The iPod never mounts at all unless you explicitly turn on disk mode. When you turn on disk mode, it mounts when you plug it in and unmounts when you hit the little eject button.
I don't have "disk mode" on.
When I plug in my shuffle, it mounts, the icon appears on my desktop. Then iTunes updates it and unmounts it and the icon goes away... but an "ls" of/Volumes shows it's still there. I can see the little "iPod Shuffle" icon pop in on my desktop and pop off again. I don't know what it does on Windows, but this is what it does on my Mac, every time I plug it in, and every time I modify the Shuffle's playlist through iTunes.
Don't tell me I'm imagining it, or that I don't use iTunes. Try it yourself, and watch what it actually does.
If you don't have a Mac, then I'm sorry for you in so many ways... even if this is a little annoying it's a lot better than what happened the first time I plugged my Shuffle into a Windows box. Norton Antivirus and iTunes got into a pissing match over who would "own" the iPod and ran CPU up to 100% until I told Norton not to scan USB drives for boot sector viruses. Much hilarity ensued.:)
Your logic is like saying, "The Ford Mustang is a clone of the Chevy Corvette" because both use gasoline fueled engines and have two doors and rear wheel drive.
If those were the only two vehicles on the market that had those features? I looked long and hard for a better version of the Gray Whale the first time my daughter broke the USB connector... and ended up soldering it back together. There really wasn't anything else like it on the market until the Shuffle came out.
This is more like a Chevy Tahoe and a Hummer 2. Same frame and powertrain, slightly different sheetmetal.
the low-end mp3 players suck. I've seen 'em up close, and witnessed the hassles friends have had with them.
That's why I spent so much time in 2003 looking for one that didn't suck. What I got was pretty damn good. If it sucks, then so does the shuffle... because other than three years worth of price drops in flash memory prices, this is virtually the same device. All that's missing is the ability to reshuffle the songs you randomly selected once you get to the end of your Autofilled playlist...
You idea wasn't the iPod shuffle, it was the iPod 32mb, with the 1 hour battery life (I guess if you only have four songs...), at thrice the physical size, all for the low-low price of $199.
The one I bought had 128MB, back when that was a lot of flash for the price. It was about 50% thicker than the shuffle, and a little longer and wider. And it cost me $69.00, not $99 or $199.
And where are you getting this "your idea" business from? I bought it for my daughter's birthday in 2003, and it had already been on the market long enough that it was showing up on discount sites back then. It's not "my idea", it's a real product, you can buy it right now if you follow the links (but I'd suggest buying a Shuffle instead... it's actually cheaper!).
But all this info was in the message you're responding to. Did you actually read the whole thing? Or was that too much work.
Apple uses a list of the songs rather than scanning for them, so you can't populate the folders by hand.
Have you tried?
I wouldn't be surprised either way. But if you can't, then that's a restriction Apple's laid down on the generic MP3 player the Shuffle's based on, because the original devices can do it.
Apple does not offer OEM versions of its own products.
Bell and Howell "Black Apple II"? HP iPod?
Apple's a big company. They do lots of stuff. They even do stuff they said they'd never do, like release a headless consumer Mac. Or a flash-based MP3 player.:)
What does the iTunes interface to the iPod shuffle give you that the file interface doesn't?
Well, it makes syncing the iPod shuffle take longer, because iTunes unmounts and remounts it twice during the process. It also means you have to remember to eject the shuffle before fiddling with its playlist, because it'll go through the whole resync dance every time you move a file around. And it lets you sort the iPod Shuffle's playlist in case you don't want to use the shuffle feature. To do that on the Magic Star device you had to delete all the files then copy them in again... the way the Shuffle works if you use Autofill to completely reload the shuffle's playlist every time...
The Shuffle is a nice device. The iTunes interface really needs tweaking.
If you say "The Shuffle is a clone to begin with" people expect to see some "prior art".
I've got your "Prior Art" right here:
Ipod Shuffle: 512MB-1GB flash disk, USB interface, recharge from USB, size of a pack of gum, hangs on a laynard, plays songs in sequence, randomize function, controls are volume up/down, next song, previous song, play, pause, power, shuffle, released 2005.
Gray Whale: 128MB-512MB flash disk, USB interface, recharge from USB, size of a pack of gum, hangs on a lanyard, plays songs in random sequence, controls are volume up/down, next song, previous song, play, pause, power, released 2002/2003.
Differences: shuffle mode (Gray Whale plays songs in whatever order it finds them... random but not re-randomizable), tight integration with iTunes (both work with iTunes, by the way), and the Shuffle's got iPod styling.
There really are no other devices out there that work this way, or there weren't until Apple made it "cool" to be simple. I looked really hard for something like the Gray Whale back in 2003, and I didn't find anything that wasn't either far more complex (and expensive) or that used AAA batteries instead of rechargables.
One more note: the Shuffle's controls are not based on the iPod's controls, they're the same controls as the Gray Whale moved around to look like the ones on the iPod. The unique iPod "click wheel" is only present as a stylistic reference.
Thankfully.
I think Apple made an excellent choice. I don't like the click wheel, and I'm glad they've copied this nice stripped-down design. After my daughter broke her Gray Whale (for good, finally) I gave her my iPod Mini and bought a Shuffle. It's a much nicer device than the full-on iPods.
and does not allow song uploads via USB MassStorage
Have you looked at the contents of your iPod Shuffle's flash drive? All the songs are there under a hidden directory, in numbered subdirectories. The software on the shuffle itself only seems to know about those files... it doesn't support Apple's HFS file system (you can format your shuffle with HFS but the MP3 software doesn't see anything on it), and iTunes loads it up through the USB mass storage interface.
I don't know how much Apple has done to keep you from being able to populate those numbered subdirectories by hand, but I would be really surprised if there wasn't an easy way to load it up from Linux or Winamp playlists the same way iTunes does.
When it's sitting in your pocket, the difference in form between two slightly differently shaped packs of chewing gum with the same controls in slightly different places is negligable. I've owned and used both, and there's very little to choose between them... stylistic differences at most.
If the iPod's the Hummer of the MP3 player world, the Gray Whale is the Chevy Tahoe inside the Shuffle's Hummer 2 lines.
Seriously, if you want an FM radio, then buy one. You may be pleasantly surprised... they are a good deal cheaper than iPods.
$0.99 at any "Dollar General".
The thing is, now you're carrying two devices around. Of course the FM radio's got a superbright LED flashlight and a decorative carabiner clip built in, so you're probably ahead of the game.
Did you see the Swis Army Knife flash memory card? No, I'm not kidding.
You might be surprised. The core of the Shuffle is a standard MP3 player chip that's used in a lot of East Asian designs:
The Shuffle Sylvester dismantled was based around an MP3 decoder chip from SigmaTel and a flash memory chip from Samsung--which means the device uses many fewer chips than hard-drive-based iPods, she wrote.
The MP3 decoder, mounted to one board, takes charge of a multitude of functions. Its handles music, including the playing of MP3, AAC and Audible format files. It harbors a USB 2.0 converter, SDRAM for buffering data and a headphone driver.
The chip is capable of handling Windows Media music file decoding and voice recording, and could send images to an LCD screen and work with an FM tuner, she wrote. Those features go unused in the Shuffle, though.
The shuffle is definitely not just a clone of this monstrosity. It's ugly, it's biggerm it's control's are not as elegant and unlike the Shuffle, it like will not work with iTunes.
It's ugly, yes.
But I've bought both of these devices. The controls on the "Gray Whale" are not that much different, and it works fine with iTunes... or I'm imagining my daughter using it that way almost three years before the Shuffle showed up, and once it's in your pocket (you're not dumb enough to wear your Shuffle on that "Steal Me Now" lanyard, are you?) the only difference in appearance is the color of the earphones.
There has been a lot of speculation that Apple never designed the Shuffle but bought it in from outside, guess we will find out if and when Apple sue over it.
Even if they implemented this one from scratch, it's still basically a redesign of the Magic Star device.
The only justification for lack of LCD is that you use iTunes to operate your iPod Shuffle.
I'm sure this will work just as well with iTunes as the Magc Star "Gray Whale" player that both this product and the iPod Shuffle are cloned from does. The only difference is that Finder or Windows Explorer was the UI for the "Gray Whale".
They probably make them in the factory next door to the clone factory they make the iPod Shuffle in.
When Steve Jobs got on stage in 2004 and poo-poohed flash music players, concentrating on the high end, I was livid. He was talking about flash music players as if the big bulky high-end were the only possible competition. I immediately went to Apple's site and sent in a suggestion that if they thought flash music players were $200 behemoths they ought to have a look at the music player I'd bought for my daughter back in late 2002 or early 2003. It cost me $70 and it had the minimum features imaginable... no screen, no way to select specific songs, you just plugged it in like a flash drive and copied MP3 files over... and it played them in whatever random order they landed in memory.
I had even figured out the way to use iTunes with this player to get the equivalent of what they later called their "Autofill" function using their Party Shuffle. Sure, it only held a couple CDs worth of songs, but you could reload them when you recharged the battery overnight... so who cared?
Apart from the "reshuffle" ability, and the memory size (after all, this was 3 years ago), it was functionally identical to what Apple released a year later as the iPod Shuffle. It was a little bigger than the shuffle, but not much, and even hung from a lanyard like the Shuffle does. Oh, Apple's definitely done their usual wonderful job of [re]design... but all in all the Shuffle is just a few tweaks applied to the Magic Star "Gray Whale" MP3 player:
The killer feature of the Shuffle, for me, is that the 512M Shuffle is cheaper than the 512M "Gray Whale"! This may be the first time in memory that an Apple product was less expensive than the third-party equivalent... but it's got a lot less of Apple in it than most people seem to think.
Tell me again why Apple doesn't put FM in the iPod?
I assume they don't think it would help sell more iPods. When they see demand, if they see demand, they'll spend a year making it cool and release it at the 11th hour.
The company you ought to be talking to is Griffin. They were going to do an FM tuner for the 'pod, but dropped it because Apple changed the way the iPod remote worked.
Why Griffin couldn't have given their tuner its own controls, I don't know.
If it won't run on your clamshell G3, you can bet Ryan Rempel will come up with a fix... after all, he just managed to get Jaguar running on Powermac 7x00s using the pre-G3 604e CPU cards.
People are asking, how is sueing CherryOS different than becoming the RIAA and sueing music downloaders?
Downloaders aren't breaking the law. People who make the music available for download when they don't have the rights to do so are breaking the law.
They should be sued to open up their source.
Well, uh, yeh, that's kind of a given. Of course once they do that they don't have a product to sell, unless they're very very clever... and they haven't shown signs of that so far.
Yeh, regardless of the merits of the case that's a horrible precedent. There's all kinds of stories that involve breaking the law, starting with reporters tagging along with protesters involved in civil disobedience.
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The iPod never mounts at all unless you explicitly turn on disk mode. When you turn on disk mode, it mounts when you plug it in and unmounts when you hit the little eject button.
/Volumes shows it's still there. I can see the little "iPod Shuffle" icon pop in on my desktop and pop off again. I don't know what it does on Windows, but this is what it does on my Mac, every time I plug it in, and every time I modify the Shuffle's playlist through iTunes.
:)
I don't have "disk mode" on.
When I plug in my shuffle, it mounts, the icon appears on my desktop. Then iTunes updates it and unmounts it and the icon goes away... but an "ls" of
Don't tell me I'm imagining it, or that I don't use iTunes. Try it yourself, and watch what it actually does.
If you don't have a Mac, then I'm sorry for you in so many ways... even if this is a little annoying it's a lot better than what happened the first time I plugged my Shuffle into a Windows box. Norton Antivirus and iTunes got into a pissing match over who would "own" the iPod and ran CPU up to 100% until I told Norton not to scan USB drives for boot sector viruses. Much hilarity ensued.
Your logic is like saying, "The Ford Mustang is a clone of the Chevy Corvette" because both use gasoline fueled engines and have two doors and rear wheel drive.
If those were the only two vehicles on the market that had those features? I looked long and hard for a better version of the Gray Whale the first time my daughter broke the USB connector... and ended up soldering it back together. There really wasn't anything else like it on the market until the Shuffle came out.
This is more like a Chevy Tahoe and a Hummer 2. Same frame and powertrain, slightly different sheetmetal.
the low-end mp3 players suck. I've seen 'em up close, and witnessed the hassles friends have had with them.
That's why I spent so much time in 2003 looking for one that didn't suck. What I got was pretty damn good. If it sucks, then so does the shuffle... because other than three years worth of price drops in flash memory prices, this is virtually the same device. All that's missing is the ability to reshuffle the songs you randomly selected once you get to the end of your Autofilled playlist...
You idea wasn't the iPod shuffle, it was the iPod 32mb, with the 1 hour battery life (I guess if you only have four songs...), at thrice the physical size, all for the low-low price of $199.
The one I bought had 128MB, back when that was a lot of flash for the price. It was about 50% thicker than the shuffle, and a little longer and wider. And it cost me $69.00, not $99 or $199.
And where are you getting this "your idea" business from? I bought it for my daughter's birthday in 2003, and it had already been on the market long enough that it was showing up on discount sites back then. It's not "my idea", it's a real product, you can buy it right now if you follow the links (but I'd suggest buying a Shuffle instead... it's actually cheaper!).
But all this info was in the message you're responding to. Did you actually read the whole thing? Or was that too much work.
Apple uses a list of the songs rather than scanning for them, so you can't populate the folders by hand.
Have you tried?
I wouldn't be surprised either way. But if you can't, then that's a restriction Apple's laid down on the generic MP3 player the Shuffle's based on, because the original devices can do it.
Apple does not offer OEM versions of its own products.
:)
Bell and Howell "Black Apple II"?
HP iPod?
Apple's a big company. They do lots of stuff. They even do stuff they said they'd never do, like release a headless consumer Mac. Or a flash-based MP3 player.
Hi, Leo!
What does the iTunes interface to the iPod shuffle give you that the file interface doesn't?
Well, it makes syncing the iPod shuffle take longer, because iTunes unmounts and remounts it twice during the process. It also means you have to remember to eject the shuffle before fiddling with its playlist, because it'll go through the whole resync dance every time you move a file around. And it lets you sort the iPod Shuffle's playlist in case you don't want to use the shuffle feature. To do that on the Magic Star device you had to delete all the files then copy them in again... the way the Shuffle works if you use Autofill to completely reload the shuffle's playlist every time...
The Shuffle is a nice device. The iTunes interface really needs tweaking.
If you say "The Shuffle is a clone to begin with" people expect to see some "prior art".
I've got your "Prior Art" right here:
Ipod Shuffle: 512MB-1GB flash disk, USB interface, recharge from USB, size of a pack of gum, hangs on a laynard, plays songs in sequence, randomize function, controls are volume up/down, next song, previous song, play, pause, power, shuffle, released 2005.
Gray Whale: 128MB-512MB flash disk, USB interface, recharge from USB, size of a pack of gum, hangs on a lanyard, plays songs in random sequence, controls are volume up/down, next song, previous song, play, pause, power, released 2002/2003.
Differences: shuffle mode (Gray Whale plays songs in whatever order it finds them... random but not re-randomizable), tight integration with iTunes (both work with iTunes, by the way), and the Shuffle's got iPod styling.
There really are no other devices out there that work this way, or there weren't until Apple made it "cool" to be simple. I looked really hard for something like the Gray Whale back in 2003, and I didn't find anything that wasn't either far more complex (and expensive) or that used AAA batteries instead of rechargables.
One more note: the Shuffle's controls are not based on the iPod's controls, they're the same controls as the Gray Whale moved around to look like the ones on the iPod. The unique iPod "click wheel" is only present as a stylistic reference.
Thankfully.
I think Apple made an excellent choice. I don't like the click wheel, and I'm glad they've copied this nice stripped-down design. After my daughter broke her Gray Whale (for good, finally) I gave her my iPod Mini and bought a Shuffle. It's a much nicer device than the full-on iPods.
and does not allow song uploads via USB MassStorage
Have you looked at the contents of your iPod Shuffle's flash drive? All the songs are there under a hidden directory, in numbered subdirectories. The software on the shuffle itself only seems to know about those files... it doesn't support Apple's HFS file system (you can format your shuffle with HFS but the MP3 software doesn't see anything on it), and iTunes loads it up through the USB mass storage interface.
I don't know how much Apple has done to keep you from being able to populate those numbered subdirectories by hand, but I would be really surprised if there wasn't an easy way to load it up from Linux or Winamp playlists the same way iTunes does.
When it's sitting in your pocket, the difference in form between two slightly differently shaped packs of chewing gum with the same controls in slightly different places is negligable. I've owned and used both, and there's very little to choose between them... stylistic differences at most.
If the iPod's the Hummer of the MP3 player world, the Gray Whale is the Chevy Tahoe inside the Shuffle's Hummer 2 lines.
Get a copy of Karel the Robot or some similar programmable robot package.
Seriously, if you want an FM radio, then buy one. You may be pleasantly surprised... they are a good deal cheaper than iPods.
$0.99 at any "Dollar General".
The thing is, now you're carrying two devices around. Of course the FM radio's got a superbright LED flashlight and a decorative carabiner clip built in, so you're probably ahead of the game.
Did you see the Swis Army Knife flash memory card? No, I'm not kidding.
You won't see Gray Whale parts in a Shuffle.
You might be surprised. The core of the Shuffle is a standard MP3 player chip that's used in a lot of East Asian designs:
The Shuffle Sylvester dismantled was based around an MP3 decoder chip from SigmaTel and a flash memory chip from Samsung--which means the device uses many fewer chips than hard-drive-based iPods, she wrote.
The MP3 decoder, mounted to one board, takes charge of a multitude of functions. Its handles music, including the playing of MP3, AAC and Audible format files. It harbors a USB 2.0 converter, SDRAM for buffering data and a headphone driver.
The chip is capable of handling Windows Media music file decoding and voice recording, and could send images to an LCD screen and work with an FM tuner, she wrote. Those features go unused in the Shuffle, though.
The shuffle is definitely not just a clone of this monstrosity. It's ugly, it's biggerm it's control's are not as elegant and unlike the Shuffle, it like will not work with iTunes.
It's ugly, yes.
But I've bought both of these devices. The controls on the "Gray Whale" are not that much different, and it works fine with iTunes... or I'm imagining my daughter using it that way almost three years before the Shuffle showed up, and once it's in your pocket (you're not dumb enough to wear your Shuffle on that "Steal Me Now" lanyard, are you?) the only difference in appearance is the color of the earphones.
can they undercut apple but a significant amount?
Probably not enough to make a difference.
The Shuffle is actually cheaper than the device it was based on.
What part of "functionally identical" is difficult to understand?
Someone posted a remark saying it couldn't use iTunes.
Any MP3 player that acts like a flash drive can use iTunes.
Are businesses REALLY interested in innovation or just being copycats?
You mean, like Apple? I wuv my Shuffle, but the Magic Star (before my daughter bent the USB connector one time too many) was just as good.
There has been a lot of speculation that Apple never designed the Shuffle but bought it in from outside, guess we will find out if and when Apple sue over it.
Even if they implemented this one from scratch, it's still basically a redesign of the Magic Star device.
They're going after the iPod Shuffle market, with nary a thought to even partially concealing their inspiration.
Right, at least Apple changed the appearance of the Magic Star "Gray Whale".
The only justification for lack of LCD is that you use iTunes to operate your iPod Shuffle.
I'm sure this will work just as well with iTunes as the Magc Star "Gray Whale" player that both this product and the iPod Shuffle are cloned from does. The only difference is that Finder or Windows Explorer was the UI for the "Gray Whale".
They probably make them in the factory next door to the clone factory they make the iPod Shuffle in.
r -m p3-player.aspt g/detail/-/B000 08AJSO/002-0805304-2818432?v=glance
When Steve Jobs got on stage in 2004 and poo-poohed flash music players, concentrating on the high end, I was livid. He was talking about flash music players as if the big bulky high-end were the only possible competition. I immediately went to Apple's site and sent in a suggestion that if they thought flash music players were $200 behemoths they ought to have a look at the music player I'd bought for my daughter back in late 2002 or early 2003. It cost me $70 and it had the minimum features imaginable... no screen, no way to select specific songs, you just plugged it in like a flash drive and copied MP3 files over... and it played them in whatever random order they landed in memory.
I had even figured out the way to use iTunes with this player to get the equivalent of what they later called their "Autofill" function using their Party Shuffle. Sure, it only held a couple CDs worth of songs, but you could reload them when you recharged the battery overnight... so who cared?
Apart from the "reshuffle" ability, and the memory size (after all, this was 3 years ago), it was functionally identical to what Apple released a year later as the iPod Shuffle. It was a little bigger than the shuffle, but not much, and even hung from a lanyard like the Shuffle does. Oh, Apple's definitely done their usual wonderful job of [re]design... but all in all the Shuffle is just a few tweaks applied to the Magic Star "Gray Whale" MP3 player:
http://pc-memory-upgrade.co.uk/memory/magic-sta
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
The killer feature of the Shuffle, for me, is that the 512M Shuffle is cheaper than the 512M "Gray Whale"! This may be the first time in memory that an Apple product was less expensive than the third-party equivalent... but it's got a lot less of Apple in it than most people seem to think.
Tell me again why Apple doesn't put FM in the iPod?
I assume they don't think it would help sell more iPods. When they see demand, if they see demand, they'll spend a year making it cool and release it at the 11th hour.
The company you ought to be talking to is Griffin. They were going to do an FM tuner for the 'pod, but dropped it because Apple changed the way the iPod remote worked.
Why Griffin couldn't have given their tuner its own controls, I don't know.
If it won't run on your clamshell G3, you can bet Ryan Rempel will come up with a fix... after all, he just managed to get Jaguar running on Powermac 7x00s using the pre-G3 604e CPU cards.
People are asking, how is sueing CherryOS different than becoming the RIAA and sueing music downloaders?
Downloaders aren't breaking the law. People who make the music available for download when they don't have the rights to do so are breaking the law.
They should be sued to open up their source.
Well, uh, yeh, that's kind of a given. Of course once they do that they don't have a product to sell, unless they're very very clever... and they haven't shown signs of that so far.
I wouldn't want a G5 in a laptop. You can permanently damage yourself running that hot a processor in your lap.
Seriously, though, I hope Apple goes with the Freescale dual-core G4 for mobile use before the G5.
Yeh, regardless of the merits of the case that's a horrible precedent. There's all kinds of stories that involve breaking the law, starting with reporters tagging along with protesters involved in civil disobedience.