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Music Media

80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player 167

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-you're-talking dept.
atu.com.au">Venebulon writes "A new mp3 player will make its debut at Comdex, November 15. Similarly sized as a PalmPilot, and containing a 4.62Gb internal hard drive, this new device will be able to store 80+ hours of music, with anti-skip features. " I'm going to COMDEX, I guess I'm glad that I finally found something I want to see there (well, besides maybe the porn con next door or Barry White)
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80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player More

80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player

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  • Well you would have to consider the size constraints/price constraints. They are probably using laptop tech. drives. As far as I know, laptop drives havn't reached those massive sizes yet. If they have, they are still expensive and you lose your price optimization.
  • Where are the MP3 players with affordable removable storage? I have a Sony Minidisc player and have a hard time accepting the idea of portable MP3 players with either small, expensive flash RAM or large, permanent fixed disks. It just seems really impractical.

    Flash ram is expensive and has too low of a storage capacity. 80+ hours of fixed disk seems more appealing, although only if the player allows one to logically group tracks into directories (albums, collections, whatever you want to call them). I can't see having to sit and hold the Skip button for 10 minutes to get to another part of the disk.

    I mention the Minidisc player becuase it seems like the ideal type of hardware platform for an MP3 player -- the MO discs are tough, and could hold nearly 140 minutes of MP3 music, and area inexpensive compared to flash.

    Although Sony has a lot invested in Minidisc, I'm kind of surprised they haven't been pushing a combination Minidisc/MP3 portable. I could even see a VAIO/MD-MP3 combo pack, using USB to connect the two together.
  • That would solve the uploading problem. Better yet make it firewire.

    But that would be overkill. However, since this thing has a 4.6Gb drive, I won't discount anything being possible...
  • has archives of 3 yrs worth of personal and business emails in Eudora.

    Off Topic to the article, but why don't you just burn that onto a CD-R and keep your HD files smaller?
    I archive my Eudora Pro folder quarterly, and delete all non-essential emails so that I won't lose anything important.

    YMMV


    Pope
  • Spinning a hard drive takes a LOT more battery power than keeping a few megs of ram alive.
  • I don't see where the concern over content comes in. You can already buy devices to put inline of digital connections to defeat SCMS on all-digital copies, and current generation ATRAC is good enough that there's little generational loss at reasonable (10-20) analog generations.

    I think the whole "recording industry opposition" to MP3 is just BS about who gets to be the middleman and collect 20% on everything that passes their noses, anyway. I think that most people will march down to the store to buy CDs, anyway, and those that will hunt down fidelity-challenged MP3s are the same ones who would tape an LP in days past.
  • No. CD = 44.1kHz. DAT = 48 kHz.

    Now who's stupid?

  • I think that someone (a SlashDot author in particular) is going to find it nice to have a whole The Who concert playing without skips.

    More power to ya,
    Matthew
    _____________________________________
  • You're getting mixed up between kilobytes per second and kilobits per second.

    No, you're getting mixed up.

    The statement I made is that the drive is 4.6GB not 4.6 Gb like the title says. GB is gigabytes and Gb is gigabits. I'm not mixing them up, the poster is.
  • I'm the same way - I will listen to anything except for what I call the "Squeeze the cat" form of country. (Non-STC country is OK and can be cool.) And even if the batt needs charging every 10 hours - I'mn assuming this has an external power jack for a car hookup.
  • If every ten hours you need to charge up the batteries then you might as well download a different chunk of music while you're at it.

    The main problem with MP3 portables is that loading in a new selection of music is awkward (connect to a computer and wait for the files to transfer) compared to a CD/tape player (remove one, insert another). What I'd like to see is a player that could read MP3s from a CD with enough buffer memory that it could store a good chunk of the contents and only occasionally have to spin the disk.

    As for the battery life, 10 hours is plenty if the batteries are a standard off-the-shelf type, but not if they're sticking the purchaser with a proprietary design.
    /.

  • Try looking back in Slashdot... Immediately after WMA's release, it was cracked. I believe the program was called "unfuck.exe", and it had /. coverage.

  • But what if we brought these two technologies together???

    I propose I hybrid solution.

    Check out www.empeg.co.uk [empeg.co.uk].

  • There is one. For Cars. There are basicly two reasons. CDs are big. A drive for them is not likly to fit in your pocket. Secondly, a CD is even more affective by mecvhanical forces than a hard drive. Not that it will breake; there is no read head floating over the CD on air that can crash into it. But a very small chock, just like those you get from jogging, may still move the CD enough to bring the laser off-track. This is reasonable while working with non-compressed data; the gap in the sound will not be that long. But with compressed data, the size of the gap is also "decompressed", enlarged.

    Oh, and there may of course be other reasons that I've overlooked, too...
  • There are a few - you can buy them here in Denmark, so you should be able to buy them in the US too.

    Here are a few of those you can buy:

    http://www.mmvision.dk/default.asp?action=vis&va renr=4&gruppe=mp3

    and

    http://www.mm-vision.dk/mp3.asp?action=vis&varen r=15&gruppe=mp3

    The site is in danish, but there are a picture of them, and some of the text is also in english.

    AFAIK, they are for you regular stereo, and plays CD's with MP3-files.
    I've seen a player which could have 3 CD's and shuffle between them, and a player which had room for one CD and a normal harddrive.

    This one (according to the manual , which is found on the site too) plays both DVD, VCD, MP3 CD's, and has a lot more features:
    http://www.china-shinco.com/dvd/dvd.htm
  • I bet they snuck a patent past the USPTO about this "Jitter Elimination Technology." Just increase the cache size, and presto! No more jitters! The novel research these days amazes me.

    I hear Redmond might try to patent a Crash Proof Operating System that is touted to be available in our lifetime...
  • It's marketing BS. Any decent filesystem/MP3 player has buffering/caching capabilities, and in many cases (Winamp at least) it's adjustable. (Um, XMMS, get on the ball here! I can't listen to MP3s off of my DVD drive under Linux!)
  • Who wants to take my bet that this little piece of technology will be used more for backups and transfers than MP3s? Essentially its a little pocket HD with lots of storage. Using my vast knowledge of economics, I sure it'll be a bit too expensive for mp3 kiddies who can burn their own CDs in the first place.

    Someone is going to hack an IDE or SCSI controller for this baby and have a super-Jazz drive.

  • Sure, the cases can handle shock, but... RUNNING?! I can't imagine that the drive head wouldn't damage the platter with a good jolt, as it was running!!!

    Maybe i am just out of touch... miracles of modern technology and all...
  • Are there any decent players that would, say, read mp3's off a cd and play them like a regular cd player? This sounds better to me than a bulky hard drive (if it is) and expensive low size flash memory.
    ----------
  • Isn't that what they are worried about... the commoditization of the music industry? That's why SDMI is trying to make electronic music such a pain...

  • 80+ hours of music seems like a bit of overkill when the battery life is only 10 hours. I'd have thought 20 hours or so would be enough to have a good random shuffle play capability.

    If every ten hours you need to charge up the batteries then you might as well download a different chunk of music while you're at it.

  • The Danish copyright-holder association (part of the European association) recently announced that they will sue anyone doing any kind of copying from digital media to digital media. Period. As they are part of the European copyright-holder association, I would assume that the same rules applies all over Europe. They conduct a campaign with the headline "We'll sue you all the way into hell". (See http://www.koda.dk or http://musik.netch.dk/pirat/ if you read Danish). It does not matter whether the copying is loss-free or not, for personal use or not, or anything. No digital-to-digital copying, in any format, in any way, allowed number of copies=0. So with this thing it is legal for you to record ... nothing really ... in Europe (Denmark). How are the rules in the rest of the world? I have nothing than the MP3's released by artists for promotional purposes on my HDD as a result of the rules outlined above.
  • Eighty hours sounds good - far better than the 6x cd changer in your trunk under a pile of suitcases. When comes the first compact-cassette-sized player that can be inserted in your car stereo?

    (I herewith claim ownership of the idea of cc-sized mp3 players for automobile use...)

  • i've used a cassette adapter in my car for awhile now on my laptop, and i really didn't notice that much sound loss. of course i don't have air conditioning so anytime i got over 30mph i couldn't hear much of anything w/o turning it up.
  • Which reminds me about that tiny hard disk in the size of a coin - obviously its seposed to be installed in portable devices. How can THAT thing handle bumps and all?
  • IBM has a 25GB drive in the 2.5" form factor. It's twice as thick as the lower capacity drives (up to about 6GB).

    It probably does cost a bomb.

  • Re:Possibilty of "Hybrid" Devices? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, you're not being Stupid/Lame. Your solution obviously is the best. It's the managers/marketing departments/... being far too stupid to come up with such a simple solution. Well, perhaps (hopefully!) one of them reads /. so we might be able to buy your hybrid device soon.
  • Well I would like to be able to have my hole collection of music with me wherever I go/travel...

    It's not allways you can download new music to the player, but you can almost allways re-charge it...

    If you are gone for a month, then only having room for one CD on you player isn't quite enough imho.
  • One thing you have to keep in mind, though, is that's 75G's while it's powered off/down etc. A lot of the drives say that for warranty purposes, but I'm sure it's a lot less force to cause a head crash while running.
  • If this continues, there aren't going to be many executives left in the music industry...they're all going to be in church, having seen the signs of the end of the world.

    OK, a bit apocalpytic, but no more than some of the wild eyed predictions we hear about all the time. Everyone else is allowed to make insane and unrealistic proclamations. Why not one more.

    In all seriousness, a 4.6GB MP3 player is a significant technological advance. Consider that, at those sizes, the device literally needs to be able to allow file upload/download--the fact that people can and will use this as their primary storage not only for their music data but all of their portable content is beyond likely--it's probable.

    Issues such as resilience to shock are worrisome, but should this product function as advertised it will cause shockwaves throughout the industry, if for no other reason that it will utterly eliminate the coming marketing flood backing WMA(forget security, it's twice the music on the same player, they'll say.)

    The Compaq involvement is critical--there are serious fortunes to be made, even in the short term. They plan to sell 10,000 of them(their stock for the year) at $810 apiece($10 an hour * 81 hours). That's $8,100,000 revenue in three months--combine that with the amount of venture capital(and outright purchase offers from media corporations looking to suppress the technology, thus increasing the value of the company) that these guys could get their hands on and you have some serious money involved.

    To say this should be interesting is an understatement. Now, all I need is to convince the company I'm worthy of a pre-release version to play with. You know, because I just don't listen to enough music as is or am in front of a computer enough as it stands...

    Oh well. All else fails, I'm getting this $279 MP3CD player [mp3shopping.com] the moment it comes out.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • I dont agree. IM(H)O storage space IS the most important factor. It's not that big a deal to load the batteries every night if need be, just plug it in before you go to sleep. It IS a big deal to start downloading music - not just because it takes time but because you have to figure out which music you want to listen to. As soon as you have space enough to store the majority of the music you listen to (presently) you're rid of one major hassle...

    As for size; the headphones is still cumbersome enough for the size of the player not to matter that much, as long as it's smaller than a walkman.
  • I know this is *totally* off topic... but what the heck is "squeeze the cat" country?!?

    Sounds vaguely immoral.

    mindslip
  • Naah, it wasn't cracked, the program just intercepted the music stream after it'd been decoded.
  • If/when this puppy becomes widely available, I'll probably buy one and crank it right into my car.

    Presumably they'll sell a lighter adapter, so no battery worries, and I'll never have to dub my CDs to cassette again.

  • I don't know what's scarier, the fact that you can't spell "dollars" and don't know the distiction between "your" and "you're" (or even moderately proper sentence structure, for that matter), or the fact that you actually made it into some "college" yet can't manage to spell that either.

    Actualy, I can tell the diffrence between 'you're'(a contraction of you and are) and 'your'(possesive form of you). But I aperantly wasn't paying much attention to what I was writing. The same thing with the word "dollars". "Collage" is actualy a hard word to spell. I don't relize if you know this or not, but for some people spelling is an extremly difficult thing to do. As far as 'academic standards' goes, acording to my ACT score, I my score was in the top 7% of all entering freshman, so I'd guess you'd rather live in a contry where collage attendance is only 6% of what it is currently. (FYI, I got a 28).

    I'm currently attending Iowa State Univercty, and I was able to test out of the first C++ class without ever having taken a formal computer programing class in my life.

    I'm not aware if you know this or not, but most collages let you run your documents through a spellchecker (and let you correct grammar) before you turn in in. But of course, if you took that into consideration, you wouldn't ahve been able to be a Jackass AC, would you?

    btw, I normaly spellcheck/look over longer slashdot posts of mine, but not this one.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • No, what happens is that the player recognizes that the thing is fast forwarding and that charges the internal non removeable Lithium Ion batteries. Same thing for rewind. Heh. Cool.

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • By the way - a 27 on the ACT is nothing to be proud of

    I said that I got a 28 on the ACT, not a 27. I guess 'reading' is below you oh great mighty one.

    I suppose I mistakenly assumed that you were a sane person, as opposed to someone who would brazenly insult everyone in the Midwest as being idiots and taking the ACT, standardized test of heathens and barbarians, as well as all but the smartest 6% of the population (actually, much smaller, as I'm in the 93 percentile of all graduating seniors in 1999).

    But I guess I was wrong. I find it amazing that you would take this opinion. But then, statistically I'm likely to me much smarter then you, and I'm constantly amazed by the absolute idiocy of some people.

    ISU is accredited, and therefore a 'real' school. Its academic standards are extremely high, and it's ranked as one of the top 100 schools in the country. I noticed you didn't mention where you attended school.

    As I stated at the end of my post, I chose not to run it though a spell checker as I usually do with longer posts (and I knew that I was spelling college. I guess the humor was lost on you. Not surprising, however. )


    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Portable computing devices already exist. This device isn't aimed at that market. It is aimed at the Walkman market. By creating a specialized device, all kinds of shortcuts can be taken that improve performance for what the device is designed for while lowering cost and size. For some strange reason, people like tools that are designed to do one task extremely well, rather than several tasks passably. This goes triple for audio devices.

  • My CD-ROM can play audio and read data, right? Why can't my car's disc changer do the same?

    Because they're completely different.

    Audio CD players don't 'care' what the data is like data CD drives. They read in a little bit of control info, de-interleave the raw audio data and spit it out a DAC. When there's a bit error in an audio CD, the audio drive makes up the data by interpolating the known data points and coming up with a "good guess" of the missing data points.

    You can't do that with a data disc. There's much more precise 'control' over how the data is handled and as such, the audio CD doesn't have that capability because it adds cost to the control electronics.

    I recently acquired a drive out of a notebook which was checked at the airport. the faceplate's missing but otherwise it's a 6x toshiba CD-ROM. Perfect. I also have an external SCSI CD-ROM drive which is intended to be used for notebooks without drives but with PCMCIA ports. So I have a pair of drives which would work great for MP3 players. I figure I'd use my EZ-Kit Lite (Analog Devices' DSP eval board with enough balls to decode MPEG 1 layer 3 in realtime) and make a nice little player for my Jeep.

    However, that's after I am done playing with a little HUD I'm designing, changing out the incandescent bulbs for brake and signal with LEDs, etc, etc... oh yes, and finishing drywalling my upstairs :-) Ahhh the life of a married man. :-)
  • I read through all the comments before posting in hopes that someone else would have explained it..

    You don't anti-skip a HDD like you do a CD. It's a different beast, entirely. The heads on a coin-sized HDD don't move like a CD head does. All I can figure for "anti-skip" is a large playback buffer (maybe a couple meg) so it can maybe power down the HDD for a min or so to help conserve battery life.

    Also, those 50G and 75G shock ratings for HDDs are when it's POWERED DOWN, if I'm not mistaken... I wonder how long these drives will last with the heads constantly scraping the platters with every bump and nudge... I'd much rather see a CD I think.
  • Yep, I must throw in my support here. I have about 3100 songs in MP3 format at home (10 gig) and I like almost ALL of them. The music I listen to is very much affected by my mood. My tastes range from punk/ska/rock/alternative/rap/hip hop/classical/classic rock/techno. Most of my stuff is music you'd never hear on the radio, and as somebody else who replied here said, often the entire album is great!

    I have been thinking about picking up an Empeg Car player to throw all my stuff onto, but it's still way too expensive. This new 4 gig drive player may be just what I need. And my main use will be car playing, so I can use the cigarette lighter adapter.

    There are also some cool players that will use MP3-CDs that are supposed to be shown off at comdex. Check out http://www.pineusa.com/ [pineusa.com] and http://www.evhi.com/ [evhi.com].

  • Well, how do you excatly know that all who says that, wants a portable?

    Besides, computers can be pretty small today - I don't know what size yours are?

    Those players I mention, fits nicely in with your other stereo equipment.

    Furthermore, if it can be done in stationary players, then it can certainly also be made in portable players, and I bet you will be able to buy such a player soon...
  • Cool. What if the user presses FFWD during playback?
    • the sound gets louder
    • the tone gets higher
    • the player gets broken
    And what about Rewind? Then, the Autoreverse thing is still in the works. (Now I have to flip the player in order to hear the other 40+ hours...)

  • I'm sorry to all the MP3 zealots out there, but it seems like a waste of tech to me.

    4.6GB of storage in a portable the size of a Pilot?? And it's used as what? A Walkman?

    I say slap a color LCD and some decent battery life on that puppy!! Make it a computing device, not an audio playback device.

    Certainly, entertainment has driven technology more than any other single pursuit (short of DoD interests), so something like my PDA on 'roids is probably waiting in the wings, but still..

    Seems like misdirected effort to me. Then again, I'm not that much into MP3 just yet to see the full glory of two man-weeks of continuous music.
  • You're getting mixed up between kilobytes per second and kilobits per second.

    4.6 Gbytes in 80 hours works out at 16kbytes per sec. But at 8 bits per byte that's 128 kilobits, so top Q stuff. and no worries.

  • Re:Jogging with a hard drive (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    75G isn't that much when it comes to shock resistence. Some of the newer drives claims to be able to withstand 1000G (3.5" drives). However, it's surprising to realize that just dropping the drive a foot onto a desk or something will probably generate much more force than that.
  • netbsd has had USB support for a while now, and linux (at least on PPC) has working support as well.
  • I for one would love to get this. I wouldn't take it jogging or running or anything, I simply want something that I can listen to wherever I go, be it at home, work, in my bed, at my friends house, etc. I am assuming it will also have an AC adapter, which would probably be used in mine 75% of the time, same as my discman.

    And 4.7GB or whatever is plenty of space for me, I could throw my entire Metallica, KMFDM, NIN album collections on there and have 2.5GB free for other stuff :)

  • A memory buffer is solid state, and should beable to withstand any resonable jossle, basicaly anything that wouldn't crack the circut board
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • For once I agree. Combination of MD technology and MP3 compression scheme would have been an ideal solution, at least till flash memory becomes less expensive.

    New MD2 format holds I believe 750MB. Sony doesn't use it for music for the time being, but I bet they will. 750MB would be a killer.

    However Sony has their own agendas, I don't think they are very excited about MP3 in general. If we are going to see the MD/MP3 combo, most likely this won't be from Sony (but if Sony holds they patent, can anyone do it at all?)


  • From http://www.pjbox.com/ [pjbox.com]:

    (Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
    Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.

    10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.

  • >the fact that people can and will use this as their primary storage
    >not only for their music data but all of their portable content is
    >beyond likely--it's probable

    bingo. the only real reason i lug my laptop home with me each night is because it has archives of 3 yrs worth of personal and business emails in Eudora. this along with a /my_stuff folder (under 1gig) has everything I ever need. most of the files are completely platform independent to make sharing easy between mac/pc/*nix.

    give me a smaller drive that is fast enough and I would pay $1000 for it. oh yeah, how bout some freaking NT support?

    i've got this cool usb port and no way to use it...
  • It's already been done - I don't have a URL, but I heard that one was shown at some Korean trade show. Took MMC cards and even managed to work out things like fast forward, etc.

    Hugo
  • The Only reason you would encode at higher than 128/44 would be if you made the mp3s yourself from a wave editor or a mixing machine. Ripping from CDs should Always be 128/44 (anything higher is wasted bits). Music CDs themselves are recorded at about 120/44, btw.

    i did the math: encoding mp3s at 128/44 is about 1 Mb / 1 min, so therefore a 4.6 Gb HD (which is 4710.4 Mb) can store about 4710.4 minutes, which is 78.5 hrs. That's close enough to 80 hrs, isnt it? i mean, who's gonna notice? :-)
  • Laptop drives are built to really take some serious shocks. From IBM's specs for the Travelstar 4GN (approx same size)

    • Shock tolerance:
      • Operating: 150 G/2 ms

      • Non-Operating: 700 G/1 ms
    That's pretty impressive to me. I wouldn't go around hitting it with a bat, but I'll bet there are components in the player which are more fragile than the hard drive.

    I have a friend who built a prototype of a similar unit for a large company that shall remain nameless. He said the hard drive only had a duty cycle of 1-2% unless the user was actively shuffling songs, which is clearly a worst case scenario. Given a playlist of 5-6 songs deep and 32 MB of memory, I could see the duty cycle of the drive dropping to 0.1-0.5% in the best case...

    Doesn't take much battery to drive that.

  • Pine is coming out with a portable CD player that
    will also play CD-R and CD-RW that have MP3s on them. You can check their www site at http://www.pineusa.com/.

    They will have it at comdex also.

    Also, Raite makes the AV715. It's a standalone
    DVD player that also plays VCDs, music CDs
    and MP3s (on CD-R or CD-RW) and some other
    things too. Their www site is http://www.raite.com.tw/
  • Yes, it was cracked. Microsoft claimed that it unsampled, but, as usual they were lying. The program brute forced MS's exsport frendly encription.

    I belive the program can be found at dimention music
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Now, i know that some moron out there is gonna say, "Who would be so stupid as to move THAT much music at once?" It would probably be the same moron that spent all that time DOWNLOADING it from the internet. Some dumb rich kid with a fast internet connection.. there are PLENTY of them out there.

    Um, Cable modems only cost a few dolars more then modem connections, I'd hardly say that makes someone "rich", if they were rich, they would just have tons of CDs. Having shitloads of MP3s pretty much means that you're not rich.

    but, I guess you just felt the need to rationalize you're lack of bandwith. Btw, I'm in a colage dorm with ethernet (1,236k/sec is the fastest I've seen). I'm not rich
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Most hard drives are rated for something like shocks of over 50 G (decelleration of 50 G), which is quite a lot.

    Not as much as you'd think.. A laptop drive is rated higher than that BTW..

    I've seen hard drives destroyed with a relatively light shock ("thumping" them on the top), and I've seen drives survive after brutal punishment.. (being thrown to the ground and stomped on.. never get in a POed sysadmin's way..)

    The anti-skip crap sounds like fast cache memory like they have in portable CD players these days..


    ---
  • Ahem.
    I want to have all my music with me at all times.
    This provides a way for me to do that.

    If you want to use that same tech for a 'computing device' (although what exactly you mean by that I'm not sure, converting digital files into audio seems like a computing function to me) then feel free.

    I like specific devices (sometimes) that perform a function I want perfectly. This sounds like that.
  • Hahaha, they'd have to provide an example of a Crash Proof OS of course. We know it wouldn't be any of their products. Or maybe it might be... MS-DOS with no programs running.
    Spirilis
  • D'Music SM-200C [mp3shopping.com]. They're accepting pre-orders for it.

    This sounds like just the thing to get...but one question they left unanswered was what types of media it'll read. Pressed CDs and single-session CD-Rs are almost guaranteed to be readable, but what about multi-session CD-Rs and CD-RWs? Does someone have a link to the manufacturer's page or to some other page that would have this info?

  • Or am I just being Stupid/Lame??

    No, I don't think so. That sounds like the right approach, although I would prefer a CD-ROM over a hard disk.


    ---
  • Agreed Mini-Disc and MP3s are where it's at! Sony however, as previously mentioned, has a conflict of interest. Do they release such a device, or do they protect their musical property [read the bands]?

    This brings me to the question... SCREW them! How difficult is it for an EE person to reverse eng. the average minidisc player? Music encoded on those things is compressed anyway, so throw that out in favor of the traditional MPEG1 lyr III encoding. All minidiscs have optical ports on them... [keep, or] change that to firewire/usb and you are set. The media is just media... there isn't anything proprietary about it, is there?

    If people have been doing this with CDs... why not a new medium?

    Am I missing something? Please discuss.

  • D'Music SM-200C [mp3shopping.com]. They're accepting pre-orders for it.
  • Yes, it uses a laptop-style portable hard drive. Yes, it will be a bad idea to have the hard drive powered on while jogging. Yes, it will basically be a hard drive with a vestigal MP3 player attached.

    But this is the kind of product *I* would use. I could put all of my favorite music in 4 and a half gigs, I mostly listen to my music in non-bumpy situations, and just having the portable hard drive without having to deal with the expense of a full-blown laptop is useful.

    Time to drop hints to the family for Christmas... :)


  • Why do people use taylor polynomials? (Score:3)

    by wilkinsm ( 13507 ) on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @09:11AM (#1584664)
    Why encode at higher rates? (Score:)
    by Eeeeegon on 12:36 PM October 27th, 1999 EDT (#)
    (User Info)
    The Only reason you would encode at higher than 128/44 would be if you made the mp3s yourself from a wave editor or a mixing machine. Ripping from CDs should Always be 128/44 (anything higher is wasted bits). Music CDs themselves are recorded at about 120/44, btw.

    Huh? 44khz is the sampling rate of the recording, 44 thousand kiloherz per second, which is the same for most audio reproduction devices today, although you can go high if you are generating the music yourself, ie. Mod files.

    I think a mp3 encoding tutorial is in order:
    From what I understand, the "128" is the number of thosands of bits uses to hold the "waveform that occurs durning that moment in time. If you have just a single tone - that generated a simple sine wave, you only need a few of those bits, you could accurately reproduce the sound by just encoding "sin x" into the datastream. This is an oversimplifaction of how mp3 compression works, but fairly accurate.

    When you add overtones and more complex waveforms to music, at some point you run out of "bits" and the reproduction looses it's accuracy. String sections in orchratras are one of the worse offenders because they tend to generate very complex waveforms.

    So, the more bits you use, the more accurate your "reproduction" is ... just like a taylor polynomial. Forgive me if I miss understand the inner working of mpeg "lossy" compression, but that is how I was taught it worked.
  • The Only reason you would encode at higher than 128/44 would be if you made the mp3s yourself from a wave editor or a mixing machine. Ripping from CDs should Always be 128/44 (anything higher is wasted bits). Music CDs themselves are recorded at about 120/44, btw.

    This is completely false. For one thing, music CDs do not use the same data format as MP3s, so comparing bit rates is entirely misleading. For another, to be really technical, music CDs are recorded at 44100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample x 2 in stereo. That's approximately 1378kbits per second, not 120.

    Finally, anything higher than 128kbits for MP3s is certainly not wasted bits. The fidelity of the MP3 increases dramatically as you raise the bit rate. I can always clearly tell the difference between a 128kbit MP3 and the original source when listening closely. 256k or 320k MP3s are difficult to impossible to tell from their sources, but they do come at a price in greater file size.

    If you really want the best quality per byte, I highly recommend encoding with LAME [sulaco.org] with variable bit rate turned on. It's the best of both worlds: it only raises the bit rate when necessary to preserve the best audio quality, otherwise it uses a lower bit rate when it can without noticeable effects. I'm in the process of re-encoding my CD collection using this: the file sizes are typically only about 30% larger than 128k MP3s and the sound quality is far better, much closer to the original source.

  • One of the great potential benefits of MP3 and other audio compression schemes seems to be in education, particularly language instruction, but also history, English and social studies ... important speeches, readings of literature by the author, interviews with jounalists, statesmen, scientists ... the possibilities are astounding.

    Is anyone offering this sort of material (commerically or not) in MP3 format? It certainly would be nicer to fly to Europe listening to Essential Italian Phrases, Volume I on a Rio and a couple of smart media than with a walkman and 8 cassettes ...

    Also, they might not all be inspirational enough to package and sell at Barnes and Noble, but it would be great benefit if speeches and other audio artifacts in the public-domain were available in an archive, for researchers, students and the merely curious. The Nixon tapes! Inerviews with Abby Hoffman! Recordings of Thomas Edison! The War of the Worlds! (Still under copyright?)

    Them's my 2-bitskis

    timothy

  • From users' perspective this would be a great solution. However, there are some serious cost and manufacturing issues here. Not only do you have to pay for rather expensive volatile memory and all that comes with it, but you also have to pay for an increasing complex unit with moving parts. I'd expect such a unit to cost easily 2 to 3 times as much.

    I'd probably be willing buy such a unit if I were convinced it were well constructed, but i'm rare in that department. =)


  • Music doesn't consist of a major part of my life Bono Vox, bono@vox.org Since when Bono? "Pop" wasn't that bad! :)
  • Or you could take the strange step of bringing spare batteries with you. ;-)
  • Not overkill when you commute 100 miles a day like me :) I've been waiting for this piece of hardware :)
  • "Compact cassette sized"? What size is this?

    (I'm assuming you don't mean things like the empeg [empeg.com])

  • I guess they designers have taken a leaf out of the portable CD player book by adding memory to act as a buffer between the hard disk and the audio controller for their "jitter elimination" technology.

    It's hardly new or ground breaking really but it is nice to be able to have more music on the move.

    Where do I sign up?
  • This kinda puzzles me.. if your hard drive were to skip, I'd think you'd have other things to worry about than your music not being continuous, although the drive mechanism would probably find it's way back to the right cylinder. Most hard drives are rated for something like shocks of over 50 G (decelleration of 50 G), which is quite a lot. Not something you create while jogging, I'd think. However, dropping it would probably be a bad idea.

    Any one know more about what they mean with "Anti-skip features"?

    Cheers!
  • Like previous pos(t)ers, I want to know why there isn't a way to play mp3's off of a CD.
    Ok, The hard drive is awesome, and with a little tinkering (say, maybe, an DC power adapter and a stereo out to plug into my car's system) it would truly be the coolest device ever...

    My CD-ROM can play audio and read data, right?
    Why can't my car's disc changer do the same?

    Another point: How long will it take to d/l more than 4 GB(!) onto this little device? Overnight?
  • I bring my Palm IIIx to read e-mail, now I can do both!
  • I hate to see how that thing does on the subway, man. Those subways are very bumpy and I'm not sure how that MEMMORY BUFFER WILL Last. But I agree, a CD-Player thing that plays MP3 off CDs will be the best. Damnit, right now I wish the Visor's Springboard Module make a decent MP3 player with ~2 hours of music, since my commute is like 80 minutes that would do me and I can DL at both places. Mmm, Visor Deluxe is good, just don't get the iMac cases.
  • I don't have a lot of experience with laptop harddisks, but I remember I saw a 2.5" disk once that coud withstand 75G
    another solution for the problem is installing memory for cache (with MP3 you only need +/- 4Mb for a average song)

    ---

  • Any one know more about what they mean with "Anti-skip features"?

    Probably the ancient multimedia technique of having seperate threads for asynchronously reading and playing, with a RAM buffer in between.

    It's sort of the opposite of the old Calgon commercial, where they use a modern product but refer to it as an "Ancient Chinese Secret." These days you use an ancient "secret" and call it technology.


    ---
  • Not true, well at least, not according to IBM. According to the datasheet on their microdrive, the drive can withstand (with no hard error), 150G half sine wave shock pulse for 2ms, or 10G for 11ms during operation.

    Non operating shock ratings are 120G for 11ms or 1000G for 1ms. This is from the same datasheet that warns that the drive must be shipped only in approved containers, otherwise the packaging might not protect the drive against shock levels induced when the box is dropped :o) .

    I think all this proves is you have to take shock figures with a pinch of salt.

    URL for IBM's datasheet is:

    http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/micro /datasheet.htm

  • Now that I think about it;

    1) Cost of ownership above and beyond actual product (cd recorder) -- thus limiting their market to those with burners.

    2) 2 aa batteries on a normal cd player should give about 25 hours playing time. With an mp3 decoding dsp chip, that time would probably be cut down drastically (some others with no moving parts use one battery and probably have the same playing time).

    Therefore, it might be the right product for me, but its mass market appeal is far less than other like products.
    ----------
  • heck, at that point, have a fairly low power cd-rom drive (12x maybe... maybe slower) and read mp3's into the 30 megs. No need to uncompress at first.

    The only place this would suck is spin up time of the cd rom, but even at that, for quick access, it could spin up to 2x rather quickly and then when the player decided you were done messing with the track selection, spin up to 12x and fill the memory once again.

    But, this is obviously not a really good solution without a playlist or arrangement of songs.
  • A little wire comes out of the player and connects to the cig lighter, just as a wire comes out of the player to connect to a CD player.

    Any power conditioning should be done at the plug for the cig lighter so as to reduce bulk on the player itself.
  • So I guess every HD already has anti-skipping technology built in? I mean, I can imagine the arm being nudged over during a write operation... that'd be pretty icky. I'm just wondering why they mention this as a "cool feature" when it seems to me that most hard drives already have this capability built in. Granted, there are gonna be hard drives that are more resilient, but why do they mention it like they invented it or something?

    Just martketing; just something prospective (and current - when they ship) owners can roll off their tongue to their gawking friends. :)

    So why is it that CD's are so much more jitter sensitive than HD's? Feeding a CD player 50 G would probably kill it for good. A lot more loose components, I suppose.

    Cheers!
  • MP3CD Player
    Battery : 4 x AA (Rechargeable or Alkaline) (8 hrs with Alkaline)

    Ouch, I wonder what play time they get with that. Looks bulky too. Oh well; not like i could ever fit my shockwave cd player in my pocket anyway.

    ----------
  • that's what I mean. On the damned TTC subways [Toronto] espically around the downtown turns, my 40 Second Virtual Shock CD Player sometimes dies
  • USB and Firewire are nice and all with one exception: their both very new technologies that not a lot of people have right now. USB only started gaining popularity with the iMac, and that was released over a year ago. This might be nothing more than just a rant about my lack of tech, but I think I'm gonna wait for the Pine MP3/CD player, because I won't have to buy another card (my slots are full up anyways).

  • (and NASA select).

    Space porn? Or is this a different NASA acronym? If so, do I want to know what it stands for? :)

  • This *is* a hybrid system. (Score:3)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @07:04AM (#1584694)
    From http://www.pjbox.com/ [pjbox.com]:

    (Sic) Low Power Consumption due to manage 10MB MP3 buffer by using DRAM and Long Battery lasting at least 6-8 hours
    Upon this reason HDD has no need to operate continuously. So it can save power consumption.

    10MB instead of 30, but that's ~10 minutes worth anyway. The drive will spend the vast majority of the time powered down.

  • > ... great potential benefits of MP3 ... in education, particularly language instruction ... the possibilities are astounding.

    Yeah, that's what they said about TV.

  • That depends on how you build the 'head'. Cheaper adapters simply use a normal tape head. As both of them are convex, the induction is not quite ideal: )(
    Better systems use a head that snug fits what's in the drive, like (( rather than )(.
    Anyone out there with a Rio player and a cassette adaptor volunteering to try that?

  • This seems like a step backwards (or at least in the wrong direction) to me. The reasons I like the idea of a solid state MP3 player are:

    extremely good shock resistance

    low power consumption

    small size

    Memory capacities will continue to grow, and the prices will (hopefully) continue to fall, at least for the next few years, so before long we'll be able to make players that can store, say, 5 hours of music easily.

    I'd also be interested to know how well those hard drives can stand up to the sort of abuse they might get in a small handheld device.

  • Possibilty of "Hybrid" Devices? (Score:5)

    by Dave500 ( 107484 ) on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @03:38AM (#1584706)
    To be honest I can't say that I am surprised. It is a sad fact, but memory (whatever the type) is simply still too expensive for mass storage, and will be for the forseeable future. I thought somebody might have tried one of those IBM Microdrives first though... I guess they were too expensive too. ;-)

    This leaves us with the usual compromise:-

    1. RAM Based units will have limited capacity, due to the inherent high price of RAM.
    2. Hard-Disk based solutions will have lower battery lives, due to the far higher power consumption of moving parts, as well as being suseptable to mechanical problems (Joggers wil know what I mean :) )

    But what if we brought these two technologies together???

    I propose I hybrid solution. Have a player with about 30Mb of RAM onboard. (Enough for approx 30mins of 160Kbs mp3). Have a small hard drive there as well (whatever GB you need...). When you start playing, the first 30Mb of you favourate album is read off the HDD and placed into RAM. Once that is done, the hard drive may safely be powered down, aka. Laptop style. Should you play all the music in RAM, or change your selection, the HDD is powered up again to read any new data required.
    This would allow an MP3 player to exist that extends battery life by running in "solid state mode" for most of the time, but still gives you a large total storage ability at reasonable cost.

    Or am I just being Stupid/Lame?? (First Post :( )
  • You are correct, except that mp3 was meant to be a fixed-bandwidth streaming format. Thus regardless of the sound playing there is fixed amount of bandwidth allocated to play it (128kb in this case). Playing sin(x) obviously doesn't require that much bandwidth - but it's still allocated 128kb, while more complex suffer when they exceed this rate. Some encoders will dynamically switch encoding rates depending on the complexity of the sound, which can save you a good bit of space.

    I think we are going to see a new generation of music encoders that can do several times better than mp3. There is much self-similarity that is not exploited. I have an album called Andy Warhul - Ah yes, Ah no. In this album andy plays back 2 audio clips one saying "ah yes" and one saying "ah no." He uses the same clips with no pitch change over and over thousands of times (it's quite boring - but somehow interesting). Compressing such a stream should result in a file 100K or less, yet it takes 30MB. This is an extreme example where self-similarity (fractals if you want to call it that) could be be used to compress music.

    Most music has very repetive patterns that can be exploited. Mp3 is designed for movies not music. There hasn't been much need for better music compression until recently because no one makes money off of it. Now that people are, I think we will see better algorithms replace mp3, and it's not MS's format.
  • I think the potential of both TV and MP3 can easily be buried in the noise ...

    There are a lot of educational materials that *are* available on television (by broadcast, cable, videocassette) -- science shows, lectures by college professors, instructional tapes for all kinds of things, history shows ... I don't have cable, but when I visit my father's place, I sometimes watch the history channel and the discovery channel.

    In this case, I think audio cassettes and instructional CDs (and before that, remember language-learning records?) are a closer parallel -- things like language-learning are well-suited to an audio medium.

    timothy
  • You can always encode your files at a higher bitrate so you can get better fidelity. I normal encode at 256kbs or 384kbs instead of the standard 128kbs, and it makes a big difference. I hate string sections that sound like they are underwater.

    When you encode at a higher rate, you file becomes twice or three times at big, making those large disk drives nice.

    I'm really getting annoyed at the WMA/SDMI format. You any of you know of away to change them digitally into an unsecure format besides filtering them through TotalRecorder [totalrecorder.com]?

  • more details... (Score:3)

    by mrzaph0d ( 25646 ) <zaph0dNO@SPAMcurztech.com> on Wednesday October 27, 1999 @03:51AM (#1584725) Homepage
    found more details here [yahoo.com] and here [pjbox.com]. It's rechargable, claims 6-8 hours of battery life. Also says there will be a car power adapter for it available...i know what I want for xmas...

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