Battery? You do it on a big scale, using the erratic power to pump water up a mountain, then let it down again to turn turbines when you want it back as electricity.
This works amazingly well... they built one in the UK in the 80s to deal with demand peaks - it uses spare grid capacity at low load times (eg from nukes) to pump the water up and can generate something like 1.3GW within 18 seconds when required. No reason why the same theory couldn't be used with wind, tidal or solar power to help fill in the gaps.
A single 1.8" hard disk - admittedly, a rare engineering sample at the time, for the development of the Rio Karma - arrived in a wood-bottomed box 3 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, complete with rope handles and one of those fork-lift compatible pallet-style bases. All the way from Japan to the UK.
Yes, you can. Not when it's transferring, but no problem with it being connected (eg, in the amazing glowing dock that can be set to pulse the blue cup in time with the music....)
Download rio music manager 1.90 from www.rioaudio.com - and delete all your old drivers (ideally, the registry keys too). RMM 1.90 does work with 2k/XP and is rather a lot more stable than the old software, as this stuff was written from scratch for the S-series players - but we also added support for legacy players though it doesn't get shouted about much. It'll do WMA transfers no problem too.
No reason not to provide source, etc? Licensing agreements and a $5k toolchain are probably enough of a disincentive for source release for the old Rio players.
The 600 came from the US development office, which is no more. The UK office (ex-empeg) now does all the rio stuff; there was also a lot of turmoil surrounding sonicblue going away, so these two combine into the old stuff being slightly more orphaned than might otherwise be the case - but try getting support for a (say) 2 year old parallel port scanner; same deal...
There are plenty of licensed frequencies for things like that - 458MHz for starters (if my memory serves) - just they're not in the FM band. UK X10 RF controllers (eg, from www.letsautomate.co.uk) use 458MHz.
Come to think of it, I don't think garage door openers in the states are in the FM band either.
The US is more the exception than the rule; many countries ban transmission in the FM band - it's just the US has a get-out for very low power transmitters.
Not actually quite true; in Europe, our TVs generally don't support component - they support RGB instead. Plenty of DVD players support RGB out on the standard feature list, not in a hidden menu (eg low end Toshibas do it).
The SCART single-plug interconnect we use supports composite, S-video and RGB, though some people run YCrCb through the R/G/B lines (like me, to my plasma which *does* support component).
USB2.0 or Firewire both have plenty enough bandwidth to saturate the drive. Cornice drives manage well excess of 3MBytes/sec in my experience (I work for Rio), which is faster than I've ever seen from my 1GB microdrive plugged into a PCMCIA-CF adaptor.
Remember USB2.0/Firewire can support up to in excess of 30MBytes/sec. This is faster than a CF interface can manage - CF doesn't have DMA capability.
Hugo
Re:Come back when you actually have a product...
on
Neuros Review
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· Score: 1
Hey, come round to my desk and play with the vapourware.
Yeah, it's not on the shelves yet; consumer electronics product cycles are planned around getting stuff into the stores for the holiday season (ie, in the stores from August).
It will be there. You can then try the vapourware comments again if it makes you feel better.
Rio with OGG and 100Mbit ethernet...
on
Neuros Review
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
On the other hand, the Rio Pearl (though it's not shipping yet) does OGG, MP3, WMA, FLAC and WAV. And crossfading. And parametric EQ. And the battery lasts much longer. And it's very small and light. And it has 100Mbit ethernet (as well as USB2.0) with a built in webserver and Java music management apps for linux users.
Uh-uh, Pearl will ship. Speaking as one of the guys working on the Pearl (hugof on the mp3.com boards), I can tell you that the Chapter 11 stuff (and subsequently being bought by D&M) hasn't even affected the schedule.
So, if you like your portables 100Mbit ethernet enabled, with built-in webservers and java management apps (plus USB2.0 and the usual PC stuff), plus funky OGG playing, crossfading, parametric EQ, etc etc then wait for the Pearl. It has a dock with real RCAs on it, too, alongside that oh-so-cute RJ45...
Bluetooth maxes out at 721kbps; ISTR this is the raw data rate, not the rate over the protocol.
Assuming you sustained a full 721kbps, you're looking at over 16 hours to fill the disk.
Hmmm.
Hugo
Re:Have you tried asking various companies?
on
Portable Ogg Players?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Erm, the Neo Jukebox will *never* be able to play Oggs. Why? Because it uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip. There is no audio path except out of this chip. It can never decode anything *but* MP3s.
One reason for OGG not being in portable players (eg, rio 600, nomad II, etc) is that OGG requires more workspace ram than these players have; anything based on the Cirrus 7209 or 7309 CPUs has 37.5k/48k of ram in total - megs of ROM space, obviously, but not enough ram to run OGG. As a comparison, the ARM MP3 decoder takes about 20k ram (inc input & output buffers), and WMA just takes a couple of K more.
However, the Nomad jukebox, iPod, Rio Riot, etc have external DRAM and can run OGG. I have seen a HipZip playing OGGs, but this was an internal build and never got released.
Simple, it extends the battery life by only needing to spin the disk up every 20 minutes. In the 10 hour battery life, it's only done 30 spinup cycles!
Note that the Fuji 1.8" 5GB PCMCIA drive costs $400.
Note that the iPod has a 1.8" 5GB hard drive (probably a Fuji, as Calluna who also made 1.8" drives went bust) plays music, has a display battery and firewire port, and also costs $400.
The apple one *does* use a PCMCIA hard drive - well, at least the insides of one. It's a 1.8" drive, not a 2.5" laptop drive (the whole unit is narrower than a 2.5" drive, which kinda gives it away....). These are not cheap at all.
Their claimed transfer rate (5G in 10mins) is over 8MBytes/sec. Damn impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Battery? You do it on a big scale, using the erratic power to pump water up a mountain, then let it down again to turn turbines when you want it back as electricity.
This works amazingly well... they built one in the UK in the 80s to deal with demand peaks - it uses spare grid capacity at low load times (eg from nukes) to pump the water up and can generate something like 1.3GW within 18 seconds when required. No reason why the same theory couldn't be used with wind, tidal or solar power to help fill in the gaps.
http://home.clara.net/darvill/altenerg/pumped.htm
A single 1.8" hard disk - admittedly, a rare engineering sample at the time, for the development of the Rio Karma - arrived in a wood-bottomed box 3 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, complete with rope handles and one of those fork-lift compatible pallet-style bases. All the way from Japan to the UK.
For a 1.8" hard disk. Mmmm.
Yes, you can. Not when it's transferring, but no problem with it being connected (eg, in the amazing glowing dock that can be set to pulse the blue cup in time with the music....)
Actually, it uses a later generation CPU than the iPod (though both have dual ARM7TDMI cores), with many enhancements.
:)
The iPod also runs multi-CPU... it just has less features
It's due to ship in the UK and some parts of Europe before Christmas this year. Keep an eye on amazon.co.uk.
:)
They weren't available instantly because of localisation and packaging issues. The software is developed here in Cambridge, UK
It will store any filetype, though you have to use the Rio Taxi application (or the Java version, served from the internal webserver).
There were bugs, yes, which were unfortunately hardware bugs that needed to be worked around. However, 1.25 is out now which fixes these.
It also fixes the gapless issues, the ethernet transfer issues, etc.
The Karma uses the same DAC/Headphone amp as the iPod (Wolfson Audio) hence has the same 30+30mW output and nice clean sound.
It can play WAVs, we just don't shout about it as you'd be silly not to use FLACs given they're identical quality but take up less hard disk space.
Download rio music manager 1.90 from www.rioaudio.com - and delete all your old drivers (ideally, the registry keys too). RMM 1.90 does work with 2k/XP and is rather a lot more stable than the old software, as this stuff was written from scratch for the S-series players - but we also added support for legacy players though it doesn't get shouted about much. It'll do WMA transfers no problem too.
No reason not to provide source, etc? Licensing agreements and a $5k toolchain are probably enough of a disincentive for source release for the old Rio players.
The 600 came from the US development office, which is no more. The UK office (ex-empeg) now does all the rio stuff; there was also a lot of turmoil surrounding sonicblue going away, so these two combine into the old stuff being slightly more orphaned than might otherwise be the case - but try getting support for a (say) 2 year old parallel port scanner; same deal...
There are plenty of licensed frequencies for things like that - 458MHz for starters (if my memory serves) - just they're not in the FM band. UK X10 RF controllers (eg, from www.letsautomate.co.uk) use 458MHz.
Come to think of it, I don't think garage door openers in the states are in the FM band either.
The US is more the exception than the rule; many countries ban transmission in the FM band - it's just the US has a get-out for very low power transmitters.
Not actually quite true; in Europe, our TVs generally don't support component - they support RGB instead. Plenty of DVD players support RGB out on the standard feature list, not in a hidden menu (eg low end Toshibas do it).
The SCART single-plug interconnect we use supports composite, S-video and RGB, though some people run YCrCb through the R/G/B lines (like me, to my plasma which *does* support component).
Erm, no.
USB2.0 or Firewire both have plenty enough bandwidth to saturate the drive. Cornice drives manage well excess of 3MBytes/sec in my experience (I work for Rio), which is faster than I've ever seen from my 1GB microdrive plugged into a PCMCIA-CF adaptor.
Remember USB2.0/Firewire can support up to in excess of 30MBytes/sec. This is faster than a CF interface can manage - CF doesn't have DMA capability.
Hugo
Hey, come round to my desk and play with the vapourware.
Yeah, it's not on the shelves yet; consumer electronics product cycles are planned around getting stuff into the stores for the holiday season (ie, in the stores from August).
It will be there. You can then try the vapourware comments again if it makes you feel better.
On the other hand, the Rio Pearl (though it's not shipping yet) does OGG, MP3, WMA, FLAC and WAV. And crossfading. And parametric EQ. And the battery lasts much longer. And it's very small and light. And it has 100Mbit ethernet (as well as USB2.0) with a built in webserver and Java music management apps for linux users.
What would you prefer?
See http://www.dapreview.com for more info.
Note: I'm biased. I'm working on it.
Uh-uh, Pearl will ship. Speaking as one of the guys working on the Pearl (hugof on the mp3.com boards), I can tell you that the Chapter 11 stuff (and subsequently being bought by D&M) hasn't even affected the schedule.
So, if you like your portables 100Mbit ethernet enabled, with built-in webservers and java management apps (plus USB2.0 and the usual PC stuff), plus funky OGG playing, crossfading, parametric EQ, etc etc then wait for the Pearl. It has a dock with real RCAs on it, too, alongside that oh-so-cute RJ45...
Don't be so sure :)
Where hardware permits & all that sort of thing...
Hugo
Bluetooth maxes out at 721kbps; ISTR this is the raw data rate, not the rate over the protocol.
Assuming you sustained a full 721kbps, you're looking at over 16 hours to fill the disk.
Hmmm.
Hugo
Erm, the Neo Jukebox will *never* be able to play Oggs. Why? Because it uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip. There is no audio path except out of this chip. It can never decode anything *but* MP3s.
One reason for OGG not being in portable players (eg, rio 600, nomad II, etc) is that OGG requires more workspace ram than these players have; anything based on the Cirrus 7209 or 7309 CPUs has 37.5k/48k of ram in total - megs of ROM space, obviously, but not enough ram to run OGG. As a comparison, the ARM MP3 decoder takes about 20k ram (inc input & output buffers), and WMA just takes a couple of K more.
However, the Nomad jukebox, iPod, Rio Riot, etc have external DRAM and can run OGG. I have seen a HipZip playing OGGs, but this was an internal build and never got released.
Hugo
Simple, it extends the battery life by only needing to spin the disk up every 20 minutes. In the 10 hour battery life, it's only done 30 spinup cycles!
Forgot the link!
Note that the Fuji 1.8" 5GB PCMCIA drive costs $400.
Note that the iPod has a 1.8" 5GB hard drive (probably a Fuji, as Calluna who also made 1.8" drives went bust) plays music, has a display battery and firewire port, and also costs $400.
Bargain!
The apple one *does* use a PCMCIA hard drive - well, at least the insides of one. It's a 1.8" drive, not a 2.5" laptop drive (the whole unit is narrower than a 2.5" drive, which kinda gives it away....). These are not cheap at all.
Their claimed transfer rate (5G in 10mins) is over 8MBytes/sec. Damn impressive.
Yeah, we know OGG libraries exist for ARM; I've seen an Iomega HipZip playing OGGs. They're not available without licensing at the moment though.
Hugo
empeg
The neo doesn't have anywhere near the playlist facilties (or searching by title, artist, genre, etc) that the empeg does.
The neo also doesn't have a built-in amp, and is too big to fit into the dash. It has 2 channel out only, no eq, etc.
There are many empeg owners who upgraded from Neos - and would never go back. The empeg is in a different class.
Don't believe me? Ask someone who has had experience of both.
Hugo