80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player

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)

Why do people use taylor polynomials?

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.

This *is* a hybrid system.

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.

Possibilty of "Hybrid" Devices?

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 :( )

more details...

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...