4.8G Portable MP3 Player

[Xorian] writes "There's a new portable mp3 device called the Personal Jukebox. Apparently, this is the result of a research effort from Compaq's Systems Reserach Center (one of the two Compaq research groups that developed the Itsy). The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music (it's got a a 4.8 GByte hard disk) and have 10 hours of battery life yet fit in your jacket pocket. No word on pricing yet though. "

Comments

Moving parts

[maroberts]

One of the major plus points of MP3 players is that they have no moving parts and therefore are not subject to shock [well most types of shock anyway].

Doesn't putting a hard disk in here sortof spoil this ?

vaporware?

[Thrakkerzog]

I keep on hearing about all of these wonderful mp3 players that hold oodles of music and have wonderful battery life..


but where are they?

Availability Date

[bravehamster]

Taken from the website:

The PJB 100 Personal Jukebox limited Premier Edition will be available the week of Nov 15, 1999 at a major web music site. If you would like us to notify you by e-mail when additional product is available please contact us at pjbinfo@mp3factorydirect.com

MAME support yet?

[eries]

Can I play my favorite arcade games on it yet? I heard that after the Kodak camera this was now a standard required feature for all hi-tech toys :)

guess what?

[adraken]

ibm 2.5" drives are HIGHLY durable and stable. the player will have a huge memory buffer since it claims that it will only spin the hard drive up once every 10 minutes.

So what?

[hattig]

This is not what I would call usable. Hard Drives, even the most modern, would not really be able to withstand the shock of hitting the ground when you drop the device, even when the HD is not spinning. HDs might be rated for 1000G for 0.1us, but you get that force by dropping a HD from 1 or 2 foot onto concrete. Maybe the HD could be encased in some kind of jelly bump-soothing gel?

Of course, being able to fit over 4000 minutes of music on a portable device sounds like fun, but surely a more durable, but lower capacity medium would be better, say fitting a Superdisk into such a device or something similar. Even CD mp3 players seem to be the most popular option amongst those here on Slashdot!

I am assuming that the device has some integral RAM in which to buffer the mp3s from the HD, 16Mb should be the minimum, so the HD only has to spin up every 15 minutes or so. That would increase battery life considerably.

What I am waiting for is the integrated portable digital camera, portable games machine, mp3 player and sound recorder of some kind. I know that MAME was ported to a Kodak digital camera (cool use of resources!).

Sorry I couldn't beat the Elite Hacksaws. (3l337 H4X0RZ) :-)

Oh No!

[Ledge Kindred]

Now I have to decide between buying one of these things or an empeg! The Empeg is cooler, but this PJbox thing is almost certainly going to be cheaper. (At least, it had better be! If Compaq/whoever is going to try to market a piece of pocket-sized consumer electronics for more than about $300, I imagine they'll have a really tough time moving them off the shelves.)

I suppose I'm just going to have to put in some overtime and get both...

-=-=-=-=-

Expensive..

[Thomas Charron]

I'm guessing that it's going to price around 800$. This is based on this quote:

Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units.

If they store 80 hours, and it's price/length ratio is 10$ pe rhour, about 800$.

This price is also supported by the fact that they compare the price to flash-media devices at 200$ an hour. The 200$ MP3 players store about an hours worth of music.

Does it do Linux?

[Ledge Kindred]

I guess I gotta ask the required question: "Will you be able to access it from Linux?" Since it *only* contains USB, that's a good question. I hope Compaq "does the Right Thing" and realizes the huge number of mp3 fans on the market who are also Linux fans and at least releases specs, if not an actual API or something.

-=-=-=-=-

Already had this discussion on /.

[jonnythan]

Ok, before everyone starts posting about how the hard drive will not work, or it's good because memory is too expensive, check out this story posted by Commander Taco about..the exact same thing.

(a 4.6GB portable mp3 player with hard disk)

Re:Price

[tweek]

Well if it's a 2.5 inch drive, it's more than likely a laptop drive. Shouldn't it be just as reliable as any IBM laptop harddrive. The last laptop I had was a vaio so it doesn't quite compare. What's the MTBF on IBM 2.5's?
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece

Re:CE or Linux

[dattaway]

CE or Linux? Why? All you really need is an MP3 player. Its not like you are going to program this mp3 player as a firewall or an X server. It most likely has a special purpose DSP programmed mostly with assembly language and perhaps some C thrown in.

My Xmas list is all ready.....

[Anonymous Coward]

These all seem like pricey-kinda-kludgy solutions... check out a review at http://www.tech -report.com/reviews/1999q4/mp-shuttle/mp-shuttle-1 .x or you can go shopping at http://xeenontech.safeshopper.com/.
Seems like a real solution to me.. 2 different models.. one has a pullout HD rack, and the other just has a CD drive in it to read normal burned CDs with mp3's on them.. and it is shipping now! This is what I want for Christmas!

We already hashed through this...

[SethJohnson]

About two weeks ago slashdot had a reference to a press release from some company called Hangjin or something that had developed such an mp3 player in conjunction with Compaq. It will cost about $800 when released in November. All the relevant issues were already discussed on slashdot (hard drive spinning down to conserve juice, shock resistance of the mechanism, etc.)-- so check the previous slashdot discussion for some good info.

Dillrod

MP3 Music on Portable Hardrive = Junk

[MaxMahem]

While I don't want to sound like a spoil sport, but this product, as I see it, is something I will never buy.

1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.

2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.

3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.

4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.

For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.

Errrr. . .

[Wakko Warner]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a CD mechanism delicate too? Wouldn't dropping a CD Walkman (or a CD-based MP3 player) from any height have about as much chance of causing damage to its mechanism as dropping a powered-down hard drive from the same height would? Keep in mind, hard drives can withstand much higher forces when they're off, and the drive in this thing would be off 99.9% of the time.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Re:Errrr. . .

[killbill]

The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.

CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.

Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.

Bill Kilgallon

Portability Factor

[mochaone]

This device, at 9.9 oz, is almost 4 times the size of Diamond's Rio, which is 2.75 oz. I guess the difference is probably attributatble to the IBM hard drive. I'll probably stick with the Diamond Rio and hope the flash memory prices come down. I think I can survive jogging 5 miles with just a measly one hour of music.

This device sounds interesting, but not for my needs. I don't plan on doing anything for 800 consecutive hours, and if I did, I don't know if I have 800 hours of music that I would want to listen to.

Spin up... spin down...

[Booker]

I thought starting and stopping hard drives was extremely hard on them... something to do with the lubrication on the spindles. Has this been solved for these small drives?

Well, I'll take this opportunity to....

[Stalemate]

put in a small plug for a project I'm working on. It's an mp3-cd player that also plays audio CD's. I eventually plan to add hard drive capabilities and offer an option where someone could send me systems specs and I could send them back a boot-disk with all the required software.

Currently, it's not portable, but with smaller hardware it could be. I'm using mine as a home stereo component.

It's all open source with code available for download, and documentation is in the works.

http://cs.atu.edu/~ewyles/mp3000.htm

BTW, sign up for our mailing list if you want future update.

PEACE

ps -- sorry for the shameless plug, I just think this project is cool.

Re:Mp4's?

[Eric_Scheirer]

The MPEG-4 Audio standard is done. It was finished at the October 1998 MPEG meeting and is now "out for ballot", which means the various countries that are members of ISO vote to approve it (countries have had several chances to suggest changes, so it's unlikely to be disapproved). After formal ballot approval, it goes to ISO for publication, and then you can buy it. It will likely be available in final form before the end of the year.

The "reference software" (slow, user-hostile code to demonstrate how the standard is supposed to work) was completed in August and the source is available as part of the spec. Non-MPEG organizations are already building tools for user-friendly use of the standard.

The whole MPEG-4 Audio standard (not including Video or Systems) is about 1200 pages long. It is formally ISO 14496-3:1999 and is divided into 6 Sections:

• 1. Introduction and Overview
• 2. Parametric Speech coding
• 3. CELP Speech coding
• 4. General Audio (AAC/TwinVQ merger)
• 5. Structured Audio (audio synthesis)
• 6. Text to Speech Interface

The part that is most like MP3 is Section 4. Section 4 enables music and other wideband audio coding from 16 kbps to 64 kbps/channel. At the high end, the quality is nearly transparent -- most listeners will not be able to tell the difference between the coded and the original signal. MPEG-4 GA at 96 kbps (stereo) gives about the same quality as MP3 at 192 kbps (stereo) -- thus, files are half as big for the same quality.

There are no "layers" in MPEG-4 Audio.

Some of the sections of the standard (2, 3, 4) are protected by patents and cannot be freely implemented. Section 5 is not protected by patents and can be freely implemented without paying license fees.

Here is the hype from the beginning of Section 1:

ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.

MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high-quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the-art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object- based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.

Best regards,

-- Eric Scheirer
Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

More info: http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio

Re:Woooo... 4.8GB.

[jilles]

why not make the harddrive arbitrary. Now a 13GB hardrive might be possible but who knows what size of hardrive we will be able to buy next year. I'd love to plug in a 50 GB harddrive when one comes available (assuming 2 1/2 inch and whatever interface the current drive is using, IDE?)

Re:Woooo... 4.8GB.

[jilles]

You got a good point here, but still a removable harddisk offers some advantages over a fixed harddrive (as long as the price of the player is so much higher as the cost of a harddrive) that make it worth it.