> With game consoles gradually veering towards becoming "home media centers"
The best console-based "home media center" is a modded XBox.:) Thank you Microsoft.
Seriously, check out what's available for it. My friend has Evox (which is a Dashboard replacement), XBox Media Player, and Gentoo Linux. And a 250GB hard drive. There's not much that it's not useful for.:)
> Sony says it has sold about 2.5 million Connect-compatible devices.
Well, I won't argue with those statistics themselves. But I know that in my daily life I see 3-5 iPods every day, whereas I don't know anyone who has a Sony ATRAC player, and I have only seen about 2 people with a Sony ATRAC player in my life.
Sony has sold a lot of MiniDisc players, because they've been around for probably ten years. However, I'll wager that at least half if not more of them have long since either (A) broken (the reliability of Sony products in my experience gives them a 1 year life-span on average for portable players), (B) been discarded at the bottom of closets because of their lack of utility--expensive media, restrictive DRM even on your own music, lack of format support, etc. and/or (C) been replaced with iPods. It can't be denied that many of the early-adopter-music-lover types who adopted MD in the 90s are carrying iPods now.
So if we're discussing how many players are in the public's hands, and by this I mean the ones they actually use on a regular basis, I'd still consider 4:1 to be a fair estimate. And it's increasing in iPod's favor every day.
But IBM did, just because they succeeded in selling their existing business customers on the concept of IBM being the "Standard For Business" in the PC market too. Once a few businesses signed on, it was all over for Apple in the business sector because you wanted to go with the standard. And that was the end of the PC wars.
So where's Sony's parallel advantage here? I think that analogy is a good thing to keep in mind in general, but very fallacious because Sony doesn't have a big captive audience that they can convince on a new standard.
For the record, MP3 is the Standard For Music, with all its faults (poor quality and no DRM from the label's POV) is the standard and will remain so for a while because of its ubiquity and freedom of use. The iPod has become the de-facto "Standard For MP3-Players" and it's not a personal thing--I'm just going by marketshare here.
I'd mod the above as Flamebait. *Any* time competition enters the market it's good for the industry.
And you disagree with me here why? I didn't say it was bad for the industry!! I'm criticizing SonyConnect because the Sony store and players are more restrictive than Apple. If you hate Apple, then fine. Don't buy an iPod or don't use iTMS. But do you think Sony is going to support OGG? Do you think they'll support AAC (DRM or no)? If you do you're dreaming. And if you hate Apple because of their "restrictions" you are going to hate Sony even more.
Sony makes Apple look like a bastion of free choice by comparison.
1. Sony's being one major label only gives other labels a disincentive to cooperate...and most artists fall into the "not on Sony" category. Sony has no majority of artists on its labels.
2. Yeah. Apple has no following in Japan at all. Give me a break! The Japanese can't keep their hands off sexy, stylish, hip little things. I predict it'll be even harder to get your hands on the iPod mini in Japan (upon its release there) as it has been in the US. Name a Sony product that's come out in the last three years that's got anywhere near the amount of buzz as the 3rd-gen. iPod and iPod mini.
I think the words of Seinfeld's Jackie Chiles will soon apply for Sony here: "This is the most public yet of my many humiliations."
...will work only with Sony Memory Stick-compatible devices......1-gigabyte Hi-MD disc players... From the sonyconnect site: "What devices are compatible with Connect? Any ATRAC-compatible device from Sony works with Connect."
Great! This will be a huge hit with the people who thought Apple's music store doesn't support enough players.
I wonder how many iPods there are out there in the public's hands for every Sony Memory-Stick and "Hi-MD" device. I'm guessing at least 4, and that's being generous to Sony.
And 1GB. Wow. That's sooo much music. Has anyone at Sony ever even heard of hard drives? C'mon, I was expecting some sort of competition here, but this is more like a joke.
Anyone know what restrictions the DRM imposes? They conveniently make no mention of it on their 5-page website (overview, features, download, customer support, independent label signup). I'd say that's pretty relevant information to put out front if you want to convince people to download your software.
Parent is absolutely right. What the whiny slashdot crowd who keeps screaming "Greed!" is forgetting is: What happens to the excess money if they just take whatever amount Fox is willing to give? Let's do an example: Let's say Fox makes $1 million in profit per actor per episode, after paying everyone but the actors. If Fox pays the actors $125,000 a piece, that is $875,000 per actor in pure profit into the News Corp's wallet. That's several million dollars per episode to finance Fox News Channel propaganda and generally make a few very rich men even richer and more powerful.
I think, if the Simpsons actors feel they are making less than their fair market value from Fox they are morally obligated to negotiate a higher salary and perhaps donate the balance to a good cause, or even just do anything with the money that's not evil. That would be better than the alternative of letting News Corp keep it.
Being willing to let others profit off you and only get a tiny portion of compensation is not a virtue, it's stupidity and it only leads to exploitation by the most corrupt element of society (such as News Corp).
Right, but when most CDs don't have any CD-text, the player support becomes kinda moot.
I do like the idea of CD-text. It seems much more practical than CDDB for most purposes, assuming the record labels used it--why should you have to hash the CD tracks and search an online database when you could just as easily deliver the data locally? It sure would make ripping CDs easier for those poor souls who are stuck on dial-up (I know, it doesn't seem possible; but I talked to a guy today who had ripped bunches of CDs offline and was wondering why they are all called "Track 01," etc. I felt pretty bad for him.)
Oh, and congratulations on getting a new car!:) Those Toyota stereos are nice. They also support that FM-text (not the real name for it, I know), that displays the station's name, and messages and stuff. Another very cool but underutilized technology.
When I use iTunes 4 to burn a bunch of random tracks from my library onto a CD, and put the CD back in, the track names show up. I was assuming this was done via CD-text, although I guess it could be using some sort of local store of track names.
For some reason, CD-text never caught on outside of car stereos. I had a CD/MP3 Walkman (Sony) that had CD-Text and I was amused to notice that out of the 20 or so store-bought pop CD's I tried in it, only 2 had bothered to put CD-text on them. I think it might be that CDDB blew it out of the water on computers, and most consumer electronics are too cheap to have displays for it. I think you should first notice that not even the recording industry cares about CD-text, then you'll realize why Apple doesn't care either.
In other words, CD-text is like lossless compression. No one cares about it outside of a few people, all of whom post on Slashdot. In this case, that might be just you.;-)
Shit! I've been using AllofMP3 for a year now too. It has always seemed too good to be true, so I only tell people about it sparingly. My thinking is, the fewer Americans that know about it, the better.
Now with US media exposure the pressure will be on for the RIAA to bring them down. This sucks a lot.
I'm kind of confused about why you chose to (A) transcode into a different format and (B) waste twice as much space as necessary.
I followed the same route as you did; however, since the source was 128K AAC, I imported them back as 128K AAC's. No loss of quality was detected. The music sounds exactly as good as it did before, and takes up the same amount of space instead of double.
The reason you would choose MP3 over AAC, I guess, might be related to the OOOH! CHEAP!"-appeal of shoddy, WMA/MP3-only portable players. (For that, I can only say, suit yourself.) Presumably, then, you chose to use the much higher bitrate to avoid incurring even more degradation in sound quality due to encoding at 128K MP3. Am I on target?
Oh come on. Nobody cares about little CD's. Maybe one or two per year would try that. And don't be ridiculous. That kind of thing wouldn't require "replacing" the drive. It would require a simple unjamming and would not cause any damage to the mechanism.
> I would have assumed the [tray-]loads are more reliable....
Really? So, to you, a flimsy plastic thing that slides out of the side of the computer several times a day (and, on PC's, which can be triggered by bumping the button on the door itself), and which can easily snap clean off with any amount of force, ruining the drive, that seems more reliable to you than a slot into which one kid might someday insert a rare tiny CD, requiring a simple and labor-only repair? Interesting.
I'll never understand you, or my ex-gf. She liked her 86 too. personally, I just couldn't stand its menu structure. Stupid "More" key and stuff. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I hated that. I don't mind the 83's menus taking up the whole screen, it lets them have 8 meaningful menu items instead of having to abbreviate everything to 4 or 5 chars to fit on a soft key, and scroll with the "more" key all day since you can only fit 4 or 5 on the screen at a time. Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of soft keys, but the 86 just gets it wrong.
If you want a better calculator than the 83+, the 89 is the only way to go. If only I'd bought one of those, way back before I took Calculus, I might be at a good college right now. 3d showing-off aside, the 89 was worth its weight in gold in Calc, because they could do half the work for you. Bad for learning math, good for getting good grades so you can get into a good college so you can make more money. Real-world concerns here.
Yeah. I have no power in my closet and it has no easily-extension-cord-able path. Otherwise I would have put one there a while ago. Now that I have net in the living room, it's too late to bother since I'm moving out in a month.
>...which you can then re-import into iTunes, right-click on and say "convert to MP3"
...which would make someone an idiot for transcoding music (Hello shitty sound!), and a bigger one for not knowing that AAC is better at any given bitrate anyway.
Non-idiots will use this program to create unencrypted AACs which they will then leave in that format and play on the many media players that support AAC.
If you wanted a shitty-sounding MP3 why not just use Kazaa in the first place?
You sir, are the man. I have been planning a similar setup for quite some time now. Now all I have to do is find a quiet computer so it won't keep me up all night and I'll do all that!
Slashdot Mirror
> With game consoles gradually veering towards becoming "home media centers"
:)
:)
The best console-based "home media center" is a modded XBox.
Thank you Microsoft.
Seriously, check out what's available for it. My friend has Evox (which is a Dashboard replacement), XBox Media Player, and Gentoo Linux. And a 250GB hard drive. There's not much that it's not useful for.
> Sony says it has sold about 2.5 million Connect-compatible devices.
Well, I won't argue with those statistics themselves. But I know that in my daily life I see 3-5 iPods every day, whereas I don't know anyone who has a Sony ATRAC player, and I have only seen about 2 people with a Sony ATRAC player in my life.
Sony has sold a lot of MiniDisc players, because they've been around for probably ten years. However, I'll wager that at least half if not more of them have long since either (A) broken (the reliability of Sony products in my experience gives them a 1 year life-span on average for portable players), (B) been discarded at the bottom of closets because of their lack of utility--expensive media, restrictive DRM even on your own music, lack of format support, etc. and/or (C) been replaced with iPods. It can't be denied that many of the early-adopter-music-lover types who adopted MD in the 90s are carrying iPods now.
So if we're discussing how many players are in the public's hands, and by this I mean the ones they actually use on a regular basis, I'd still consider 4:1 to be a fair estimate. And it's increasing in iPod's favor every day.
But IBM did, just because they succeeded in selling their existing business customers on the concept of IBM being the "Standard For Business" in the PC market too. Once a few businesses signed on, it was all over for Apple in the business sector because you wanted to go with the standard. And that was the end of the PC wars.
So where's Sony's parallel advantage here? I think that analogy is a good thing to keep in mind in general, but very fallacious because Sony doesn't have a big captive audience that they can convince on a new standard.
For the record, MP3 is the Standard For Music, with all its faults (poor quality and no DRM from the label's POV) is the standard and will remain so for a while because of its ubiquity and freedom of use. The iPod has become the de-facto "Standard For MP3-Players" and it's not a personal thing--I'm just going by marketshare here.
I'd mod the above as Flamebait. *Any* time competition enters the market it's good for the industry.
And you disagree with me here why? I didn't say it was bad for the industry!!
I'm criticizing SonyConnect because the Sony store and players are more restrictive than Apple. If you hate Apple, then fine. Don't buy an iPod or don't use iTMS. But do you think Sony is going to support OGG? Do you think they'll support AAC (DRM or no)? If you do you're dreaming. And if you hate Apple because of their "restrictions" you are going to hate Sony even more.
Sony makes Apple look like a bastion of free choice by comparison.
it's small and it runs for 50 hours on a single AA battery. That and it's cheap -- I can [destroy] it and not worry!
What a coincidence!
That's the same reason I drive a Yugo!
1. Sony's being one major label only gives other labels a disincentive to cooperate...and most artists fall into the "not on Sony" category. Sony has no majority of artists on its labels.
2. Yeah. Apple has no following in Japan at all. Give me a break! The Japanese can't keep their hands off sexy, stylish, hip little things. I predict it'll be even harder to get your hands on the iPod mini in Japan (upon its release there) as it has been in the US. Name a Sony product that's come out in the last three years that's got anywhere near the amount of buzz as the 3rd-gen. iPod and iPod mini.
I think the words of Seinfeld's Jackie Chiles will soon apply for Sony here: "This is the most public yet of my many humiliations."
...will work only with Sony Memory Stick-compatible devices... ...1-gigabyte Hi-MD disc players...
From the sonyconnect site: "What devices are compatible with Connect?
Any ATRAC-compatible device from Sony works with Connect."
Great! This will be a huge hit with the people who thought Apple's music store doesn't support enough players.
I wonder how many iPods there are out there in the public's hands for every Sony Memory-Stick and "Hi-MD" device. I'm guessing at least 4, and that's being generous to Sony.
And 1GB. Wow. That's sooo much music. Has anyone at Sony ever even heard of hard drives? C'mon, I was expecting some sort of competition here, but this is more like a joke.
Anyone know what restrictions the DRM imposes? They conveniently make no mention of it on their 5-page website (overview, features, download, customer support, independent label signup). I'd say that's pretty relevant information to put out front if you want to convince people to download your software.
-Daniel Pritchard
Parent is absolutely right. What the whiny slashdot crowd who keeps screaming "Greed!" is forgetting is: What happens to the excess money if they just take whatever amount Fox is willing to give? Let's do an example:
Let's say Fox makes $1 million in profit per actor per episode, after paying everyone but the actors. If Fox pays the actors $125,000 a piece, that is $875,000 per actor in pure profit into the News Corp's wallet. That's several million dollars per episode to finance Fox News Channel propaganda and generally make a few very rich men even richer and more powerful.
I think, if the Simpsons actors feel they are making less than their fair market value from Fox they are morally obligated to negotiate a higher salary and perhaps donate the balance to a good cause, or even just do anything with the money that's not evil. That would be better than the alternative of letting News Corp keep it.
Being willing to let others profit off you and only get a tiny portion of compensation is not a virtue, it's stupidity and it only leads to exploitation by the most corrupt element of society (such as News Corp).
I don't know why you're modded Flamebait...but anyway:
> That's why you have an estate tax and is also why the Republicans are so keen to do away with it.
I thought they already did do away with it. But I could easily be wrong.
> Okay, am I the only one who thinks that AYBABTU is getting a little old (or who can't figure out what made it so damned funny in the first place).
Yes.
Oh, and all your base are belong to us.
For great justice.
I actually think we should spark a big AYB resurgence...It's been pretty much off the radar for about 4 years now.
Right, but when most CDs don't have any CD-text, the player support becomes kinda moot.
:)
I do like the idea of CD-text. It seems much more practical than CDDB for most purposes, assuming the record labels used it--why should you have to hash the CD tracks and search an online database when you could just as easily deliver the data locally? It sure would make ripping CDs easier for those poor souls who are stuck on dial-up (I know, it doesn't seem possible; but I talked to a guy today who had ripped bunches of CDs offline and was wondering why they are all called "Track 01," etc. I felt pretty bad for him.)
Oh, and congratulations on getting a new car!
Those Toyota stereos are nice. They also support that FM-text (not the real name for it, I know), that displays the station's name, and messages and stuff. Another very cool but underutilized technology.
Note:
when I said "lossless compression" I meant "Lossless audio compression with respect to music."
Yeah, a few car stereos do support CD-text.
;-)
When I use iTunes 4 to burn a bunch of random tracks from my library onto a CD, and put the CD back in, the track names show up. I was assuming this was done via CD-text, although I guess it could be using some sort of local store of track names.
For some reason, CD-text never caught on outside of car stereos. I had a CD/MP3 Walkman (Sony) that had CD-Text and I was amused to notice that out of the 20 or so store-bought pop CD's I tried in it, only 2 had bothered to put CD-text on them. I think it might be that CDDB blew it out of the water on computers, and most consumer electronics are too cheap to have displays for it. I think you should first notice that not even the recording industry cares about CD-text, then you'll realize why Apple doesn't care either.
In other words, CD-text is like lossless compression. No one cares about it outside of a few people, all of whom post on Slashdot. In this case, that might be just you.
> With Paypal's fees, that's a real annoyance.
No. If you pay AllofMP3 $5 with PayPal, they get $4.75 or so. They bear the PayPal fees, not you. Have you ever used PayPal?
I've given them my credit card number. There has never been a charge on it other than the one I first authorized.
I did use PayPal at first, but I realized they were at trustworthy and cut out the middleman after that.
Shit! I've been using AllofMP3 for a year now too. It has always seemed too good to be true, so I only tell people about it sparingly. My thinking is, the fewer Americans that know about it, the better.
Now with US media exposure the pressure will be on for the RIAA to bring them down. This sucks a lot.
> importing the CD-RW tracks as 256K CBR MP3s,
I'm kind of confused about why you chose to (A) transcode into a different format and (B) waste twice as much space as necessary.
I followed the same route as you did; however, since the source was 128K AAC, I imported them back as 128K AAC's. No loss of quality was detected. The music sounds exactly as good as it did before, and takes up the same amount of space instead of double.
The reason you would choose MP3 over AAC, I guess, might be related to the OOOH! CHEAP!"-appeal of shoddy, WMA/MP3-only portable players. (For that, I can only say, suit yourself.) Presumably, then, you chose to use the much higher bitrate to avoid incurring even more degradation in sound quality due to encoding at 128K MP3. Am I on target?
> "non-standard CD disk-size insertion."
Oh come on. Nobody cares about little CD's. Maybe one or two per year would try that. And don't be ridiculous. That kind of thing wouldn't require "replacing" the drive. It would require a simple unjamming and would not cause any damage to the mechanism.
> I would have assumed the [tray-]loads are more reliable....
Really? So, to you, a flimsy plastic thing that slides out of the side of the computer several times a day (and, on PC's, which can be triggered by bumping the button on the door itself), and which can easily snap clean off with any amount of force, ruining the drive, that seems more reliable to you than a slot into which one kid might someday insert a rare tiny CD, requiring a simple and labor-only repair? Interesting.
> I mean, what major has changed in... PE...that requires buying expensive books all the time.
Yeah, I remember all those revised editions of my PE book back in school.
Chapter 7, how to play volleyball without looking like an idiot.
I'll never understand you, or my ex-gf. She liked her 86 too. personally, I just couldn't stand its menu structure. Stupid "More" key and stuff. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I hated that. I don't mind the 83's menus taking up the whole screen, it lets them have 8 meaningful menu items instead of having to abbreviate everything to 4 or 5 chars to fit on a soft key, and scroll with the "more" key all day since you can only fit 4 or 5 on the screen at a time. Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of soft keys, but the 86 just gets it wrong.
If you want a better calculator than the 83+, the 89 is the only way to go. If only I'd bought one of those, way back before I took Calculus, I might be at a good college right now. 3d showing-off aside, the 89 was worth its weight in gold in Calc, because they could do half the work for you. Bad for learning math, good for getting good grades so you can get into a good college so you can make more money. Real-world concerns here.
-Daniel
I thought he meant that the TI-84+ was this "bar of soap" design while the past case design (83+/89/etc) was superior.
Yeah. I have no power in my closet and it has no easily-extension-cord-able path. Otherwise I would have put one there a while ago. Now that I have net in the living room, it's too late to bother since I'm moving out in a month.
Non-idiots will use this program to create unencrypted AACs which they will then leave in that format and play on the many media players that support AAC.
If you wanted a shitty-sounding MP3 why not just use Kazaa in the first place?
You sir, are the man. I have been planning a similar setup for quite some time now. Now all I have to do is find a quiet computer so it won't keep me up all night and I'll do all that!