I can't see how even $26,000 would be enough for a *single* symphony, if you actually want to pay the musicians. A 20 minute symphony would take at least a day of rehearsal and half a day of recording. You'd want to pay each musician a fair wage of at least several hundred dollars for each day (if you think this is too much, remember that they're self-employed, have to own a very expensive instrument, years if not decades of expensive training, and hours and hours of unpaid practicing are also included). Multiply that by the dozens of musicians required for even a modest symphony, and you're already nearing that amount, without actually paying anyone to record and edit it! I'm very curious how they've budgeted this...
And for the smaller-scale things, $1000 is truly a paltry sum, unless you sell it to the musicians as if you're recording their demo for free...
I guess they have something figured out, but I don't see what it could be!
Yes, people do this. I think it's often not a good idea. Tuning every note to a tuner, watching a little dial moving around can be for for learning the tendencies of your instrument - it's good to know that, on one particular saxophone, a given Bb fingering is a little sharper than another, for example. However, there are a few big problems with it: one is that it trains you to associate a visual event (the needle) with your tuning technique, whereas in real performances, you use your ears. A better practice technique would be to match tones with a fixed pitch. Some tuners do this, and some people use it this way, but most people just use the meter. The other big problem with tuners is that they generally aren't even that accurate. I've run into many problems with tuners, (fairly expensive Korgs, for example) and found all sorts of just plain mistakes it makes. Testing it against a more accurate sound source, like a computer, can be illuminating.
Finally, the tuner assumes that you're tuning equal temperament and nothing else. Sure, a lot of music from the last century or so somewhat assumes equal temperament, and sure, you'll often be playing with a piano or another instrument tuned this way, but in a real performance, you can and SHOULD adjust notes to match the harmonic/melodic context of them. In other words, if you finish a piece on a C major chord, and you're playing the E, unless there's a very prominent E played by a piano that you must match, your E should be much lower than the tuner would tell you for it to be in tune. Most players do these kinds of adjustments automatically, but training for hours with a little electronic box that is ignorant of all this can get in the way.
A better way to practice tuning is to have a machine (computer, tuner, pipe organ, etc) play held notes, and then you use your ear to tune other notes to it. Maybe playing a whole scale, listening carefully to each note to match it to the drone. You might be surprised at how you put some notes at different places from the tuner! Or even different places depending on which drone you're tuning to! This is the way it should be.
And I've also played saxophone for almost 20 years, and now tune harpsichords for a living... I've thought about tuning a lot! It's a big, and often misunderstood subject.
I was looking to do something similar - I ended up just ditching Skype, because the closed nature of it meant it just didn't have the flexibility to do what I wanted. Now I'm using SIP calls, with various programs on various platforms, using a server running asterisk to do the recording (and a huge pile of other things too). When you switch to an Open platform, it's much easier to do things like this.
If you *just* need to record, and don't have any experience with the other tools, it might be a lot simpler to just use one of the other suggestions, but anything going through skype is going to be much more limited than a Free solution.
One other thing to keep in mind is that phone networks just have cruddy sound - I'm sure you know that, but anything on a phone network isn't going to even approach CD quality or anything. This has nothing to do with VoIP, but is the nature of the telephone network that the VoIP service connects to.
(of course, calls going directly over VoIP, with no PSTN termination can potentially get much better quality by using codecs like speex, but that won't help if you need to talk to a landline).
No kidding! It's kind of like outlook, but more so, since it doesn't even support exchange connections as well. It certainly has improved - but then, considering where it was coming from a couple of versions ago, just using an old copy of eudora 3 in classic mode would be an improvement. Now it's a functional, but very buggy e-mail client.
I would add that there are loads of people that use computers every day, but have never learned the basics of the interface they see all the time. I saw someone at work today who, despite doing most of her work in Outlook, and having many folders of e-mail, had no idea that you could collapse and expand the folder tree. If you only learn the tasks as a step-by-step set of actions, and don't learn how to apply those steps to any other tasks, then you really don't know the desktop you use. I think there are a LOT of people that fit this category.
My advice is to not just look at KDE and Gnome! Many people, myself included find both of them rather annoying and cluttered. There's a lot to be said for the customizability and simplicity of not using them. It's not perfect either, but I do wish people wouldn't assume that it's no longer an option.
I use sawfish, no gnome, and I don't have any gnome-settings-daemon... I've managed to avoid installing almost all the libraries, even. (I have libgnomecanvas, and the basic gtk stuff, and hardly anything else) Though it's always a shock when I try installing some teeny CD player app or something, and find it pulling in 100MB+ of libraries... Luckily, aptitude has an undo.:)
But yeah, I've hated KDE and gnome since before either was usable. It's a nice idea under it all, but a horrible implementation.
I wasn't too pleased with it either - haven't used the most recent version, but I spent a little bit of time with the evaluation version last year. Seemed there were a lot of nice ideas, but a lot seemed kinda half-assed. Lots of stuff that would work really nicely if you used it just like they wanted you to use it, but then didn't support anything more esoteric. And then if you tried to go outside of the "standard stuff", you find undocumented and unfinished scripts and the like. I found it rather annoying... especially since it seemed relatively impossible to get help on it other than through the paid support, which I didn't pay for, of course. But it's really not the sort of distro I'm interested in - I much prefer the flexibility and transparency of Debian (fully realizing that half the transparency is a result of my knowing better where to look, having used Debian for about 8 years now). SuSE just seemed to have too much "do it our way, or don't do it at all!" mentality about it. But maybe if I used it more, I'd change my mind.
I found it a little slow with my 5200 (fanless), but only a tiny bit. Definitely playable, though I'd want to turn the resolution down if I was playing a lot, or doing a bunch of multiplayer craziness.
The big question is why you would need anything so expensive for a "home theatre" setup. I mean, my old TNT2 card would already be overkill for that kind of setup, and it was just as silent and probably used less power than the 5200. It doesn't have to *do* much beyond stretching the video to fit the frame. Of course, if you want to display it on a TV with no pretty inputs, you might want a card with a tv out, but that's still no reason to use a high-powered GPU.
Forget "children in developing nations" - I want one! This looks nearly perfect for me, really.. Of course, a more powerful system would be nice, but this seems to have all the important stuff, and a number of features that expensive laptops don't offer. Why not sell it here? (i.e. Montreal )
I for one would like to see more web pages behave like web pages - these funky html-based interfaces are impressive, and gmail is definitely one of the better ones I've seen (I haven't seen the yahoo beta yet) but I find it extremely annoying to actually use it a lot of the time. Going from a "normal" web page - i.e. one where all the web elements behave the way my browser wants them to - to one of these DHTML-enhanced "interfaces" - where the web elements behave the way the page designer wants them to - is infuriating. Best/worst example of this is the keyboard shortcuts gmail and many forum web sites use - sure, they're handy to use them, but I *already* have keyboard shortcuts in my browser, and I don't want any old web page to obliterate them. I want alt-s to open the sage sidebar, and not send the message I'm currently writing.
Another awful example, because it's just so pointless, is my online banking sign in page: you enter in your card number, and then the cursor automatically jumps to the password field. Of course, anyone who has every actually used any other web pages will have already hit the tab key to move to the next field, so that you then have to switch BACK to the password field. Annoying, and not beneficial in the slightest.
I'd just go back to turning off javascript entirely like I did until a couple of years ago, except that it's just too prevalent.
I'd rephrase your question a little: unless your infrastructure is heavily based on MS software already, it's going to be expensive and a huge hassle.
Of course, most businesses just run windows, and have no interest in anything else. In that case, I expect AD would work really quite well. From what I've seen of it, there's an awful lot that it does very very well, and a lot that isn't really doable with other systems, at least not without a lot of messy hacking.
That said, most of those interesting features are only available to windows machines, so if you use anything else, you've basically just got a very expensive and quirky LDAP server. In my case, I work at a university that is in the process of switching to AD - it's been several years and the process is ongoing, and it's been *painful*. I think there have been some poor setup procedures complicating matters, but in general, there are several departments that don't benefit from the system at all, because they don't/can't use windows and MS Office.
Of course, a university is an extremely hererogeneous situation, and this is a large organization with a million overlapping previous IT structures. I expect it would be much simpler with a company.
To sum up - I wouldn't go with AD unless you know you can stick with it for the next decade or more at the very least, and will never be using anything other than MS software. You just might find yourself in a very messy situation otherwise.
Ok, but it never should have had anything to do with any kind of public network, in that case. The flaw might not be the invention itself, but that it was enabled in the *web browser*.
Pretends to handle them? I'd say many distros do a fine job - 'aptitude install openoffice.org' and it's all there, 'aptitude remove (or purge) openoffice.org' and it, and all its unused dependencies are gone.
The problems only start when you get software that isn't packaged yet, or if you don't have a good net connection, or another quick way to access a good archive with what you need. That's something that could be improved, I suppose. But more and more, that's not an issue at all.
Since when was a school supposed to teach everything one needed? This is a very new idea - until very recently, it seems that "everything you needed" was learned outside of school, at your home, or a workplace (as an apprenticeship, etc...) School was, and to some extent still is, the place to learn academic subjects - those that, by definition, you don't really "need" for life. They certainly are good to know, but it's a different kind of learning. The concept that all your life and career skills would be taught in a school like this is, to be honest, a little bizarre.
As far as updating goes, generally, debian is much easier to update in my experience. Using the packages included in debian (and this is a HUGE number) you essentially never have to worry at all about dependencies.
Of course, if you use the unstable distribution, occasionally a package gets uploaded that is a little... unstable.:)
But using stable, or even testing, you almost never get this kind of problem. Certainly nothing like the problems with winxpSP2, and of course, the viruses/spyware fun on windows requires far more frequent updating than anything in linuxland.
Anyway, if all your experience has been with redhat, especially if you weren't using yum or apt-get in it, things can be greatly improved.
I'd say that client side scripts actually SHOULDN'T be in web pages. THey're a pain in the ass, frequently have problems, and very rarely do anything that couldn't be done with either plain html/css or with a server side script.
The basic fault is that scripting is designed to make a web page behave in a non-standard manner. I don't want that to happen! I want control over my web browser and how it displays things, and how many windows it opens, and how controls (forms, etc) work. Anything else, IMHO, is broken.
I've had a bit of success building firebird in the past, though last time I tried, the compile wouldn't complete. Never did find out why.
Can anyone suggest any sites that explain the build process in a little more detail? There are a LOT of options there! Also, I know that several compilers have trouble with mozilla, but I haven't been able to find any actual lists of what works and what doesn't. Does such a thing exist? Seems an awful lot must be documented SOMEWHERE, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere on the mozilla site.
They've actually just started the *ist line of cameras.
I don't know much about it, other than it being quite small, and some say it looks good.
What *I* want, is much simpler - basically a digital k1000. Autofocus is lovely and all that, but it's not what I want.. of course, no one's going to produce that sort of thing any time soon, so just like with mp3/ogg recorders, I'm stuck with nothing available! Too bad..
Also, they don't have FLAC at all yet (though it's planned for the distant future) and it's much bigger. Also doesn't support recording to anything but mp3.
THe biggest thing is the transfers: it needs a special program. While this wouldn't be SO bad at home, it means it's not nearly as useful if I want to transfer something from someone else's machine. They probably wouldn't want me installing the software.
As well, I believe that the USB only works in the windows client. The java version is restricted to just using the ethernet, which is rather more annoying to use for this sort of thing.
What I'd like to see is a machine like this one that works as a USB mass storage, and can therefore be an easily used portable hard drive. (I know some can do this, but they have other issues...). Just transfer the oggs/mp3s/FLACs(not much mention of those around!) or anything else, and then you could play them. Database info is generally available in properly tagged files, and they could be organized by directory fairly easily, making it perfectly usable, and much simpler. Playlists could be uploaded in the same way.
The main reason I would want a little machine like this would be for quick and easy recording - I've heard that this records well, and records to OGG and WAV nicely (don't know if it records to FLAC, but it'd be very nice). I don't know if it's got any editing features though - nothing complicated would be expected, of course, but just splitting/combining/deleting tracks like a minidisc recorder does would be plenty. I'm not sure how it does this - the reviews I've seen haven't gone into any detail about it. But it's essential.
The main issue is the transfers though. I don't want to have to use a special program, and I ESPECIALLY don't want to need a graphical one. Until a player that has that along with everything the Karma has, I'll be stuck with my minidisc, and its complete lack of digital out. *sigh*
If there's a sound board. I only ever do acoustic concerts, usually of 17th or 18th century music.
It's interesting that when hearing "concert", most people today seem to think of an amplified show. Seems strange to me... but then, I play the harpsichord.
Man, I wish I got thousands of bodies at my concerts..
Actually, usually in the places I play (churches or small concert halls) having a few (50 or so) enhances the sound considerably, getting rid of a lot of the boominess that those sorts of locations tend to have.
Of course, you probably didn't expect me to be playing harpsichord like I do...
In any case, the higher quality storage isn't due to the impeccable recording quality that I always get, because you're right - it usually blows chunks, since I don't really know what I'm doing, and usually have one cheapo microphone to record with. However, With that much storage, I'd much rather use Flac or something and get as 'pure' a recording as I could manage for the rare occasions when it does turn out nicely. On top of that, I often end up recoding stuff I've recorded in several different bit rates, along with burning to CD, so I'd rather start out with something lossless to minimize the effects of switching bitrates.
The best use for FLAC one a portable device that I know of is for musicians to make informal recordings of their concerts. I know tons of people, myself included, that like to record concerts that they do, mostly for educational purposes - you can really learn a lot from listening to a recording you've made! Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are stuck with minidisc recorders, and I need not go over the problems with them on THIS forum.
A good hard disk recorder with a good amount of storage, lossless compression, and half-decent audio, combined with simple, USB mass storage or similar transfers (USB 2 would get pretty important, I imagine) would be wonderful. Unfortunately, I don't know many machines that have an input on them! Neither the Rio Karma nor the iRiver mention input at all, other than the USB/ethernet connections.
At this point, the Neuros seems like the best bet... but I don't think the FLAC support has been released yet. All these players are extremely expensive as well. I wish I could get a pared-down version - just input, basic output, ogg and flac compression (both directions) and a simple USB mass storage connection. No need for special software or anything. An interface suitable for simple editing instead of just playlists would be great too - being able to chop out a chunk of a track or the like would be really nice. Though with such a huge amount of storage, it wouldn't be too hard to just leave it all on there.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see how even $26,000 would be enough for a *single* symphony, if you actually want to pay the musicians. A 20 minute symphony would take at least a day of rehearsal and half a day of recording. You'd want to pay each musician a fair wage of at least several hundred dollars for each day (if you think this is too much, remember that they're self-employed, have to own a very expensive instrument, years if not decades of expensive training, and hours and hours of unpaid practicing are also included). Multiply that by the dozens of musicians required for even a modest symphony, and you're already nearing that amount, without actually paying anyone to record and edit it! I'm very curious how they've budgeted this...
And for the smaller-scale things, $1000 is truly a paltry sum, unless you sell it to the musicians as if you're recording their demo for free...
I guess they have something figured out, but I don't see what it could be!
Yes, people do this. I think it's often not a good idea. Tuning every note to a tuner, watching a little dial moving around can be for for learning the tendencies of your instrument - it's good to know that, on one particular saxophone, a given Bb fingering is a little sharper than another, for example. However, there are a few big problems with it: one is that it trains you to associate a visual event (the needle) with your tuning technique, whereas in real performances, you use your ears. A better practice technique would be to match tones with a fixed pitch. Some tuners do this, and some people use it this way, but most people just use the meter. The other big problem with tuners is that they generally aren't even that accurate. I've run into many problems with tuners, (fairly expensive Korgs, for example) and found all sorts of just plain mistakes it makes. Testing it against a more accurate sound source, like a computer, can be illuminating.
Finally, the tuner assumes that you're tuning equal temperament and nothing else. Sure, a lot of music from the last century or so somewhat assumes equal temperament, and sure, you'll often be playing with a piano or another instrument tuned this way, but in a real performance, you can and SHOULD adjust notes to match the harmonic/melodic context of them. In other words, if you finish a piece on a C major chord, and you're playing the E, unless there's a very prominent E played by a piano that you must match, your E should be much lower than the tuner would tell you for it to be in tune. Most players do these kinds of adjustments automatically, but training for hours with a little electronic box that is ignorant of all this can get in the way.
A better way to practice tuning is to have a machine (computer, tuner, pipe organ, etc) play held notes, and then you use your ear to tune other notes to it. Maybe playing a whole scale, listening carefully to each note to match it to the drone. You might be surprised at how you put some notes at different places from the tuner! Or even different places depending on which drone you're tuning to! This is the way it should be.
And I've also played saxophone for almost 20 years, and now tune harpsichords for a living... I've thought about tuning a lot! It's a big, and often misunderstood subject.
I was looking to do something similar - I ended up just ditching Skype, because the closed nature of it meant it just didn't have the flexibility to do what I wanted. Now I'm using SIP calls, with various programs on various platforms, using a server running asterisk to do the recording (and a huge pile of other things too). When you switch to an Open platform, it's much easier to do things like this.
If you *just* need to record, and don't have any experience with the other tools, it might be a lot simpler to just use one of the other suggestions, but anything going through skype is going to be much more limited than a Free solution.
One other thing to keep in mind is that phone networks just have cruddy sound - I'm sure you know that, but anything on a phone network isn't going to even approach CD quality or anything. This has nothing to do with VoIP, but is the nature of the telephone network that the VoIP service connects to.
(of course, calls going directly over VoIP, with no PSTN termination can potentially get much better quality by using codecs like speex, but that won't help if you need to talk to a landline).
No kidding! It's kind of like outlook, but more so, since it doesn't even support exchange connections as well. It certainly has improved - but then, considering where it was coming from a couple of versions ago, just using an old copy of eudora 3 in classic mode would be an improvement. Now it's a functional, but very buggy e-mail client.
I would add that there are loads of people that use computers every day, but have never learned the basics of the interface they see all the time. I saw someone at work today who, despite doing most of her work in Outlook, and having many folders of e-mail, had no idea that you could collapse and expand the folder tree. If you only learn the tasks as a step-by-step set of actions, and don't learn how to apply those steps to any other tasks, then you really don't know the desktop you use. I think there are a LOT of people that fit this category.
My advice is to not just look at KDE and Gnome! Many people, myself included find both of them rather annoying and cluttered. There's a lot to be said for the customizability and simplicity of not using them. It's not perfect either, but I do wish people wouldn't assume that it's no longer an option.
I use sawfish, no gnome, and I don't have any gnome-settings-daemon... I've managed to avoid installing almost all the libraries, even. (I have libgnomecanvas, and the basic gtk stuff, and hardly anything else) Though it's always a shock when I try installing some teeny CD player app or something, and find it pulling in 100MB+ of libraries... Luckily, aptitude has an undo. :)
But yeah, I've hated KDE and gnome since before either was usable. It's a nice idea under it all, but a horrible implementation.
I wasn't too pleased with it either - haven't used the most recent version, but I spent a little bit of time with the evaluation version last year. Seemed there were a lot of nice ideas, but a lot seemed kinda half-assed. Lots of stuff that would work really nicely if you used it just like they wanted you to use it, but then didn't support anything more esoteric. And then if you tried to go outside of the "standard stuff", you find undocumented and unfinished scripts and the like. I found it rather annoying... especially since it seemed relatively impossible to get help on it other than through the paid support, which I didn't pay for, of course. But it's really not the sort of distro I'm interested in - I much prefer the flexibility and transparency of Debian (fully realizing that half the transparency is a result of my knowing better where to look, having used Debian for about 8 years now). SuSE just seemed to have too much "do it our way, or don't do it at all!" mentality about it. But maybe if I used it more, I'd change my mind.
I found it a little slow with my 5200 (fanless), but only a tiny bit. Definitely playable, though I'd want to turn the resolution down if I was playing a lot, or doing a bunch of multiplayer craziness.
The big question is why you would need anything so expensive for a "home theatre" setup. I mean, my old TNT2 card would already be overkill for that kind of setup, and it was just as silent and probably used less power than the 5200. It doesn't have to *do* much beyond stretching the video to fit the frame. Of course, if you want to display it on a TV with no pretty inputs, you might want a card with a tv out, but that's still no reason to use a high-powered GPU.
Forget "children in developing nations" - I want one! This looks nearly perfect for me, really.. Of course, a more powerful system would be nice, but this seems to have all the important stuff, and a number of features that expensive laptops don't offer. Why not sell it here? (i.e. Montreal )
I for one would like to see more web pages behave like web pages - these funky html-based interfaces are impressive, and gmail is definitely one of the better ones I've seen (I haven't seen the yahoo beta yet) but I find it extremely annoying to actually use it a lot of the time. Going from a "normal" web page - i.e. one where all the web elements behave the way my browser wants them to - to one of these DHTML-enhanced "interfaces" - where the web elements behave the way the page designer wants them to - is infuriating. Best/worst example of this is the keyboard shortcuts gmail and many forum web sites use - sure, they're handy to use them, but I *already* have keyboard shortcuts in my browser, and I don't want any old web page to obliterate them. I want alt-s to open the sage sidebar, and not send the message I'm currently writing.
Another awful example, because it's just so pointless, is my online banking sign in page: you enter in your card number, and then the cursor automatically jumps to the password field. Of course, anyone who has every actually used any other web pages will have already hit the tab key to move to the next field, so that you then have to switch BACK to the password field. Annoying, and not beneficial in the slightest.
I'd just go back to turning off javascript entirely like I did until a couple of years ago, except that it's just too prevalent.
I'd rephrase your question a little: unless your infrastructure is heavily based on MS software already, it's going to be expensive and a huge hassle.
Of course, most businesses just run windows, and have no interest in anything else. In that case, I expect AD would work really quite well. From what I've seen of it, there's an awful lot that it does very very well, and a lot that isn't really doable with other systems, at least not without a lot of messy hacking.
That said, most of those interesting features are only available to windows machines, so if you use anything else, you've basically just got a very expensive and quirky LDAP server. In my case, I work at a university that is in the process of switching to AD - it's been several years and the process is ongoing, and it's been *painful*. I think there have been some poor setup procedures complicating matters, but in general, there are several departments that don't benefit from the system at all, because they don't/can't use windows and MS Office.
Of course, a university is an extremely hererogeneous situation, and this is a large organization with a million overlapping previous IT structures. I expect it would be much simpler with a company.
To sum up - I wouldn't go with AD unless you know you can stick with it for the next decade or more at the very least, and will never be using anything other than MS software. You just might find yourself in a very messy situation otherwise.
Ok, but it never should have had anything to do with any kind of public network, in that case. The flaw might not be the invention itself, but that it was enabled in the *web browser*.
These look a lot more informative than the IE error pages (it'd be hard to be LESS informative!)
Pretends to handle them? I'd say many distros do a fine job - 'aptitude install openoffice.org' and it's all there, 'aptitude remove (or purge) openoffice.org' and it, and all its unused dependencies are gone.
The problems only start when you get software that isn't packaged yet, or if you don't have a good net connection, or another quick way to access a good archive with what you need. That's something that could be improved, I suppose. But more and more, that's not an issue at all.
Since when was a school supposed to teach everything one needed? This is a very new idea - until very recently, it seems that "everything you needed" was learned outside of school, at your home, or a workplace (as an apprenticeship, etc...) School was, and to some extent still is, the place to learn academic subjects - those that, by definition, you don't really "need" for life. They certainly are good to know, but it's a different kind of learning. The concept that all your life and career skills would be taught in a school like this is, to be honest, a little bizarre.
As far as updating goes, generally, debian is much easier to update in my experience. Using the packages included in debian (and this is a HUGE number) you essentially never have to worry at all about dependencies.
... unstable. :)
Of course, if you use the unstable distribution, occasionally a package gets uploaded that is a little
But using stable, or even testing, you almost never get this kind of problem. Certainly nothing like the problems with winxpSP2, and of course, the viruses/spyware fun on windows requires far more frequent updating than anything in linuxland.
Anyway, if all your experience has been with redhat, especially if you weren't using yum or apt-get in it, things can be greatly improved.
I'd say that client side scripts actually SHOULDN'T be in web pages. THey're a pain in the ass, frequently have problems, and very rarely do anything that couldn't be done with either plain html/css or with a server side script.
The basic fault is that scripting is designed to make a web page behave in a non-standard manner. I don't want that to happen! I want control over my web browser and how it displays things, and how many windows it opens, and how controls (forms, etc) work. Anything else, IMHO, is broken.
I've had a bit of success building firebird in the past, though last time I tried, the compile wouldn't complete. Never did find out why.
Can anyone suggest any sites that explain the build process in a little more detail? There are a LOT of options there! Also, I know that several compilers have trouble with mozilla, but I haven't been able to find any actual lists of what works and what doesn't. Does such a thing exist? Seems an awful lot must be documented SOMEWHERE, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere on the mozilla site.
They've actually just started the *ist line of cameras.
I don't know much about it, other than it being quite small, and some say it looks good.
What *I* want, is much simpler - basically a digital k1000. Autofocus is lovely and all that, but it's not what I want.. of course, no one's going to produce that sort of thing any time soon, so just like with mp3/ogg recorders, I'm stuck with nothing available! Too bad..
Plays ogg with BETA FIRMWARE.
Also, they don't have FLAC at all yet (though it's planned for the distant future) and it's much bigger. Also doesn't support recording to anything but mp3.
Here's what keeps me from buying it:
THe biggest thing is the transfers: it needs a special program. While this wouldn't be SO bad at home, it means it's not nearly as useful if I want to transfer something from someone else's machine. They probably wouldn't want me installing the software.
As well, I believe that the USB only works in the windows client. The java version is restricted to just using the ethernet, which is rather more annoying to use for this sort of thing.
What I'd like to see is a machine like this one that works as a USB mass storage, and can therefore be an easily used portable hard drive. (I know some can do this, but they have other issues...). Just transfer the oggs/mp3s/FLACs(not much mention of those around!) or anything else, and then you could play them. Database info is generally available in properly tagged files, and they could be organized by directory fairly easily, making it perfectly usable, and much simpler. Playlists could be uploaded in the same way.
The main reason I would want a little machine like this would be for quick and easy recording - I've heard that this records well, and records to OGG and WAV nicely (don't know if it records to FLAC, but it'd be very nice). I don't know if it's got any editing features though - nothing complicated would be expected, of course, but just splitting/combining/deleting tracks like a minidisc recorder does would be plenty. I'm not sure how it does this - the reviews I've seen haven't gone into any detail about it. But it's essential.
The main issue is the transfers though. I don't want to have to use a special program, and I ESPECIALLY don't want to need a graphical one. Until a player that has that along with everything the Karma has, I'll be stuck with my minidisc, and its complete lack of digital out. *sigh*
If there's a sound board. I only ever do acoustic concerts, usually of 17th or 18th century music.
It's interesting that when hearing "concert", most people today seem to think of an amplified show. Seems strange to me... but then, I play the harpsichord.
Man, I wish I got thousands of bodies at my concerts..
Actually, usually in the places I play (churches or small concert halls) having a few (50 or so) enhances the sound considerably, getting rid of a lot of the boominess that those sorts of locations tend to have.
Of course, you probably didn't expect me to be playing harpsichord like I do...
In any case, the higher quality storage isn't due to the impeccable recording quality that I always get, because you're right - it usually blows chunks, since I don't really know what I'm doing, and usually have one cheapo microphone to record with. However, With that much storage, I'd much rather use Flac or something and get as 'pure' a recording as I could manage for the rare occasions when it does turn out nicely. On top of that, I often end up recoding stuff I've recorded in several different bit rates, along with burning to CD, so I'd rather start out with something lossless to minimize the effects of switching bitrates.
The best use for FLAC one a portable device that I know of is for musicians to make informal recordings of their concerts. I know tons of people, myself included, that like to record concerts that they do, mostly for educational purposes - you can really learn a lot from listening to a recording you've made! Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are stuck with minidisc recorders, and I need not go over the problems with them on THIS forum.
A good hard disk recorder with a good amount of storage, lossless compression, and half-decent audio, combined with simple, USB mass storage or similar transfers (USB 2 would get pretty important, I imagine) would be wonderful. Unfortunately, I don't know many machines that have an input on them! Neither the Rio Karma nor the iRiver mention input at all, other than the USB/ethernet connections.
At this point, the Neuros seems like the best bet... but I don't think the FLAC support has been released yet. All these players are extremely expensive as well. I wish I could get a pared-down version - just input, basic output, ogg and flac compression (both directions) and a simple USB mass storage connection. No need for special software or anything. An interface suitable for simple editing instead of just playlists would be great too - being able to chop out a chunk of a track or the like would be really nice. Though with such a huge amount of storage, it wouldn't be too hard to just leave it all on there.