Neuros - Portable MP3 player, FM radio, Digital Recorder

KenMaier writes "Interesting new product in the portable MP3 player space -- this portable 'Neuros' from Digital Innovations comes with either 128MB or 20GB storage, built-in FM radio and a built-in digital recorder. Two interesting features -- you can record 30 seconds of music you hear and it will 'fingerprint' the song and tell you the title and artist. Also, a built-in wireless feature lets you beam music from one Neuros to another. Not really clear on the speed, but transferring 20 GB sounds like it might take a while. If anyone owns one of these care to post a review?"

Neuros?

So what's the the plural of that?

Re:Neuros?

box - boxen
neuros - neurosen

Trademark adjective

It's like moose The plural is Neuros.

Correct. Trademarks don't pluralize because they're adjectives. The plural of "Xerox copier" is "Xerox copiers", and the plural of "Neuros player" is "Neuros players".

Beautiful...

but I wish it could be built into my mobile phone...

Same for your UK mobile

What you want is Shazam [shazam.com] - assuming you're in the UK that is! :-)

You dial a number, play a bit of music down the phone and you get an SMS message back identifying the artist and title, pretty nifty. It costs about 50p though. They add the "tagged" tracks to a personalised list on their site where you can buy them online and other neat stuff.

Fingerprints

you can record 30 seconds of music you hear and it will 'fingerprint' the song and tell you the title and artist

It seems that they are either using freedb [freedb.org] or something similar. Here's a clip about what the freedb.org's database is:

What is CDDB? The original CDDB is a database to look up CD information using the internet. This is done by a client which calulates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client displays the artist, CD-title, tracklist and some additional infos.

Take a look at this DVD artist/title programmer [openchallenge.org] submitted to Openchallenge to see how else you can utilize freedb.org.

Re:Fingerprints

Similar in functionality, but the key here is that they claim they can do it for an arbitrary 30 second clip from radio or an unlabeled MP3 rather than a static arrangement of data on a CD.

This sounds much harder, but also more useful. I'd be very (pleasantly) surprised if it works well for anything other than Billboard hits and very popular oldies. Still, it could be nice.

Just for the record, the player can also record longer clips by pressing the record button twice.

Also, someone said something earlier about not knowing how long the wireless transfer would take. Well, from the site it seemed that it was transfer via FM radio at the speed you'd normally play it at. So, neat for wireless playing on a car audio system or the boombox at home/work, but not a major file-transfer tool. (You could still broadcast to another unit and record the FM broadcast on the other unit.)

The site said recording was to MP3, but didn't specify bit-rate. Anyone know? Other MP3 players that recorded have done so in such low rates that they would only be useful for recording speech.

Also, they have a survey about what other audio formats you'd like to see supported. It wouldn't hurt for all you Ogg Vorbis devotees to go skew the results of the poll. ;)

FM radio is a *transmitter*

That's possibly the coolest feature. It will broadcast the music on low-power FM, so that any FM radio in your house can pick it up.

Beats wires...

FM Broadcasting

That sounds like a serious gadget. Will instantly upgrade my home stereo, the alarm clock, and my 30 year old classic car radio to MP3 capability. Granted, it's not cristal clear quality, but for many applications it will do nicely.

Linux?

Looks nice! Can it run linux, it seems to have the required HW. I wounder if it has a bitmapped screen, or some custom. I'd love to run bash from it and have an IrDA keyboard...

It's a little pricey...

but all in all, a pretty nifty gadget for people who are into that sort of thing. The fidelity is decent for something its size, and while transfers take a while it's really neat to be able to hum a song you've got stuck in your head and have it tell you what it is (depending on your singing voice, I suppose).

I don't know how fast it is in beaming from one unit to another, but as the article mentions I wouldn't assume it's that fast -- just guessing, but maybe on the order of swapping one or two songs rather than several CDs within a reasonable amount of time? Much faster, and I imagine we'll be seeing the Napster debacle all over again...

Make sure to vote!

They have a survey with one question being "What music format would you like Neuros to support besides mp3?". One choice is Ogg Vorbis.

Radio, wall of sound

I like the feature where it can transmit music/whatever to any radio receiver - it scans the frequency range, picks a non-used frequency and starts transmitting radio. It seems to be too low-power to start your own radio station, but it should work within a normally sized home or dorm. Post a notice on the dorm's bulletin board and go DJing! A neat solution. Should work with your old car stereo too.

Shipping Date

Its not availiable until January 2003

Oh boy...

Phew... So many applications... Lets start a project to integrate them all and make a complete application. :-D

Stop it!

Could you please stop releasing new MP3 players every other day of the week.

Some people would like to be able to decide which one to buy, open Mozilla to order the one they chose and when /. opens, as the default page, not see Yet Another Cool MP3 player available.

usb

20gig version (or 128 with backpack) with USB connection = :(

Design and size...

The 128mb version is still a little too big, and the 20gb version is obscenely big... despite the size issues it actually appears to have been made by a professional designer with a moderate amount of taste. Something most of the millions of mp3 players don't have the fortune of having.

How in the name of the lord....

Can someone request a review for something that in not even on sale yet!!!!! [neurosaudio.com]

Until I can buy it, it is vaporware.

Fingerprinting

I wonder how this really works logically

Neuros records directly to MP3 format. Next time you synchronize with your PC, Neuros matches the "digital fingerprint" you've recorded to a proprietary online audio database and provides you with the title and artist of the song.

I mean it looks to me that these guys have some copy (or interface to it) of a database containing every existing record published by the music industry. Can this be true? Or has the MI a proprietary and already licensed fingerprinting algorithm/database?

Transfer speed not an issue

Not really clear on the speed, but transferring 20 GB sounds like it might take a while...

Why does this really matter? So it might take a while to transfer the music, but it'll take significantly longer to listen to it. Your average user will probably transer music as necessary -- no need to shoot the entire collection over in one shot.

System requirements

OS: Microsoft® Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP

This really annoys the h#!! out of me... Most mp3-player manufacturers do this. What is the problem with just making a player that acts as an USB hard drive? Why do we need Windows to transfer files through USB?

Re:System requirements

This really annoys the h#!! out of me... Most mp3-player manufacturers do this. What is the problem with just making a player that acts as an USB hard drive? Why do we need Windows to transfer files through USB?

Relax! Then go read this [neurosaudio.com]. The Neuros is based on (in their words) "an open platform". Unlike the iPod, their database and menu systems are open and based on XML (schemas coming in a few weeks apparently), so even though their synchro software is currently Windows only, making a Linux version should be a snap.

This is a pretty cool MP3 player. It looks good, has some nify features, and is open. Sounds like a serious contender to the iPod to me (at least for anybody semi-geeky).

Operating temperature

Otherwise this baby sounds like a cool gadget, but the operating temperature on the 20gb version is limited: Operating temperature: -4 to 125 degrees F It's way colder than -4 outside at the moment. Not really ideal for northern people.

fingerprinting!

Sonicblue introduced the fingerprinting functionality in its Rio series of players. It used Moodlogic database. That database had a good number of songs...But with this Neuros database, being proprietary, it has to be seen how much of use it can be, unless it has a large database it has. It is possible that they have a deal with some other fingerprinting companies.....

USB 1.1

Seems like any new device coming out should be either firewire or usb 2.0. 20GB over USB 1.1 just seems unacceptable.

gameboy??

hmm, and here i am thinking this stuff should have a nice design.

where did they get their product designers?? NINTENDO?

The thing looks like an old gameboy...

128mb version?

who's going to choose the 128mb version over the 20gb version? sounds like the former is pretty redundant.

The new frontier of spyware

Having a closed source appliance with wireless network built in takes the conecpt of spyware to a new dimension.

Do you have ANY control over what kind of information this device shares with its real masters (remember, you are not its master, merely its owner)?

The fingerprint feature comes in handy in this scenario. Now the **AA knows exactly what music you are stealing ;-)

Wait till the RIAA hears about this

you can record 30 seconds of music you hear

Oh my god! With that kind of technology, and 6 of these things, you can copy a whole SONG without paying! It'll have to be outlawed immediately!

But but but...

This weekend I bought a CD. It was copy-controlled and as such unplayable on my Linux-machine. It had some windows-player that was supposed to play the cd if I had put it in a Win-machine. But naturally it wouldn't let me create mp3's from it.

My question (that's actually related to this topic) is, "What should I use the portable mp3-player for?".
Since all record companies are doing their best to prevent me from transfering my legally purchased music to this player, what is it good for?
Won't the mp3-players be as useless as a betamax-player for the general public, as the copy-controlled cd's becomes more and more common?

That raises another interesting question. How long will Sony or any other large company that makes mp3-players stand for this? If people can't use the players then they won't buy it, which would hurt Sony's sales.

I'm sure someone can write some insightful comments about this.

Oh, and I returned the CD. I'm not buying broken products. And I made sure that the store understood that the failed sale was due to the record companies bad customer policy.

.haeger

I play Hattrick [hattrick.org]

pixo os?

It looks like this thing is running a pixo OS [pixo.com] - almost identical to the one the iPod uses.

The RIAA will love this!

Hmmm. Let me see...you can digitally record from any source, including FM radio.

You can then "beam" an mp3 to anyone else who has one of these cute little boxes.

Oh yeah! This is gonna be on the RIAA's list.

On the other hand, I'm still scratching my head that they haven't made a fuss about the Archos player/recorder.

Nice looking but...

It's a nice looking piece of equipment, well, until you put the 20GB attachment on it. Some things I noticed from the specifications though.

1st, as mentioned already, the device is USB1.1. Can you imagine synching your 20GB of music? Ooof.

2nd, you cannot transfer music from one neuros to another, but you can broadcast using FM, music from one Neuros to another. The receiving neuros then has the ability to record a 30 second snippet of that music. This isn't WiFi or Bluetooth, this is pure analog FM.

Beyond that, the built-in FM broadcaster is quite a convenient feature. As is the ability to create playlists right there on the device.

.sigless by choice

USB 1?

WTF?

I had an Archos Jukebox 20, which was very cool. Nice form factor, good controls, very friendly. It even hooked up to my RedHat 7 box with only a kernel recompile.

But transferring 20 Gigs over USB 1 was an all night affair.

This thing SERIOUSLY needs USB2 and/or Firewire.

Radically OPEN!

What is cool is that this seems to be an open platform so you can writes MODs to the player to get extra functionality out of the player. Now this is revolutionary stuff.

I love my iPod but adding the ability for users to write extra mods to provide more functions would be amazing. You can just imagine the websites springing up with 3rd party extras...

So full-marks to the designers. Using the an open XML database is a wicked idea and providing it is as easy to code to as they claim I can see this being a serious selling point!!

So close...

Okay, this thing is pretty cool. In fact in my mind it definitely gives the iPod a run for its money on the PC platform. Unfortunately, until the Neuros has USB 2.0 or Firewire, I would never buy it. Transfering 20 GB of songs to a player over USB 1.1 is masochism.

Back to the Drawing Board:

Where's the:

• Scroll Wheel
  
• Firewire / USB 2.0!!!!
  
• Small form factor (5 x 3 x 1.3 is ok, I guess)
  
• Quick charging time (8 hours??!?)
  

At this point, I wouldn't give up those features for an FM radio or wireless broadcasting. You can get both of these things at Radio Shack for really small and really cheap and attach the wireless broadcaster to your iPod easily enough.

The ability to record off the radio or line-in DOES sound pretty sweet though...

The RIAA will love it

With the wireless P2P song transferring facility, it'll have to be banned, so....get'em while they're hot!

Did anyone notice?

I noticed a feature that seems to help compensate for the lack of usb2.0 or firewire. the PC Library contains a listing of all MP3's on your comp, and if you select it to transfer, the next time you synch up your device, its automatically downloaded. This keeps you from having to dump all 5k songs at once, just keep the ones that you want. This sort of also eliminate the need for the 20gig model however, as you dont need to keep all your mp3's on the device, only transfer them over when wanted...

just my $.02

One step closer -

- to the holy grail of delayed digital audio recording and playback in one appliance unit. Really folks, how hard can it be to make something that turns itself on a at preset time, catches broadcasts in through a built-in antenna (or a jack from an outside source), records them to some media, even an analog casette tape, and then shuts itself off again? Its called a VCR when attached to a TV and has been around for over a decade! How hard can it be to make the radio version? And I'm sick of having to fuss with the computer in order to do this crap. There are some good programs out there that will let you do these things, but the inherent wekness is the computer itself. There are too many tasks and other things I want my computer to do and worry about instead. 50% of the time I do set the computer up, something happens and the program isn't recorded as I want. There has got to be an XML or Linux geek out there who can program something like this for a dedicated one-step applaince. Unfortunately, I'm not the geek.

My question is...

How many Euros does it cost the Neuros??
(it would be nice the answer was "NoEuros")

missed xmas?

Obviously if the player is not going to be available till after Jan 03, they were trying for this holiday season but missed, which is not a good sign especially in a lousy economy in a mp3 portable market that is already saturated with competitors. I looked at the company page [digitalinnovations.com], these guys are going from CD Cleaners to Mp3 portables? CD Cleaners are a dumb product, but I love the marketing strategy of these companies.

I hate how every time I go in to EB, they try to push a "game doctor" on me. Like I'm going to Pay $30 for a device to clean CD's when I can do it myself for little or no cost.

Neuros vs. Archos... FIGHT

I did'nt have the time to check ALL the replies to see if this has been pointed out yet... but, I would have to say that for $100 cheaper you can get an Archos Jukebox FM 20 and just buy a little portable FM transmitter from radio shack if you really need that functionality. The two are comparible in size and weight... Neuros is 5.3"x3.1"x1.3" 9.4oz and the Archos is 4.45"x3.11"x1.18" 10.23oz. They both have 10hr li-ion batteries and both have 20GB harddrives. They are both appealing to the eyes in different ways and both can recieve FM transmissions and record them. The Neuros can broadcast to FM, which the Archos cannot do... and the Archos can record from ANY analog or digital source which I dont think the Neuros can handle. Oh and the Archos uses USB2 as opposed to the Neuros which uses USB1.1, but it can "beam" info to another buddies Neuros.... Its hard to say really, depends on if you need the FM broadcasting ability... but like I said, for aprox. $50 at radio shack you can get a little transmitter for use with the Archos. I think its pretty clear which one I am going to buy ;p

Almost sounds good.

One of the main features of the iPod is that you can mount it like a regular disk and just drop whatever you want on it. On the 20GB model this is a major feature, because really, do you *need* 20GB of music in your pocket (~340 hours at 128k!)? But you might need 10GB and an offsite backup of some data, or something.

Looks like this doesn't do that. Also looks like they totally stole the UI of the iPod (okay, it's a good UI, now come up with another good one). It's also damn ugly.

And why do I want to take my high-quality digital MP3s and send them over the comparatively crappy-sounding FM band to listen to them? If they really wanted to make this a home stereo component, there would be a digital out. For the car, just use a tape adapter or a line-in.

Plus the whole Windows-only thing is silly. Why do I want "synchronization software," especially from a company I've never heard of? Keep it simple.

This thing *almost* sounds really good. Almost.

"HiSi" feature is useless

From the site (emphasis mine):
HiSi - Hear It! Save It!

A new song catches your ear on the radio. You love it, but you can't count on getting the song title and artist from the DJ. Rely instead on Neuros and its' HiSi feature. Record a 30 second sample of the mystery song to your Neuros by pressing the orange button. Neuros records directly to MP3 format. Next time you synchronize with your PC, Neuros matches the "digital fingerprint" you've recorded to a proprietary online audio database and provides you with the title and artist of the song. This information is sent directly to your Neuros and is also stored in your Neuros Synchronization Manager PC application.

A proprietary online database? How many such databases are there? Are they free? Will they alawys be free? Is what they're doing even legal or authorized by the RIAA?

This reminds me of a few years ago, when mp3 software started adding in lyric lookups through a variety of online lyrics databases. Shortly after it became a popular feature, the RIAA had all of those sites shut down, leaving that feature useless.

FM Transmitting Capability

You can get the FM transmitting capability without buying a whole new audio player. I know of one product here [myirock.com] that lets the user transmit any audio to a radio. You can use it with any thing that has a headphone jack.

Some Flaws...

This thing has great potential, but it has a couple flaws in my mind. The rechargeable battery inside is non-removeable, why? And if you buy the 20 gig model and later want to buy or use a 128MB attachment, you can't. For some reason, as read in the FAQ section, the 128MB model is compatible with the 20GB attachment, but the 20GB model is NOT compatible with the 128MB attachment. Why, again? These things should be completely swappable. Without having USB2.0 or Firewire, it will be a hassle to deal with the 20GB model. The recording feature is great, but you can get this on other models. I am intrigued by the 30 second music identification feature, but I don't know how much I would use it; while it is very appealing to geeks out there to play around with, it doesn't exactly strike me as a must-have feature. As said by another /.er, there are many alteratives to the FM radio transmission feature. Also, the unit is comparatively large for this type of player. I DO really like the idea of the interchangeability between the 128MB solid state model and the higher capacity hard drive. That is a must-have feature, that is, if the price difference between buying this and the other attachment is made advantageous to buying two separate players of each type. One will just have to see if it is convenient to exercize or run with the unit within its size parameters. I also am intrigued by but sceptical of the transfer feature between these players: is it a lossless digital transfer, or is the transfer made by the action of simply re-recording the FM broadcast of one of the players to the other, thereby TRANSCODING the recording within the mp3 format? If it is the latter, THAT would be ridiculous.

Sound Quality

I love how their FAQ explains the sound quality of their player's music: "What is the quality of the music on my Neuros? Hi Fidelity sound."

shock protection

I have always wondered with theres:

what will happen if it is dropped? how much shock protection does it have? how far can I drop it before it causes perm. damange? and if I kill a drive can I just go buy a new laptop drive? other than that I would love to own a HD based mp3 player

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Re:Recording

The Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 [archos.com]'s spec sheet [archos.com] says that it supports

"MP3 (selectable 30 to 160 Kbps) Real-Time Encoding"

I'm not too sure what you think is good quality but I don't think 160 is terrible

Re:Idea

The new Archon jukebox actually does all of this, though its screen seems to be only the size of the ones on digital cameras.