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Music Media

Pine Introduces New Portable MP3 device 140

Posted by Roblimo from the perfect-limousine-accessory dept.
TheTomcat writes "Big deal. Another MP3 player, huh? Not quite. This story at news.com talks about a new MP3 device that plays MP3 CD's, audio CDs and comes with a built-in FM tuner. While it has no capabilities to store songs (like the Empeg or the Diamond Rio), this would be IDEAL for my car. Hook it up to a decent power supply, an amp, and voila, out goes my current CD deck. It even comes with 10 seconds of anti-skip for Construction season (aka Summer), a remote control, and a built-in EQ. I'm drooling. [scheduled release: November]"
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Pine Introduces New Portable MP3 device More

Pine Introduces New Portable MP3 device

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  • Re:mp3 sound loss (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The so called 'MP4' format is not actually a MPEG standard. MP4 was trademarked by some unknown company trying to get their compression known. Its not the 'next' version of the MPEG Audio Layer codecs. It really sucks too. =) I believe the official title for the newer mpeg audio codecs is AC3, however I have not really looked into it lately, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

  • will they use audio tracks ??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    they say the limit is 100 songs... that is the hardware limit of audio tracks a cd can have.. what if they force you to have all songs as that? 1. you will need special writer software (as most current check if audio data is a valid wave file) 2. you wont be able to use it anywhere else.. reading fats is a bit problematic.. which ones to support.. Joliett is the most popular one.. havent seen much of rockridge or any other ones.. where to get song info? the id3 tags.. or hwat? no tech data? maybe their solution to this is so 'innovative' that no one else though of it.. some cd players require for you to store cds in a third directory from room /[author]/[album]/01.mp3 they suck terrible... if I was to design one I would force users to write mp3_nfo.lst file, which would be a small text file with a list of all mp3s and their type (bitrate, size, lenght) their location on cd (for playback) as well as the id3 info... that would rule... but what would I do with my current 60 mp3 cd collection?

  • About time (What the Rio should have been) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, ever since I first heard about the Rio, this is what I've actually been waiting for.

    For the first time, I can have a portable music system that can carry enough tracks for me not to have to work out in advance exactly what I'll want to listen to.

    This isn't going to be popular with the Music Industry however - the backlash on this is going to make the Rio injuction look like a polite discussion amongst friends. Having already been threatened with tax on blank CDs, this might be the final straw and encourage government action.

    Still, I'll put it in my list of toys for Xmas...after all, I did buy the Rio just for sheer gimmick value!

    ~ Bruce
  • Fscking brilliant, the empeg is cool - but this thing is perfect. I've been holding out on getting a new car stereo for my Jag till someone produced one of these. The article writer doesn't rate this as too useful - moron. Which is easier, carrying a CD from the home to the car or lugging the whole stereo, connecting it through a cable and downloading etc etc. It's the most convenient option yet. Its awkward keeping more than 10 cds within reach in the car - which just isn't enough - unless you can get 5-10 cds on each cd. At $299 the price is right too, as long as sound quality is reasonable.

  • Please dont use Bladeenc (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Bladeenc faithfully reproduces all the bugs in the ISO reference encoder. These bugs really trash the sound quality. Blade sounds OK at 160+ but on a really good sound system you can still clearly hear the difference. Mpegenc at 160+ and Lame (3.2x betas) at 192+ sound MUCH better then blade at 256 on a really good system.

  • NO NO NO bladeenc. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mpgeenc (FhG) has passed EBU's tough tests at 224Kbit as perceptually lossless to highly trained listners. Recent copies of Lame usually meet (sometimes) exceede mpgenc at those high bitrates. If you have a good system and good taste, I'd suggest you use mpgenc @224Kbit or lame @256Kbit.
  • This thing sounds wonderful actually, especially since it has 600MB of removable (but not writable) storage. Sure beats a regular CD player because of its added functionality, and since it has no more moving parts than a diskman, it should be just as portable. Even though this has nowhere near the capabilities of the empeg(and almost none of the hack value :)) i think it will be a big success because of its price tag. At $300 almost any person who purchases audio equipment can afford one. Even me. The only real problem is that not enough people can burn their own cds yet, however, almost everybody knows someone who can do it for them.
  • but it can be helped. you may want to try a different encoder or higher bitrate mp3s. even then things aren't perfect, but you can get much much closer to the real thing. I'm sure if you ask people for advice you will just start a flame war, and it will just end up as a "my dick(encoder) is bigger(better) than yours" argument. do some of your own tests, because to the best of my knowledge there isn't a comprehensive benchmark for identifying the best encoder. my personal advice would be bladeenc at 256kbit/s, but i didn't even say that because i don't like flamewars
  • The linux port of Xing's mp3 encoder, I've found, is not only fast as hell, but produces the best-quality 160K MP3's I've heard.

    Agree? Disagree?

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • ...just imagine how many pennies you'll have to stack onto the cartridge mount. Your poor records will beg for mercy.

    Radio Shack sells a 110v adaptor, though.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • ...just imagine how many pennies you'll have to stack onto the cartridge mount. Your poor records will beg for mercy.

    (Actually, I've heard of people playing with their decks standing up vertically, using rubber bands to keep the needles firmly in the groove of the record.)

    Radio Shack sells a 110v adaptor, though.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Come on. $300 will buy you one of those Aiwa "Don't turn it up 'cause it'll distort" pieces of trash at Best Buy. $300 might just barely buy a *component* of a truly "decent" stereo system, but even then, some people might laugh at me for suggesting that.

    $300 is more than reasonable for this thing, IMO. (And, yes, it truly is *not* high-end stuff, but it's a nice toy nonetheless.)

    A lot of slashdot readers seem to be poor whiners, which seems odd when so many of them are in the IT/CS industry and should, by rights, be swimming in money.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Repeat after me.. READ before you post..

    He's asking about how they are stored on the CD, as in what file system to use, etc..

    It doesn't matter how their encoded, yoyo..
  • I was about to ask the same thing.. It's kinda scetchy, but since it does buffering, I'm guessing it must just be raw data..

  • When is the anti-skip car turntable going to be perfected?

    When they come out with a car power adaptor for the Technics 1200? =)

  • ... I just got the new Crutchfield catalog yesterday and on the cover was an in car DVD player. I'm not sure who the target audience is. The picture looked like an ordinary PC CD or DVD drive, there was no screen. If DVD-RAM prices drop maybe someone will built a DVD based MP3 player.
  • Sure you can get a cheap sound card for $20 by scraping the bottom of the barrel. Do you really think that's a good idea if you're building the system specifically to play music?

    I tried that once. I took the recommendation of some Slashdot poster on what sound card to buy for playing MP3s. Guess what, the music is filled with quiet static in the background even when playing wav's instead of MP3s.

    If you're going to build your own MP3 player plan on spending $100+ on a high end sound card or else plan on buying several different cheap sound cards until you get lucky and find one that's decent.

  • Cironian was asking whether the MP3 decoding circuitry would significantly increase the power drain. That is, he realizes that this thing has the same mechanical and optical parts as a CD player, plus the additional chips for the decoding, and he wondered whether this addition would cause the battery life to suffer relative to a CD player.

    Hrunting pointed out that, for reference, a Rio lasts longer on one battery than a CD player on two, from which we can conclude that its decoding parts take less than half the power of the CD player's mechanical and optical parts. Even less, really, since both also have the load of the actual output signal. Hence, with the addition of the decoder, the whole thing should take at most half again the power of the ordinary CD player, probably a lot less, reducing the battery life by at most a third, probably a lot less. So it was a perfectly good answer, if not fully explicit.

    My addition: common sense says that a microchip should draw far less power than either a motor+laser or the output signal (though I'm just guessing, since I don't have any numbers), so to answer the original question, I would expect the extra load to be dwarfed by the others -- practically lost in the noise. I don't think it would make much difference at all.

    ObDrool: I really want one of these, though I'm still pretty interested in one that would work with an IBM MicroDrive (340 MB, 1", same form factor as complact flash cards). The article on the RCA "Lyra" was the only one I saw that mentioned this possibility, but wouldn't it work with anything that accepts a compact flash card? Specifically, does anyone know if a Rio can take a MicroDrive? If not, why, and if so, why don't they advertise it?


    David Gould
  • Pine is a text only web browser??? Gee, and all of this time I have been using it as an e-mail client. Perhaps you were mistaken, and are actually referring to Lynx [browser.org]. ~Cyberphreak
  • Instead of buffering 10 measly seconds, buffer the whole song.

    Why not use MP3 compression on the sound buffer? You could use a low quality setting to fit a lot of sound into that "10 seconds' worth". I don't think that most listeners would notice if the sound quality dropped a little for just a few seconds.

    You could do this in two ways: encode things into low-quality MP3 on the fly and store the most recent minute or so in the buffer, or if you are playing MP3s to start with, use the buffer to hold raw MP3 data, which doesn't require any extra processing power.

    However, this doesn't match your suggestion of sucking in an entire song at once. You might be able to save quite a lot of power by buffering 60 seconds at a time, and when the buffer becomes nearly empty, spin up the CD again and read the next bit. But I don't know about how much power a CD drive uses relative to memory, how much it costs to spin it up, and so on. There must be a best compromise between reading from the CD all the time (requires lots of power to keep the motor turning) and slurping the entire CD (requires lots of power for 650MB of RAM!). But I don't know where the optimum point is.

  • People with those huge vans with televisions in them (example, Ford Conversion vans, some Mercury Navigators).
  • The system that I designed uses a standard AT motherboard, 2 Hard Drives, a Network card, and a cheap sound card. I have the motherboard/hard drives powered from an inverter, and the sound card is wired directly to my tape deck via tape adapter. (Yeah, it's a cheap way out but it works. It also provides easy switching between FM and Computer.)

    The network card, in conjunction with a 25' RJ-45 cable, is used for what else, but uploading more mp3's to the computer. (And downloading cracked distributed.net blocks. Try cracking encryption with Pine's player. :P)

    I don't need a display, or a full keyboard. My design uses a PS/2 Numeric keypad for input, and I know what song is playing by listening to it. (Hey, a radio doesn't have a display. Why should my mp3 player?)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Actually, I have a cheap OPTi sound card that I bought for about $10 used, and it works quite nicely.

    I'm no audio fanatic either. Slight noise doesn't bother me much. If it's annoying, it will, but if you can't hear it while the song is playing, I don't care. (My car has a factory system. I don't believe in buying speakers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I wouldn't do it.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • The Rio was a neat gizzmo, a cute little geek toy to further ones hip style statements...but it was an idea simply filling in a transition gap.

    Rio costs a shit load of cash to get a mere hour worth of music. It costs me $1.50 (at most) to get at least 10 hours on a cd, 50 hours if im burning my old time radio stuff. You do the math, its not all that hard.

    The one thing that has stopped us from having this is the litigious record companies and the fear they are spreading across the globe. Even Rio is bowing to the new "laws" set down by the recording industry, the next version will start in on stoping the play of certian files.

    Yes a solid state device has its places, having no moving parts makes it ideal for joggers and the like. The option is there, expensive and all. For most every other use though the CD is still the best cost media around.

  • This would be cool if you could use a CD-RW to play your MP3's from. Then I could just add and subtract my MP3s without having to burn a full CD every time I want to change my playlist. I can't tell from the specs, though, if this is possible.

    Also, I know the Rio has problems with 128 kbps MP3's, and you need to make them 96 kbps... does this have that same limitation?
  • >>You mean, like, reinventing empeg ?

    Yes, but for about half the price of empeg.

    LK
  • If you're really discerning, you won't be happy with MP3... It's whole kick is that it throws away data that falls into the area's where we (humans) shouldn't notice - Kind of like JPEG, MPEG, etc...

    You sacrafice a little sound quality for a much smaller file. If your priorities are for the best listening experience rather than the most available music, you'd be best to avoid MP3...

    But then if you care that much, you should probably shun CD's and go back to Vinyl... :)
  • TheTomcat hit the nail on the head when he suggested this device is better suited for a car than as a lug-around/portable player.

    The IBM microdrives seem like the next logical step for portable MP3 storage. This technology will lay the foundation for true second-generation players. These players will be as small as the Rio or Nomad, but hold 5 1/2 hours of music instead of 30 minutes. Connectivity will probably be via USB... maybe Firewire.

    Or maybe I should just wait around until we have a Holographic Memory Cube with 540 exobytes of storage. THEN I won't have anything to bitch about.

    Just for fun, figure out how many 4 minute songs you can store with a 540 exobytes. Can you guess?



    A: 1.29 x 10^15 songs at about 4 minutes each. But if you drop the encoding down to 96kbs you could probably squeeze on another thousand trillion tracks or so :-)
  • For the most part, I agree with you. But, I have found that by encoding all my mp3s at 256 kbits rather than the accepted 128 kbits, the sound quality is improved tremendously. They take up twice the disk space, but I think that the improvement in sound quality is worth the sacrifice.

  • Okay, so which filesystem will it (or other similar devices) require on MP3-CDs? No fun having all "SONG0023.MPG", IMHO. :-)

    Personally, I believe it'll be M$ Jolly-ett, though.

    P.S.: I know, I know, better use IDs than filenames.

    --
    f y cn rd ths y mst hv bn sng nx

  • I'm kicking myself in the ass right now for not patenting this. I guess that's what I get.

    --Hunter

  • I dunno if Audio CDs have a 100 track limit or not, but I can assure you that CD-ROM filesystems (e.g. ISO 9660) are certainly not limited to 100 files. How many files do you think are on a Redhat or Windoze CD? :-)

    Hmm, you brought up searching, that makes me wonder... If I have a MP3-CDROM with 103 songs on it, and I want to listen to song #95, I'm not going to want to press a button 94 times. Equipment like this is going to need a better user interface than what current Audio CD players have.


    ---
    Have a Sloppy day!

  • download the MP3's for free off someone's site. Don't bother encoding them, someone has done it for you already.

    One of my Linux boxes has a nice Samsung 32x CD-ROM drive that can rip audio files at 2-3 times playback speed. Encoding at 128 kbits with bladeenc takes longer, but all that means is that my RC5 keyrate drops. (I've got a K6-2 at 333 MHz and a Celeron at 400 MHz.)

    On the other hand, my connection to the Internet at home is a 14.4 kbps modem. But that's not important, because the modem is not the bottleneck during downloads -- my ISP's network is.

    You do the math.

    Until broadband Internet access becomes the norm, ripping from audio CD is going to be much more feasible for me.

  • The article says that this device has a 10-second anti-shock buffer. Hopefully, that is 10 seconds worth of data, not 10 seconds of audio. Assuming 128kbps (about the best you'll be able to hear through headphones), a buffer capable of holding 10 seconds of CD audio can really hold about 2 minutes of audio if it's compressed as an MP3.

    To consider further, if the buffer can hold that much, the CD only needs to read 10 seconds' worth of data every 2 minutes. Assuming the CD drives in a portable like that run at about 2x (otherwise, how would a conventional CD player fill up that buffer), that means the MP3 player only needs to be able to read the CD for 5 seconds out of every 2 minutes. That sounds like a MUCH better idea than to try to pack in 30 or 40 seconds worth of buffer in a regular CD player. It probably saves the batteries too. Saves them for the chip decoding the MP3.

    Which brings me to my final thought: what's the runtime on these things? Portable CD players now will run anywhere from about 10-20 hours, depending on buffer size, shock, batteries, etc.
  • ..except..

    this is portable.. It's not a problem to build a system to be able to put into your card, but a system to be able to carry with you? With 10Sec buffering, it will easily playing while traveling.

    For $300, you can move it from car to car, take it to the gym, and use it at home.

    Burners are dropping in price, and the media is dirt cheap now. No longer an excuse.

    ..burn baby burn..
  • There is already one on the market that will get you out of Texas. :) Empeg [empeg.com] is the name of the player. Slashdot has had several stories [slashdot.org] already. It is like a Rio for your car, so not cool in the same way as this device; CDs aren't an option. But it does have an FM tuner and "Up to 28.2Gb of disk storage, with approximately 17 hours of CD-quality stereo audio per Gb. [empeg.com]" ... And it runs linux! Bloody expensive though. ~$1000 for the 4GB version.
  • C'mon....8 hours....please! I have a $100 Panasonic unit that does 24 hours of AA battery time with the anti-shock turned on. For the amount of music you're getting, I'd almost expect more battery efficiency.

    In other news, nice idea. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Hope it works out for them and more companies realize this is a viable solution. Hopefully they'll create some good documentation for burning those CDs, or partner with a CD-burner company and co-develop a kit.

    --Bernie
  • Shouldn't bounce *too* happily - it'll make the CD's skip!

    ;-)


  • If only some company would come out with an mp3 player with a CD Changer interface - so that it coule easily interface with current decks.
    -Nick
  • I can speak to how nice this concept is, since I took a Powerbook along with me on a car trip from New York to Wisconsin. The PB was powered by the cigarette lighter, and the audio out was piped nicely into the in-dash tape player using a CD car adapter "tape with wires" that came with my portable CD player. Reading data from a CD-R, the PB had no problems with skipping, and one CD played for hours and hours. With the track-shuffle and playlist capabilities of the MP3 decoder software, it was as full-featured a music jukebox as I could hope for.

    The PB went down on the floor between the driver & passenger (Taurus wagon, lots of room there). You could skip to the next song by tapping the space bar with your foot. The only problem with this solution was the size of the laptop. For me, the ideal car companion would be an eMate-sized iBook or similar. I would run mapping software for navigation and MP3 (and/or normal CD audio) for tunes. A solution likely to come sooner is a Palm-based device that does mp3 & mapping s/w....

  • True, true, BUT - I'm more interested in having an MP3 player that you don't have to boot up! Not to mention, there's problems with control (you really want an entire keyboard in your front seat?), display (how do you know what song is playing, when you've got 150?), and skipping (PC CD-Roms aren't known for their skip protection).

    I've actually made one of these, though. It used a MediaGX board and fit in a briefcase. No hard drive; it created a ramdrive (lots of memory!), unzipped win95 to the ramdrive and booted off that. For display, I used the old SBTalker speech->text synth to read the name of the song that was playing. Fairly slick, but took a while to boot. I had the whole keyboard up front, but you can get a keypad-only keyboard for about $25. I solved the skipping problem by having Winamp cache the entire file. Still, I'd rather have a tiny unit. =)
  • Buying things for the "sheer gimmick value" is good though... it sends a little message to manufacturers and the rest of the industry that they're on the right track... they're providing something that people are at least somewhat interested in.

    I usually expect first and second generation products in a new field to suck, but it's important to support them, so you are familiar with what to look for in the 3rd, 4th, etc... generations. And it keeps that field alive so they can do further development.

    Plus it's fun to get toys. :P

  • They could spin the CD at 1x long enough to fill a large buffer...

    Not as described. They said it'd have ten seconds of anti-shock storage, which seems to indicate that it's not storing any more of the song.

  • I just had a conversation with my Dad last week about how pointless the Rio was---I mean, you only get a bit more music than you can fit on a CD, and you have to download a new set of music onto the Rio whenever you want to change it. "Why not," I said, "have a player that could play MP3s off of CD?" Et voilà! For my car, this is perfect, so I don't have to deal with packing the ten or so CDs I want to listen to (which I'll have to listen to twice on a 1000-mile trip), I can just pack one MP3-CD per day!

    For that matter, I may hold off a bit on getting a new stereo. I had gotten tired of my old one, which could only handle one CD, and had planned on getting a 5-CD changer; but if this Pine player is in the portable market, it's not long before an equivalent thing makes it into the stereo market... it's like having a 10-CD changer, only cheaper, and you can randomise the playlist without listening to the player whirr and click as it changes the CD between each song. :)

  • While portable mp3 players are cool, I think home audio players is kind of silly (why not just get an old computer), it would be great to get a true headunit for my car that had radio tuner and could play cd's and mp3 cdr's. Till then, count me out.
  • we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent

    even more off topic, but where i live (dallas), to take public transit to work would require: 1 hour ride on bus to downtown, 15-30 minute wait for the next connecting bus, 1 hour ride on bus to station close to where i work. from there it's about a 30 minute walk to my building or I can wait another 15-20 minutes to catch another bus and get dropped off in front of my office. Even riding in the HOV lane on the freeway with my sister and mom(both of whom work near me) It still takes over an hour to get to work. I could move closer, but i can't afford the rent. So, I think a device that'll hold enough songs that i won't have to listen to the same stuff twice in one day would be fine.
  • The 12Vold DC power from a car battery would be readily adaptable to use by such a device, and you ould get an enclosure from Radio Crap.

    You mean, like, reinventing empeg ?
    See Empeg MP3 car player [empeg.com] if you want that...
  • I agree with you absolutely here. My plextor can rip at something like 24x, and my encoder can encode at something like 6-8x, and when I get my second CPU I should be able to about double that.

    Also, most of the music I listen is NOT available on mp3 sites. I have yet to see more than a handful of songs from Einsturzende Neubauten, Rollins Spoken Word, Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Curve, Recoil, Portishead, or Firesign Theatre on these sites. It is so much easier to pop the CD in the drive, have grip grab the CDDB stuff, and RIP it all automatically, and then have my perl script schlub it all into the correct /artist/album directory on my mp3 jukebox.
  • I've been waiting two years for someone to come out with one of these things. Finally I can drag mp3 music with me wherever I go. My car stereo already has a line-in jack, so I am set. I have something like 8 gigs of mp3's ready to be burned onto CD-R's. $299 doesn't sound too bad either for 12 or more hours of playtime. It looks like it doesn't have an LCD for song titles, but such is life.

    Now the important question is of course, when is it shipping?
  • Crikey, you're right, I did indeed miss that. I guess I didn't see it when I read the article, and looking at the picture on pines site, I didn't see a very large LCD panel, so I assumed that it just showed track numbers. My bad.
  • I have to wonder if this is going to send the RIAA into spastic fits or force them to change their business models. It seems one heckuva good way to bring non-geeks into the MP3 world, assuming they've been living in some dank,dark cave somewhere...

    Plus, I can finally enjoy those seven hour car trips to the 'rents house...


  • For instance, all my MP3 CD's are burned using a subdirectory for each album or artist.. It needs to be able to access subdirectories, otherwise I'd have to reburn my CD's to use it.

  • Last week i was at the IFA in Berlin (europe's largest consumer electronics fair). There was a chinese manufacturer named "Shinco" which showed a DVD-Player that also played super Video CD, Video CD, MP3 CDs (!!!) (iso9660 with mp3-files on it) and normal audio CDs. Should be available soon (at least in Germany). The mp3-mode was menu driven via the tv-set. Yummy! -Detlef
  • I've been waiting a long time for a player like this! I've burned quite a few of my favorite songs to cdr's. (Off my own cd's, thank you.)

    Mmmm.

    Possible Birthday present.
  • A lot of slashdot readers seem to be poor whiners, which seems odd when so many of them are in the IT/CS industry and should, by rights, be swimming in money.

    The whining you hear is mostly coming from cash-strapped students like myself. They don't pay us to get a CS degree. (at least not at my school... should I transfer?) :)
    --

  • I saw the same catalog item in Crutchfield, and had the same thought.

    Why should a car-mountable DVD drive cost $1000 instead of $200? You can get a PC DVD drive nowadays for around $80. So conceivable, you ('one' ;) ) could build a system for your car for a couple of hundred dollars -

    - small case
    - invertor for the DC/AC dance
    - hard drive enough to hold the OS / drivers to ru the DVD player
    - sound card

    You would need a video card, monitor and keyboard to get it set up, but once it was running I don't think you'd have to keep them; better to use one fo the mini-LCD displays / touch-button panels as have been used on the several home-brewed MP3 players feaured at various points here on /.

    And considering how much data a single DVD can store, a DVD-based audio player seems like a sensible idea.

    If anyone builds it, post some pix!

    timothy

  • while mp3's sound quite fine on my computer sound system, when i've tried it in other places such as my car, i find the sound to be a bit lacking. Mainly, i mean, before i invest in hardware to play mp3s, are there any superior file formats waiting to steal the sound? I am not interested in the useless copying security as are most file format innovators these days, i just want it to sound exactly like a cd! And not have the high hat turn to mishmash when the vocals come in.

  • I know, I have lived in America and I realize that if I still lived there now I would probably be getting a drivers license and a pollutomobile as we speak, but it is only because you have built your cities that way.

    Dallas is a lot bigger than Stockholm (x2-x3 I guess) but you don't need to look around to long to find cities of comparable size where it is possible to get by living a normal life without a car.

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • I hate big bulky boxen for portable music. I love my translucent blue-green Rio. Just pop 2 or 3 CDs of music in and I'm set for the day - perfect for busses.

    On the other hand, I might pick up the version that has FM, recording, and MP3 as well, but am waiting for price to drop a bit.

  • there's another company called evhi [evhi.com] that i promising to release the same kind of product, with a car audio version in the works. from their faq it looks like they will support iso9660. no real word on battery life. they quote a price of $110.
  • One of these would be cool for my car. You could burn a "road" CD kinda like I use to do with tapes for those long trips.

  • Why not use MP3 compression on the sound buffer? You could use a low quality setting to fit
    a lot of sound into that "10 seconds' worth".


    yes -- that's how I got 4MB = one song. Sorry. should have been more clear.
  • I've been hoping for something like this for my car and home stereo for quite some time.

    *drool*

  • Jippy


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  • A recent study proved that, without any doubt, MP3 audio can be at, or near, CD quality. Of course, there are many variables: Hardware quality (Stereo System, Speakers, etc), software quality (encoder) and the quality of the listener's ears. However, most of those that took part in the study were unable to significantly distinguish between CD and MP3 audio (and those that participated were audiophiles) However, the three participants that the author predicted would be most likely capable of distinguishing between the two formats (because of their background) scored higher than the others.

    I don't recall the URL, but Slashdot had a story and a link just a few days ago. Try doing a search of recent posts: The article's a must-read for anyone interested in MP3
  • I am still going to wait for my empeg...
  • Hehe, you'll have to change the batteries on this thing more often than you change the CD. I think I'd rather have the tiny Rio 500 and load up a dozen songs every day before I skip off to classes. Is it true that the Rio isn't happy with most bit-rates?
  • I had this idea years ago. Back then I thought I was the only one who ever thought of this, and that I would be rich and famous some day. Hah! Lots of people have had this idea, and it's about bloody time someone implemented it. However, you really have to be wary of sound coming through FM. That's gotta deteriorate the quality somewhat, no? I find nicely encoded MP3s at 128 bits stereo sound great. No one I've tried it on can figure out the difference between MP3 and CD of the same song. I say, bring it on!!!

    And when are we gonna see DVD-MP3 players? Imagine, your entire music collection on a single DVD.

    By the way, check out my new site, a Slashdot-like thing for Math/Science/Technology discussion, at http://www.mindwire.org
  • hehe, opps!!! faux pax...
    what I meant was.. :o)
    can it send EMAIL... ?
    I musta been up too early or somethin'
    see what happens when you HAVE to use winblows at work? All the term apps seem to melt into each other... and ya get all gui'd out. Anyway- I want mine to send email, AND surf the web, AND play cd's and mp3's. Oh ya- they already have one of those, its called a lapdance, or is it lapTOP.
  • Does it come with a text only web browser?!?!?1
  • haha..someones a dipshit. pine is the text email client developed by university of washington. you're perhaps thinking of lynx.
  • Seriously. Listing removable media as a disadvantage is moronic. Even if you loaded any of the RAM devices with their max ram, you still couldn't carry more than 2 albums on it with good quality audio... You'd need your notebook along to refill it anyway.

    Just wish it wasn't $300....

  • Other Similar Devices (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You can look for a lot more of these kinds of devices coming along very soon. Asian manufacturers have been producing home-audio component players that play pretty much everything:

    VideoCD 1.0 & 2.0
    Interactive VideoCD 3.0
    DVD 1.0
    Super VideoCD
    CDDA
    MP3 on CD
    the draft spec of Audio-DVD, a subset of DVD 2.0

    I have also heard of portables that play the CDDA, MP3 and Audio-DVD, but haven't seen anything yet. The console players have been available in China and Taiwan for several months now. I have one and it rocks. Expect smaller companies stateside to be OEM's for these very soon. Sorry I can't name names, but I'm sure all the cool stuff will be announced here when it's time.

  • How to store mp3s on a cd? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Are we supposed to burn mp3s as raw data with one per track or does this device support iso9660 filesystems? Naming conventions for tracks? Some proprietary system for storing mp3s on a cdr? What data rates does it support? I find the lack of details troubling(it takes a while to encode all my cds so better start early). And it does look a little bulky compared to a sony discman too.
  • If they designed it right, probably less battery power per song. The CD could be spun at less than 1x (because an mp3 contains, kilobyte-for-kilobyte, far less bits per minute than does a raw CD audio stream). Keeping the disc spinning is the primary battery drain in a conventional Discman; spinning the CD more slowly equates to burning less battery. I would think that the electrical savings attained from doing this would more than make up for the additional milliwatts spent on powering decoder chips.

    Anyone know if there are problems with spinning a CD beneath 1x? (Does it grind to a halt or something below that speed?)

  • Well, the Diamond RIO runs for quite a long time (exactly how long I don't know) on it's single 1.5V AA battery, so it can't draw *that* much power. My current CD player requires two AA's and it dies out well before the Rio.

  • One thing about mp3 is that the quality can vary significantly when you change the bitrate, encoder, or player. Looks like you need to find the right combination.

    For getting as close to the original CD as possible, I've found bladeenc and its 168, 192, and 256kbit/s encoding modes very helpful. It cuts down on the typical mp3 "cymbal splatter" that is so annoying when played through real speakers with good high end response.

    Of course, this won't help you with low quality mp3's you've downloaded from the Internet unless you can get the author to re-encode them, but you can at least re-encode audio CD's you own at a higher bitrate. You'll fit less mp3's on one CD with a higher bitrate, but you'll also be less annoyed by quality loss.

  • We're finally getting somewhere! I have held off buying a Diamon Rio due to their tiny storage size. I mean, what's the point of using MP3 if you don't have enough space to keep your -entire- music collection at your fingers at any time?

    The one this I wished this article would mention is how long the device will run on a charge. Currently I've been hauling my IBM Thinkpad 390E notebook around with me to do me CS projects on -and- be my "portable" MP3 player. With 6GB of disk space and two Li-Ion batteries installed, I can listen to my entire collection for over 9 hours each day without carrying the wall brick.

  • Yeah Yeah, It's nice, and it DOES actually implement some good ideas, but for the price pine is charging, you're not getting much. For $299, you get:

    1.) A CD Player
    2.) Walkman-ish FM Tuner
    3.) MP3 Decoding

    Now, while the CD Player/FM tuner is a traditional combination, the MP3 decoding is a nice addition. But the unit doesn't store MP3s, and it relies on other sources. Okay, so what exactly would those sources be? Is there an IDE plug in the back of the device? Or do you have to burn all of your MP3s to CD, then use the CD in the player? (If that's the case, forget about Music CDs. That's really cool. The [>>|] and [|<<] buttons could skip files similar to tracks.)

    I still don't think it's worth $300. You could put together a very simple car MP3 system for a lot cheaper. If you have the parts to do it, great. If you don't, get an old Pentium motherboard ($30), Power Inverter ($40), a decent size hard drive ($100), and a cheap sound card ($20).

    Having your very own computer in the car, and MP3 System?.......Priceless.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • The article does not say anything about the CD format. So quite possible that it will require also a Pine CD recorder and some bla bla running under windows only and etc, etc, etc.

    So the overall price may as well come to be god knows how much (That is besides buying a PC for windows ;-)
  • With HD prices coming dow like they are (I just got a 10gb Maxtor for $149+tax) All I'd need is a Single Board Computer (SBC) with audio out and I'd be in business.

    I could run a small quick Linux distro like Trinux, and all would be good.

    The 12Vold DC power from a car battery would be readily adaptable to use by such a device, and you ould get an enclosure from Radio Crap.

    LK

  • Yes! (Score:2)

    by Jethro ( 14165 )
    I've been waiting for something that'd play MP3s off a CD for quite a while now. What I'd like to know is how it navigates the CD - do you need to dump all the files in the root dir, or can you have one dir per album, etc? Either way, I'm likely to get one...
  • 1) "Instant" track access - how easy and quick will this be when there are 150+ songs on a disc? There could be a fair delay when you first put in a disc and it indexes it, and just imagine pressing >>| over 100 times to get to the track you want..

    2) This thing looks horrible. If I was dropping $300 on an audio device I'd expect a sleek metallic device similar to the high-end Sony Discmans(men?).

    3) It'll be too big and probably too heavy to be truly portable. Doesn't matter for in-car use (better off with an empeg though), but it's not going to sway many Rio or Minidisc users.

    4) Support for every bitrate under the sun *must* be there. With the memory limit (in effect) now 650mb, there's no need to re-encode stuff like you have to for the Rio (just to squeeze a decent amount of music into that 32mb)


    I've been saying "some sort of CD-based device for mp3 would rule" for some time, but thinking about it the only place it would be really good would be in a cheaper version of the empeg in-car player. I certainly wouldn't lug one of them with me when I'm just walking to/from places. I ditched my discman for a MiniDisc recorder for that very reason..

    qube

  • Is the counter on the player limited to 100? Because you can certainly fit more than 100 mp3's on a CD-r. At a meg a minute, say 600 megs would be 100 6 minute songs. Most songs are 3 to 4 minutes. You can get more than 150 typical songs on a CD-r. I suspect the unit has a 2 digit counter to select the track.

    Other than that, this is what I've been waiting for, now I just need a CD-r drive. The radio is a great bonus too.
  • Did you try putting your sound card on the slot fartest from the power supply? There is sometimes effects of the emf from the power supply effecting the analog parts of many cards. Try that, if that doesn't still work either it truly is a crappy card, or your just a little too picky when it comes to audio noise
  • According or a press release [pineusa.com] on pine's site it last 8 hours on 4 AA's
  • , i just want it to sound exactly like a cd!

    I recommend you get a CD player then.
  • They could spin the CD at 1x long enough to fill a large buffer (5mb would be big enough to fit most songs, longer songs could be re-buffered when the buffer gets near empty). Then the cd spins down and you get the power usage of a Rio, until the next song comes.
  • Woo! I have been waiting, hoping, and sweating over a device like this! Although the article says you can store up to 100 mp3s on one cd, that's a little off. You can get ~11.5 hours of 128k encoded mp3s onto a 650mb cd-r/w, which, figuring an average of 4 minutes per song, is 172 songs.

    I already have a bunch of mp3-cds made, and listen to them at work with Winamp all the time. I would LOVE to be able to use these cds in the car, or anywhere. Definitely worth the $300 to me.

    There's also another one of these devices coming soon, called the Eclectic CP200, from Vertical Horizon, Inc. They're currently in a beta testing process. Check it out at http://www.evhi.com/ [evhi.com] and click on the Portable one. Also, check out the way cool headphones with built rio-type mp3 player.

    I wonder how exactly they expect the MP3-CD format to be. Sub-folder seperated by artist? Can you switch between playlists, or just folders, or just song-to-song? It sounds like it supports ID3 from the article.

    Yes!! I'm excited.

    Ian.
  • Um, no. This is a a CD player that can decode MP3 files from a CD. A RIO (AFAIK) has no CD motor to spin so there is little use in comparing its battery life here.

  • 1) RAM is relatively cheap compared to what it was before but it's still expensive enough that adding 5minutes of buffer would make a dent on a $300 device.

    2) adding RAM would consume power itself.
    3) spinning down the CD would be a tradeoff, spinning it up is more expensive than keeping it spinning for a while. I'm not sure where the tradeoff is.

    4) Any number quoted for shock protection these days already takes into account compression. In fact even standard CD players with 40s shock protection are using lossy compression to give you that. The best ones allow you to disable it for a noticeable improvement in sound quality.
  • If the people who made this thing are not total idiots, it must support the iso9660 filesystem. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to release MP3 CD's that could be read both on a computer and on this special device. And you couldn't have any directories to separate the songs (which is pretty important when you have 100 songs or so). And, yeah, they could use a proprietory system, but I hope to god not.

    As far as data rates, the only thing I've read about portable MP3 players not supporting data rates is one (and I don't remember which) that doesn't support 256k. Though maybe this is just because they pressume _everyone_ uses 128k, MP3 players don't mention what bit rates they support and do not support. Yes, this is another possible problem.

    Okay, skeptical mode off. THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. I got so sick and tired of hearing about damned flash card MP3 players that hold no more than a single album (even less if you use a higher bit rate). I'll be first in line to put down $300 for this, as long as the questions you ask don't have ridiculous answers (such as it only supporting 128k).

    I'm actually surprised this has come so soon, as the wide consumer market for mp3 is not with people who have CD recorders (which I don't think is a large amount of people at this point). The lack of details is scary, yes, but remember this is just a PR release. I'm very excited about it. If this one is not perfect in the details, hopefully the next one will be.
  • Personally I don't see the point with this thing at all. Ok, you can now burn a cd with more music on it, but you are still burned by physical media, and the player is still big an clumsy.

    I read somewhere that the most important music market in America is the car, since you people are always driving around (* cough * cough * its my fucking atmosphere too) while in Europe and Japan walkman style portables are most important since we use smarter forms of transport (like walking - shocker - cycling - double shocker - and public transit) to a much greater extent. But even if I did have drivers license or a car, I think that if all that mp3 has to offer us is a higher density CD the hoopla is a little exagerated.

    True, the current flash based players have to little memory to be good for anything but short trips, but they represent a much more interesting direction (music stored as data, and treated as such).

    What I want: A portable player with 100+ mb memory (enough for the train to school/work back, and any dead time inbetween) that can patch into my lan and pull mp3s off a server, as well and a stationary unit with a large harddisk and ethernet connection to replace the linux pc currently in my bookcase with the stereo (which works great but is a little noisy for true listening).

    Actually, come to think of it, what I really want is a PDA with enough power to do decoding in software - gonna need that for running cracked SDMI players...

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • Personally I don't see the point with this thing at all. Ok, you can now burn a cd with more music on it, but you are still burned by physical media, and the player is still big an clumsy.

    I tend to agree to a point. The media is a limitation. It requires more bulk. And having to burn a CD isn't as fluid as a flash memory solution.

    But flash memory has a major drawback right now: price. Its expensive. This leads to either overpriced or under-powered solutions. I hope this will change. The demand for inexpensive memory modules will be driven by other devices such as digital cameras and PDAs. Maybe MP3 players can help fuel that demand. But until the demand enables lowered prices... flash memory is too expensive for all but premium devices.

    The CD media solution offers the price break needed. CD burners are inexpensive and so is the media (depending on how many coasters you make). The media allows for a considerable amount of storage. It is the perfect solution for THIS stage - an inexpensive, widely accepted format to get MP3 players into the masses.

    But CDs are NOT a step to the future. Its a lateral step - a solution using current technology. I look forward to when we can make the next step without it costing an arm and leg.

  • I had an idea about this: basically, add more ram. Ram is cheap from a power perspective. Instead of buffering 10 measly seconds, buffer the whole song. 4 megs of memory is free these days. Now you can just spin up the drive once every song, suck it all in at the optimum speed (40x?) and then play back at leisure.

    Or it could be that the best strategy is to read the CD at a constant bit rate of .12x (1X == 150KB, so 128 Kb ~ .128X) -- which would explain the measly 10 seconds anti-skip.

    Does anyone with powermanagement skills have an opinion?

  • The next step... (Score:3)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @02:35AM (#1693164)
    This is cool. Now, let's see a 10 Disc DVD changer version for the car. That way you'd get around 4 months of continuous, unrepeated music. (It sucks when you start to hear the same music after less than a month of continuous listening...)

  • *bounces happily* (Score:3)

    by Cironian ( 9526 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @01:58AM (#1693165)
    I hope the batteries will last long enough. Does anyone have an idea how much power an mp3 decoder unit might draw in addition to the regular CD parts (laser)?

    Cant wait until they ship the first units over here. :)

  • how long this baby will last: 8hrs, but 4 AA's!!! (Score:3)

    by male ( 71469 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @05:01AM (#1693166) Homepage
    Pine makes more than just this new device, according to there web site, though i have never heard of it until now.
    http://www.pine-dmusic.com/

    the important stuff is right here, however. http://www.pine-dmusic.com/specs/specs.htm
    according to this site, the thing will last up to 8hrs...with FOUR AA's! it's gonne be big and heavy!

    Portable MP3 / Audio CD Player Specifications

    CD digital audio MPEG type
    Analog volume control
    Built-in charger
    FSTN LCD ( Title display)
    Dimension : 130(W)x138(D)x31(H)(mm)
    Output 1: headphone
    Output 2: Audio line
    Battery : 4 x AA (Rechargeable or
    Alkaline) (8 hrs with Alkaline)
    Voltage 5 V

  • About time (Score:3)

    by Northern Hunter ( 89531 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @03:44AM (#1693167)
    This is one of those things that you think of the moment you hear of the pre-cursor technology.. you think to yourself "aha! Now they just need to make this and it'll be killer!". And it's so obvious to you that you just can't imagine no-one jumping all over it.

    And then the free market system goes and ignores it for two years, evenutally producing some other less powerfull stuff (but more widely appealing for the regular lUsers and induvidhuals) that doesn't come near to satisfying your original thoughts.

    The Rio's nice, but 32Mb? Through a serial connection? For _how_ much? Ok, if there's nothing else... Or if I'm an audiophile and my cassette deck just doesn't cut it.

    From the day I saw mp3 way back when, I dreamed of 12 hours of music in my pocket!!

    Ok. Quiz time. What's the killer service to accompany products like this?

    1) Rip-n-burn services (requiring you to bring/send in your original CDs, you know, fair use and all).

    2) K-Tel records (or whoever else has the guts) producing their big anthologies, all the 70's on one cd. All the 80's on one CD. The top 150 songs of 1992!

    3) "Buy-your-CDs-from-us and we'll burn for free" services.

    Ok, there's one huge problem with all of this. The RIAA will freak out and sue everyone to death, (in spite of fair use) and that threat alone will prevent anyone except us CDR/CDRW owners from being able to use this stuff. Now this will cost us more denero due to the economies of scale being massively reduced. Guess that means less money to buy CDs with :)

    (Attn RIAA: Thanks for nothing you boners.)

  • Just Imagine ... (Score:4)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @02:26AM (#1693168) Homepage
    ... car trips
    On average, a CD will last me about 80 miles. Get one of these, plug it in, and I could drive for over 700 miles without having to change the music. It's still not enough to get me out of Texas, but it's close.

    ... the architecture studio
    As it is now, CDs allow the time to pass. Put in a CD, listen, work, the next thing you know an hour's gone by. Put in one of these babies, listen, work, the next thing you know, four projects are done and you're still dancin'.

    ... the party
    As it is now, even with a 5-disc changer, my party runs out of music 5 hours into the dang thing and something's gotta be changed. Put one CD in one of these babies and voila! You've got yourself ten hours of non-stop partying. Given my current rate of being completely smashed about eight hours into such an event, and I'm all set.

    Given the anticipated popularity of this device, I only hope that they a) take advance orders and b) can handle production so I have one of these for the drive home over Christmas.

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