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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)
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.
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...
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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
(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.
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
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
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?
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.