) has working support as well.
I for one would love to get this. I wouldn't take it jogging or running or anything, I simply want something that I can listen to wherever I go, be it at home, work, in my bed, at my friends house, etc. I am assuming it will also have an AC adapter, which would probably be used in mine 75% of the time, same as my discman.
:)
And 4.7GB or whatever is plenty of space for me, I could throw my entire Metallica, KMFDM, NIN album collections on there and have 2.5GB free for other stuff
A memory buffer is solid state, and should beable to withstand any resonable jossle, basicaly anything that wouldn't crack the circut board
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Porn, porn, sausage and porn. Porn, porn, porn, porn and eggs. Porn, porn, eggs, sausage and porn..... ...gotta love it! The NUMBER ONE reason to have a big (TVRO) satellite dish! Seven channels of 24/7 hardcore PORN!!! (and NASA select).
I suppose I'm just a little more limited in what I like in terms of music. Music doesn't consist of a major part of my life - I just don't have time to sit back in a dark room and really *listen* anymore. About the only time I put any on is during my 10-minute commute to/from work. I'm not much of one for "background" music during work or piddling on the computer, when I get focused, the music gets filtered out anyway, or I treat it as noise and turn it off.
Bono Vox, bono@vox.org
...a #@$%*& FM Tuner! These dumb-ass companies falling all over each other to cash in on the MP3 money and I think only one portable player has a tuner. That adds, like one chip and a few support components. You can't get todays Stern on MP3!
(Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.
10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.
The Only reason you would encode at higher than 128/44 would be if you made the mp3s yourself from a wave editor or a mixing machine. Ripping from CDs should Always be 128/44 (anything higher is wasted bits). Music CDs themselves are recorded at about 120/44, btw.
:-)
i did the math: encoding mp3s at 128/44 is about 1 Mb / 1 min, so therefore a 4.6 Gb HD (which is 4710.4 Mb) can store about 4710.4 minutes, which is 78.5 hrs. That's close enough to 80 hrs, isnt it? i mean, who's gonna notice?
The trick is to buffer *a lot* of compressed MP3 in memory and spin-down the hard disk. The disk is much more shock resistant when not running, besides it takes a lot less power this way.
Zona research hasn't posted this study on their site yet (the latest press release/study set is an Oct. 5 report on Application Service providers.
I was curious about the other replies by survey respondents. 35% VB + 20% C/c++ + 9% Java means 36% other.
What is the distribution in "other". Are people using Delphi, Python, Perl, or what?
It would be interesting to see how the top eight (or so) languages fluctuate in relative dominance from year to year.
I will be watching zonaresearch.com intently for that report.
Pine is coming out with a portable CD player that
will also play CD-R and CD-RW that have MP3s on them. You can check their www site at http://www.pineusa.com/.
They will have it at comdex also.
Also, Raite makes the AV715. It's a standalone
DVD player that also plays VCDs, music CDs
and MP3s (on CD-R or CD-RW) and some other
things too. Their www site is http://www.raite.com.tw/
Yes, it was cracked. Microsoft claimed that it unsampled, but, as usual they were lying. The program brute forced MS's exsport frendly encription.
I belive the program can be found at dimention music
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Now, i know that some moron out there is gonna say, "Who would be so stupid as to move THAT much music at once?" It would probably be the same moron that spent all that time DOWNLOADING it from the internet. Some dumb rich kid with a fast internet connection.. there are PLENTY of them out there.
Um, Cable modems only cost a few dolars more then modem connections, I'd hardly say that makes someone "rich", if they were rich, they would just have tons of CDs. Having shitloads of MP3s pretty much means that you're not rich.
but, I guess you just felt the need to rationalize you're lack of bandwith. Btw, I'm in a colage dorm with ethernet (1,236k/sec is the fastest I've seen). I'm not rich
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Most hard drives are rated for something like shocks of over 50 G (decelleration of 50 G), which is quite a lot.
Not as much as you'd think.. A laptop drive is rated higher than that BTW..
I've seen hard drives destroyed with a relatively light shock ("thumping" them on the top), and I've seen drives survive after brutal punishment.. (being thrown to the ground and stomped on.. never get in a POed sysadmin's way..)
The anti-skip crap sounds like fast cache memory like they have in portable CD players these days..
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Hahaha, they'd have to provide an example of a Crash Proof OS of course. We know it wouldn't be any of their products. Or maybe it might be... MS-DOS with no programs running.
Spirilis
the real at&t mix
This sounds like just the thing to get...but one question they left unanswered was what types of media it'll read. Pressed CDs and single-session CD-Rs are almost guaranteed to be readable, but what about multi-session CD-Rs and CD-RWs? Does someone have a link to the manufacturer's page or to some other page that would have this info?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
No, I don't think so. That sounds like the right approach, although I would prefer a CD-ROM over a hard disk.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
D'Music SM-200C. They're accepting pre-orders for it.
Yes, it uses a laptop-style portable hard drive. Yes, it will be a bad idea to have the hard drive powered on while jogging. Yes, it will basically be a hard drive with a vestigal MP3 player attached.
:)
But this is the kind of product *I* would use. I could put all of my favorite music in 4 and a half gigs, I mostly listen to my music in non-bumpy situations, and just having the portable hard drive without having to deal with the expense of a full-blown laptop is useful.
Time to drop hints to the family for Christmas...
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
I always thought the PDA's were a waste of tech for people who just liked gadgets for the sake of having gadgets. But I do like the idea of the MP3 walkman...
Why encode at higher rates? (Score:)
... just like a taylor polynomial. Forgive me if I miss understand the inner working of mpeg "lossy" compression, but that is how I was taught it worked.
by Eeeeegon on 12:36 PM October 27th, 1999 EDT (#)
(User Info)
The Only reason you would encode at higher than 128/44 would be if you made the mp3s yourself from a wave editor or a mixing machine. Ripping from CDs should Always be 128/44 (anything higher is wasted bits). Music CDs themselves are recorded at about 120/44, btw.
Huh? 44khz is the sampling rate of the recording, 44 thousand kiloherz per second, which is the same for most audio reproduction devices today, although you can go high if you are generating the music yourself, ie. Mod files.
I think a mp3 encoding tutorial is in order:
From what I understand, the "128" is the number of thosands of bits uses to hold the "waveform that occurs durning that moment in time. If you have just a single tone - that generated a simple sine wave, you only need a few of those bits, you could accurately reproduce the sound by just encoding "sin x" into the datastream. This is an oversimplifaction of how mp3 compression works, but fairly accurate.
When you add overtones and more complex waveforms to music, at some point you run out of "bits" and the reproduction looses it's accuracy. String sections in orchratras are one of the worse offenders because they tend to generate very complex waveforms.
So, the more bits you use, the more accurate your "reproduction" is
One of the great potential benefits of MP3 and other audio compression schemes seems to be in education, particularly language instruction, but also history, English and social studies ... important speeches, readings of literature by the author, interviews with jounalists, statesmen, scientists ... the possibilities are astounding.
...
Is anyone offering this sort of material (commerically or not) in MP3 format? It certainly would be nicer to fly to Europe listening to Essential Italian Phrases, Volume I on a Rio and a couple of smart media than with a walkman and 8 cassettes
Also, they might not all be inspirational enough to package and sell at Barnes and Noble, but it would be great benefit if speeches and other audio artifacts in the public-domain were available in an archive, for researchers, students and the merely curious. The Nixon tapes! Inerviews with Abby Hoffman! Recordings of Thomas Edison! The War of the Worlds! (Still under copyright?)
Them's my 2-bitskis
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
From users' perspective this would be a great solution. However, there are some serious cost and manufacturing issues here. Not only do you have to pay for rather expensive volatile memory and all that comes with it, but you also have to pay for an increasing complex unit with moving parts. I'd expect such a unit to cost easily 2 to 3 times as much.
I'd probably be willing buy such a unit if I were convinced it were well constructed, but i'm rare in that department. =)
I guess they designers have taken a leaf out of the portable CD player book by adding memory to act as a buffer between the hard disk and the audio controller for their "jitter elimination" technology.
It's hardly new or ground breaking really but it is nice to be able to have more music on the move.
Where do I sign up?
This kinda puzzles me.. if your hard drive were to skip, I'd think you'd have other things to worry about than your music not being continuous, although the drive mechanism would probably find it's way back to the right cylinder. Most hard drives are rated for something like shocks of over 50 G (decelleration of 50 G), which is quite a lot. Not something you create while jogging, I'd think. However, dropping it would probably be a bad idea.
Any one know more about what they mean with "Anti-skip features"?
Cheers!
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Like previous pos(t)ers, I want to know why there isn't a way to play mp3's off of a CD.
Ok, The hard drive is awesome, and with a little tinkering (say, maybe, an DC power adapter and a stereo out to plug into my car's system) it would truly be the coolest device ever...
My CD-ROM can play audio and read data, right?
Why can't my car's disc changer do the same?
Another point: How long will it take to d/l more than 4 GB(!) onto this little device? Overnight?
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Uhm, when was the last time that you tried to upload 4.6 Gb worth of files via LPT or Serial connection? Think LAPLINK. It's very slow.
Now, i know that some moron out there is gonna say, "Who would be so stupid as to move THAT much music at once?" It would probably be the same moron that spent all that time DOWNLOADING it from the internet. Some dumb rich kid with a fast internet connection.. there are PLENTY of them out there.
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rJames.org - illustration
heck, at that point, have a fairly low power cd-rom drive (12x maybe... maybe slower) and read mp3's into the 30 megs. No need to uncompress at first.
The only place this would suck is spin up time of the cd rom, but even at that, for quick access, it could spin up to 2x rather quickly and then when the player decided you were done messing with the track selection, spin up to 12x and fill the memory once again.
But, this is obviously not a really good solution without a playlist or arrangement of songs.
Karnal
Have you ever *listened* to a cassette adapter? They sound terrible!! The lower HALF of the frequency range suffers so badly that even people's voices (midrange) are barely rendered correctly. Yuck.
(Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.
10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.
> ... great potential benefits of MP3 ... in education, particularly language instruction ... the possibilities are astounding.
Yeah, that's what they said about TV.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
the porn conference seems interesting. Is that some annual porn movie award event?
Just watched Bruce 7's Buttslammer 17. Super wanton uninhibited purely spontaneous all girl orgy. (I love porn. but I hate porn for show. i.e. faked, 'directed', 'choregraphed'.)
it's funny, but watching porn makes me feel that there's so much to life! That people are so diverse. That mainstream or traditional or conventional judgements shits are not the only judgements of things in the world. That I must be myself, and act myself. It is the ultimate expression. Be a free thinker.
I want to see people without a fucking gazillion of hats, suites, medals, uniforms, makeups, or masks.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
I recently went through all of my cds, and all of my g/f's cds (total of about 150), and stripped off the songs I liked (basically anything I'd rate 6 or higher on a 1..10 scale), and was barely able to fill 5 burned cds - in cd format, not mp3. I don't need 80 hours. Think... that's 2 full weeks at work. Does anything actually have *that* much music they wanna listen to? Bono Vox, bono@vox.org
extremely good shock resistance
low power consumption
small size
Memory capacities will continue to grow, and the prices will (hopefully) continue to fall, at least for the next few years, so before long we'll be able to make players that can store, say, 5 hours of music easily.
I'd also be interested to know how well those hard drives can stand up to the sort of abuse they might get in a small handheld device.
To be honest I can't say that I am surprised. It is a sad fact, but memory (whatever the type) is simply still too expensive for mass storage, and will be for the forseeable future. I thought somebody might have tried one of those IBM Microdrives first though... I guess they were too expensive too. ;-)
:) )
:( )
This leaves us with the usual compromise:-
1. RAM Based units will have limited capacity, due to the inherent high price of RAM.
2. Hard-Disk based solutions will have lower battery lives, due to the far higher power consumption of moving parts, as well as being suseptable to mechanical problems (Joggers wil know what I mean
But what if we brought these two technologies together???
I propose I hybrid solution. Have a player with about 30Mb of RAM onboard. (Enough for approx 30mins of 160Kbs mp3). Have a small hard drive there as well (whatever GB you need...). When you start playing, the first 30Mb of you favourate album is read off the HDD and placed into RAM. Once that is done, the hard drive may safely be powered down, aka. Laptop style. Should you play all the music in RAM, or change your selection, the HDD is powered up again to read any new data required.
This would allow an MP3 player to exist that extends battery life by running in "solid state mode" for most of the time, but still gives you a large total storage ability at reasonable cost.
Or am I just being Stupid/Lame?? (First Post
This seems like a pretty long time desipite it being only 10 hours, I mean pratically and seriously How many people are going to be moving around for 10 hours ? and if you are in a car or something I am sure the company would also have a adapter or something that plugs into the cigarette lighter
The important question thou I believe is how heavy is this going to be?
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
I havent read the article yet, but is is possible to exchange the herddisk with a larger one, say 25 Gb
I'd like to take all my mp3's with me so I can decide what I want to listen to when I am going to listen to music, depending on the mood I am in or what I am doing and 4.6g isn't nearly enought for my mp3 collection.
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When this product was first announced it was going to be called HanJob (I guess, they didnt realize their mistake, when it was being produced in Korea), but for obvious reasons the name was changed for marketing in the US. (True story, or so I read... I will post the source of the article I read it in if I can stumble upon it again)
I think the potential of both TV and MP3 can easily be buried in the noise ...
... I don't have cable, but when I visit my father's place, I sometimes watch the history channel and the discovery channel.
There are a lot of educational materials that *are* available on television (by broadcast, cable, videocassette) -- science shows, lectures by college professors, instructional tapes for all kinds of things, history shows
In this case, I think audio cassettes and instructional CDs (and before that, remember language-learning records?) are a closer parallel -- things like language-learning are well-suited to an audio medium.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
4.6Gb? There's no way you can fit 80+ hours of music in only 4.6Gb. 80 hours is 288000 seconds, so 4.6Gb would only be about 16Kbps. Have you ever heard a 16Kbps mp3? Terrible.
The drive in this thing is 4.6GB not 4.6Gb. That's what the article says, and that's the only thing that makes any sense.
You can always encode your files at a higher bitrate so you can get better fidelity. I normal encode at 256kbs or 384kbs instead of the standard 128kbs, and it makes a big difference. I hate string sections that sound like they are underwater.
When you encode at a higher rate, you file becomes twice or three times at big, making those large disk drives nice.
I'm really getting annoyed at the WMA/SDMI format. You any of you know of away to change them digitally into an unsecure format besides filtering them through TotalRecorder?
I have ~200+ CDs (collection still FAR from near complete) and actually enjoy most songs on most of them. I'm going to make the assumption that many of your CDs are of bands that have a few hits you heard on whatever radio station. Often times those bands end up having disappointing albums overall, or just a few "catchy" songs, while the rest are extremely below par. There's also the problem of growing completly sick of the songs after hearing them over and over and over 50 million+ times. Tell me what music you're interested in, and perhaps I can recommend some websites for you to check out to hear some (hopefully) better music. I'm proud of most of the CDs/records I own...I can't imagine having 150 CDs and being disappointed in most of them.
found more details here and here. It's rechargable, claims 6-8 hours of battery life. Also says there will be a car power adapter for it available...i know what I want for xmas...
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.