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Music Media

80 Gig MP3 Player 238

Posted by timothy from the or-however-big dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I don't know who has anywhere near enough MP3 music to need an 80G drive, but for those who want one Reality Media has just released the GIDI Digital Jukebox. The company is based out of Belgium and offers the unit in three different box styles including one for the dash ($715) and one for a systems rack ($795). The company will also sell you the guts alone to build your own player. The key is the company's Single Board Audio Computer (SBAC), which is a pre-programmed for digital music."
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80 Gig MP3 Player More

80 Gig MP3 Player

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  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:23PM (#2540498) Homepage Journal
    Why is it so hard to believe that someone would want 80 gigs of music storage? Is it difficult to believe that someone would have several hundred CD's collected over the years and want to archive them at a decent quality in a jukebox? I know I've run out of space on my 40 gig drive and am going to adding another just for music..
    • I know I've run out of space on my 40 gig drive and am going to adding another just for music..

      I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.
      • Hey, I listen to all of the files on *my* 30 gig drive. I've got a few really big playlists that get shuffle-played every day while I'm at work.

        • I guess it depends on what compression, but at the rule-of-thumb compression of 1 meg/minute, 30 gig is 30,720 minutes of music, or 21+ contiguous days (64 days of 8 hours).

          Maybe your work days are REALLY long?

          • I guess it depends on what compression, but at the rule-of-thumb compression of 1 meg/minute, 30 gig is 30,720 minutes of music, or 21+ contiguous days (64 days of 8 hours).

            Maybe your work days are REALLY long?

            Hey if you want to hear the exact same music day after day, you can save a lot of money by not buying any CD's - An FM radio is all you need.

            Frankly I never listen to any of my music collection anyways - AM Talk radio is where its at.. Of course to archive all that talk radio I'm going to need a lot more than 80 gigs..

      • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tackhead ( 54550 )
        > I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.

        Over several years of collecting MP3z and/or ripping/encoding your own CDs, yeah, you will listen to everything in your collection, at least once.

        If you're ripping your own CDs, you won't know the rip/encode was "good" until you've listened to the MP3.

        If you're l33ching MP3z, you won't know you "got" the song (that is, you won't know that the idjit posting the file did his job of previewing the MP3 before he uploaded it) until you've listened to the MP3.

        Thus, any serious MP3 collector will probably have listened to every piece in his or her collection at least once, and arguably multiple times.

      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mixmasta ( 36673 )
        > I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20% you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.
        ---

        Just like the %80 of my CD's I dont listen to. CD's collect take up REAL space AND collect dust. I rip them and then sell 'em back to the warehouse when I'm done. =)

        But .... Forget MP3!

        Dont waste your time ripping 80G of mp3 just to have to do it again when hardrive space quintuples in 2 years.... like I did.

        Forget mp3 and all the other lossy compression types. They are/will be a complete waste of time when 1-200GB hard disks are selling for $200 sometime next summer.

        I'm saving all my files with lossless compression with the flac format: http://flac.sourceforge.net

        A cheap 80G drive should hold quite a bit, and I'll never have to rip the files again since they will expand to perfect digital copies when played.

        Trying to save the world time....
    • I could see this really take off in a commercial environment, like say, for restaurants. Put one of these into a traditional juke box form factor and voila! Instant Americana.

    • God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:43PM (#2540671) Homepage
      This pisses me off too. The anti-piracy busybodies where I work have been up my skirt a few times about my bringing MP3 files from home to listen to at work. They have no problem with music on the job -- they're just convinced that MP3 is a "pirate-only" format because there has been so god damn much news about Napster and pirates.

      I personally archive any CD I buy IMMEDIATELY as a high quality (256kbps or -r3mix) MP3 because CDs are just too damn fragile. I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times) because they developed serious skips/scratches before I started encoding everything to MP3. And YES, I do share my MP3 files sometimes. More than once I've sent a song to a friend in e-mail with a subject like "HOLY SHIT, I just bought a CD and *kicks ass*, LISTEN TO THIS!"

      And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it.

      These could be wonderful times -- we have the ability to reproduce information endlessly, so no information, be it music or paperwork or video or photos or whatever ever has to die or disappear -- and instead of preserving and sharing all this bounty of knowledge, we're even being prevented from perserving our OWN data for PERSONAL use by the likes of Microsoft, RIAA, SDMI, and all of those damned MP3 BUSYBODIES!

      Yes, I need more MP3 space, my CD collection online is now up to 48 gigs and growing by two CDs a week! GIVE ME 80 GIGS OR GIVE ME DEATH!
      • I'm curious how well emailing your 256kbps mp3s to friends works. Those files must be almost 10MB for a 5 minute song. Most people with email accounts probably have a quota of less than 7MB, if that.
      • "I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times)"
        "More than once I've sent a song to a friend in e-mail"
        "And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it."

        You should feel guilty. Haven't you heard of FDSFFAS?

        Friends Don't Send Friends Fiona Apple Spam.

        :P? :P [colonpee.com] !

      • Don't use MP3 for archiving! (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If you're archiving your own music and have the luxury of choosing a format to store music in, don't use MP3! FLAC [sourceforge.net] is a lossless, open, LGPL-in-implementation format that's wonderful for archiving. A few years down the road, when you have more storage space, a higher-tech, cleaner audio system, and are wishing that you hadn't used MP3 because you can now hear the artifacts, FLAC will still be in original CD quality.

        Disadvantages: Most people aim for about 10 to 1 compression with MP3...FLAC only gives you 2 to 1. You'll have to decide whether the cost in space is worth have a lossless duplicate of the CD.

        A person I know [cmu.edu] has been archiving all their data in FLAC on their Linux box, and has been raving about the results.

      • funny (Score:1)

        by beuk ( 18933 )
        ... I've had to buy some CDs twice (and #$Y&^@ Tidal by Fiona Apple FOUR times) ... And do you know what? I don't feel guilty about doing it.... Yes, I need more MP3 space, my CD collection online is now up to 48 gigs and growing by two CDs a week! GIVE ME 80 GIGS OR GIVE ME DEATH! ...

        whoah. here's some advice, buddy: buy bullet, rent gun.

      • HECK YEAH FIONA!!! :D

        just so this post can be on topic:
        i totally agree w/you :D... cd's just aren't practical.
    • One of my workplaces has 80GB of HDD in their jukebox. They buy scratched/useless CDs so that they own the right to play the songs, then rip the music from good copies.

      They're going to up it to 160GB soon. Ripping at least two CDs every day soaks up a lot of disk space.

      There were some insightful comments in other articles from musos with the opinion that they almost and/or literally give away the albums in order to spread their name (they get SFA for the ones sold through RIAA channels, maybe 5% typical, 10% on special occasions, so from a $Oz39 CD they normally get $Oz2, or maybe $Oz0.20 a track on average), and make their actual living from concerts and merchandise. I think this process is something that the hard drive manufacturers need to look into fostering. (-:

  • New Rio Volt (Score:2, Informative)

    by sacherjj ( 7595 )
    The cooler product is mentioned at the end of the page. Finally Rio put a radio in their CD-R MP3 Player. Yeah!

    Who needs 80 Gigs of MP3s, give me a portable radio add on anyday. :)
  • I can get rid of all my audio CD's. As long as the 80gigs of HD space isn't an IBM Deskstar, I think I'll be okay.

  • school.. (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by moronic1 ( 162493 )
    actually when I was in school, we had just about filled up a 40gig drive.. we were looking at getting another drive, but it was too close to the end of the year so we just mirrored it.. :)
  • I have well over that in MP3s. It's not hard if you are a fan of lots of different types of music, believe me.
    • hey! spanky555... if u're reading this... email me: tahpot@hotmail.com (re: mp3s)

      why isn't there anyway in /. for me to find ppl's email addresses that have posted?
  • If this device takes off, I'm sure one will follow.

    Of course, if M$ were to do it and somehow tie Pa$$port into it, I'm sure RIAA would fall all over it.

  • Why only mp3? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Radnimax ( 533758 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:28PM (#2540537) Homepage
    I love the idea of these players but what happens when a new audio format takes lead? I want a player that is upgradeable.
    • If you'd bothered to read the article you'd have noticed it isn't only mp3.
      It can also play WMA files!
      ( pause for laughter )
      Seriously, though, if it can play two formats it can probably be flash-upgraded to do others, I'd imagine.
    • It won't be much longer before they start slapping a small color LCD on there and instead of mp3s, we'll either be watching tons of music videos or, even worse (for the MPAA), bootleg feature-length videos.

      Let's not limit ourselves by thinking all we need is audio. With hardware getting this powerful and inexpensive, the possibilities are endless.

      ::Colz Grigor

      --

  • problem with large storage mp3 players (Score:5, Informative)

    by ultrapenguin ( 2643 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:28PM (#2540543)
    Is how do you navigate through 80gb of content? Sometimes you just want to listen to whatever music in the background while you work, or whatever, and its a lot easier to throw in a tape or cd that you know has something you like. Unless these players with > 2gb of storage come with *extremely* sophisticated playlist management where you can store and recall a large number of customized playlists, their value for casual listening is rather low. Of course added benefit on this unit is you probably only have to copy the music once and just leave it away from computers...
    • This may already be done somewhere in MP3-land, but...

      What if, instead of merely swapping MP3's, you swapped playlists, too? The trick to navigating a big mass of music is programming it in interesting ways. I know that I usually wind up just playing the same CDs over and over out of laziness and only cycle in new stuff when I get bored. To avoid the equivilent with this player (hitting the same hot buttons or menu sequences or whatever), you would upload a playlist that someone else found interesting (Hendix followed by the stuff he influenced, Miles Davis followed by Kobain, etc). Essentially, you'd be doing the job a radio station programmer does, but at an amateur level.

      Seems like a good idea - that's why I gotta think some of the MP3 sites aleady do this.

      • If you "sync" an iPod, it loads all the songs in the library and then your playlists as well, which is sort of what you're talking about...

        as far as trading playlists on the 'net, hasn't been to reliable because you can't guarentee someone will have a certian song or that the filename/ID3 tags will be the same...

    • What, you don't think a single line display with some buttons is going to cut it for potentially 10,000 songs? :)

      Seriously, it could be done. If you had a drill-down interface that let you skip to first letters, then second letters, etc, it's possible it might be practical.

      • this is exactly what I was referring to.
        Unless this unit (or at least the radio station version of it (rack mount)) comes with a external display + mouse + keyboard so that you can roll your own playlists for it, it's going to be rather difficult to use.
        And no, I don't think ANYONE has that much time on their hands to sit in front of a one-line LCD display picking music for a playlist. 80gb of storage definitely requires a external monitor + keyboard to be able to make some sense out of all the music.

        Or how about this, make it run Linux (maybe it does already?) then you can ssh into it, and make all playlists with vi! Then on the one-line display you only pick from say, 40 playlists instead of 40000 songs. All the playlists could be stored in a separate directory, as plain text (m3u or something), and LCD display can be switched between songs/playlists mode. Hopefully this kind of functionality is already present in this unit in one way or another.

        • Re:problem with large storage mp3 players (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          This thing probably doesn't run on linux, but you could easily make your own rack-mount mp3player box for a lot less than $800.00. The most expensive part will be the enclosure, MB, power supply. Supermicro sells some nice enclosures that already have all of that stuff (plus NIC), and all you need is a CPU and a hard drive.

          Of course I may be _way_ off base, I haven't read the article. Honestly the idea seems sort of stupid to me. Why would anybody want to buy a mp3 player box that sits in an equipment closet? The point of using a rack is to organize your equipment and save space. And usually the rack gets put in a closet somewhere nowhere near your computer with speakers.
    • The first thing I would do with something like this is get the highest quality MP3s I can. At 128Kbps, I could easily fill my nomad jukebox with trance mixes that go from merely cd-size to 3 hours (!). I now download at 160 to 192Kbps, so although it's still a lot of listening time available, I'll outgrow my nomad jukebox soon.
    • I've encountered the "navigation" problem with my ~6000 song mp3 collection. I was going to use something like grip/digital DJ but I'm more interested in rolling my own solution (no offense Mike, your tools are good). I think it's the geek in me looking for a project. So far I've got a SQL database and the beginnings of some perl for ripping/storing CDs/metadata. I had the benefit of scripting ripping software at a previous job where we ripped 1,000 CDs and enconded via various mp3 encoders and vorbis, so I've got a good foundation to build on.

      In the end, I'm shooting to hook up my Vaio laptop to the home stereo. Combine that with NFS over an 802.11b wireless network and the digital optical output (skip the laptop's inferior soundcard) and it should be a pretty decent system.

      Oh, navigation. That's what I meant to be talking about...besides having verbose filenames/directories, allowing the if you provide the database with 2 or more genres (or genre/subgenre) navigation isn't terribly difficult. Plus if you represent genres as some sort of adjency matrix you could implement a random play mode that wouldn't jump genres too harshely.
    • A good point - I would imagine that you could upload playlists to the box in the same way as you upload the MP3 tracks. That way the only on-the-fly control you'd need would be your standard audio controls + an add and remove playlist facility.

      Here's hoping they've got a decent way of getting the tracks on the box in the first place.

    • Is how do you navigate through 80gb of content?

      Very easily. Ok, I've only got 8 gigs of mp3s, but navigating through my collection is still not a problem in the least. I just have a directory structure that goes something like C:\music\Band Name\Album Name\mp3s. Compilation albums go into C:\music\Various Artists. It's just like any large physical album collection I might have, only it alphebetizes itself. Navigating through my mp3 collection has never given me any difficulty. And if I ever get a lot more bands' mp3s, I can just categorize the Band Name directories in Genre directories.

      As far as I've seen, most portable mp3s players haven't been able to catch onto the value on a directory structure. With the tiniest bit of discipline and a directory structure, organizing a very large mp3 collection is not difficult at all.
    • I just bought a Genica hard drive based player. You can create winamp or winamp compatible playlists on the PC, and then choose among those playlists on the portable device, eliminating the problem of how to find the music you like on such a large device.
  • Didn't EMpeg (a british company that I _thought_ got bought out by Rio) have an 80GB in-dash (and I suspect component model as well) mpeg player over a year ago? A guy I knew had a 20GB version in his truck that was pretty slick, and when I checked, they went up to 80GB. That being said, they were pretty expensive at the time...well over $1K.
    • They have a cradle inside that holds 2x 2.5 inch laptop drives. Several owners have units that have been upgraded to 96gb (2x 48gb drives)

      Someone (IBM I think) just released a 60gb laptop drive, so it's only a short time until someone has a 120gb eMpeg player.

      Additionally, a digital radio tuner is available, so the eMpeg can be a complete replacment for the head unit in you car. Oh, and it's removable and has additional outputs so you can take it inside and connect it directly to your home stereo.

      And it should be noted that the eMpeg firmware/OS (Linux powered as if you didn't know) is constantly being upgraded and new features added. How many other car stereos can say that? (or that they have built in Ethernet)

      Production has ceased, but the units are still available (until stock runs out). And the prices were just cut: I think the 10gb Rio Car is now $799

      for more info: check out http://www.riohome.com/CarAudio.htm [riohome.com]

      -Mp
    • The Empeg (RioCar) also copes with new formats - Ogg Vorbis will be probably be added by the guys there if there is enough call for it. They have said that although they aren't producing any more, they will still support and develop.

      And the visuals are lovely.

      And you can play Tetris on it, although you have to turn your head on one side:)

  • What they don't tell you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CmdrTroll ( 412504 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:30PM (#2540560) Homepage
    This is even better than it sounds. One of my buddies bought the do-it-yourself kit and he found that they send you full source code listings for the entire unit (under a "do not distribute" license of course), which allows you to erase and re-burn the firmware EEPROMs. Very handy. He has already experimented with recompiling them to change some of the prompts and things look encouraging.

    It would be *very* nice if other manufacturers followed suit, but I'm not holding my breath... (It would also be nice if the sources were GPL, but I'm not complaining.)

    -CT

    • Whatever happened to Heathkit? They used to rock when it came to supplying do-it-yourself electronic kits. It looks like heathkit.com [heathkit.com] does primarily educational stuff. It's a shame. It guess there isn't much room for soldering in a surface mount world, but it would still be cool if more companies had kits like this.

      • Unfortunately Heathkit quit producing electronics kits about 10 years ago. However, EBay usually has quite a few older Heathkit amplifiers up for auction at any time. Their audio equipment was very high quality considering the reasonable prices of the kits. There are a lot of companies nowadays producing other audio electronics kits that are also very good, though.
    • Check out pjrc's board [pjrc.com]

      This site is slashdotted, so I can't really see what they've got. I did find in google's cache [google.com] a copy of the image on that page though.

      It looks like this player does not have much buffering to speak of. So it wouldn't be very useful for a portable player. This one looks like a commendable effort, but I'd recommend PRJC.com if you're doing a portable player - large SDRAM means you can spin down the drive. Plus it's open source!

  • Cool... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by C0vardeAn0nim0 ( 232451 )
    Enough storage to rip an entire CD colection at 196 kbps... Better sound without worring about space...

    If my iPaq had all this space...
  • Ok, so how do we navigate through this thing? I mean my minidisk player holds 20-30 songs and its a bitch thumbing through them all. Now lets see, 1500 songs is roughly 6 gig (a decent sample due to its randomness of songs selected) meaning that we could put... well alot of music on this thing (roughly 20,000). Thats great but... it would be quicker to rebuild my pc everywhere I go to access all that. I'm sure they have a gui and a fine one but still... who wants to go through 20,000 songs one-by-one?
    • read their site. it seems they've patented a concept called "directories" that lets you use a tree like structure to recursively subdivide your music files into different groups...
      • it seems they've patented a concept called "directories" that lets you use a tree like structure to recursively subdivide your music files into different groups...

        BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

        just my $0.02. . .

  • Neo (Score:5, Informative)

    by ScrO ( 221643 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:38PM (#2540626)
    You can get a similar unit, and put whatever hard drive you want in it, for less. It's called the Neo, it's been out for quite a while, and is a decent piece of work. It connects to your computer via IDE, comes with connections for your car and a remote display so you can install it in your trunk, under your seat, wherever, if you can't fit it in your dash. You can get it with a 60GB drive for $549. Learn more at http://www2.funmp3players.com/ [funmp3players.com]. It's firmware is upgraded on a regular basis too. Be aware that only the people that have problems post to the message board there, don't let it deter you. (=

    As for hard drives, I bought an 80GB drive solely for MP3s ($179), and it's a little over 40GB filled with my CD collection ripped (at 192KBPS). I can forsee 80GB being to small in a couple of years.

    ScrO!
  • Wow I can't even think of 40 gigs worth of songs I like let alone 80 gigs just for bringing around with me. 80 gigs for a portabe?? wow


  • I dont know how come so many companies are still persuing this when the RIAA is hell bent on stopping anyoen from ripping CD's be it your own CD or not. whats the point of investing $800 for something that wont allow me to rip and play the CD I just bought. BTW, any CD I purchase that does not play on my CD I return as being faulty. no sence in purchasing something I can't use, regardless of what is says on the lable
    • Hmm, that day must have snuck up on us because If I didn't know better, I still ripped a couple of brand new (prerelease) cds last week.

      The day u can't rip cds will be the same day the United States stamps out terrorism and Micro$oft ends warez trading. It's an abstract war than can't be won. the Riaa brings down one p2p, 8 more pop up, or someone finds out about IRC or USENET or some other flavor of mp3 trading.

      As for being unable to rip cds, if someone really wants to rip cds and can't even get CD paranoia or someother l33t program to rip the tracks, whats to stop them from recording directly from the Audio Out? As long as there is one geek out there willing to do the work, mp3s are still going to be around.

  • Enough for everyone (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nau.dk ( 444316 ) <slashdot DOT org AT nau DOT dk> on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:41PM (#2540656) Homepage
    "80 Gigabyte should be enough for everyone"

    /Andreas

  • The problem is... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 )
    ... getting data into this thing, especially when securely mounted on my car. Not that I'd complain or anything - this thing is monstrous. But I find myself downloading to my 20GB MP3 player time and again because I just found this great new song that I want to listen to.

    There's got to be a better way, like a modularized HD assembly with basic USB or FireWire conectivity that you can lug to your PC and back to the car. Sure would beat those MP3 car players that do CD-R's.

    • Actually, a wireless connection to your home system.
      You pull into the garage, your computer checks its playlist vs the cars, and makes any changes on the fly.
      Of course even at 10Mb downloading all 80 gig at once would be time consuming,but that would just be an annoyance

  • WOW!! (Score:1)

    by NovaD ( 532082 )
    You know, the more that I think about it, the less that I would call myself a music junkie, right now I have about 7 gigs of music, I thought that was a lot, but with some of the pople here having 7 times that, well i'm just plain pathetic in that regard. OOh well guess I'll have to start downloading music that I don't care about to be an uper geek
  • I didn't see any information on what inputs or outputs this thing supports.

    How do you get the files onto the device? Does it use firewire or USB and show up as a removable storage device under your OS (Windows/MacOS/etc) Can you rip a CD directly on the device, like that product we heard about from HP a few days ago?

  • Audio Quality? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PoiBoy ( 525770 )
    Being able to store 80 GB of music in MP3 format may be useful to some, but how good does it sound?

    First, taking music off a CD and reformating into MP3 results in some degradation. Much more importantly, however, just because music is digitally stored does not mean it will be audiophile quality. Storing bits of data is one thing. Converting them to high fidelity audio is arguably much more difficult. Go to Circuit City and listen to your favorite CD, and then go to an audio shop and listen to a good CD player such as the Rega Planet 2000 through a good amplifier and speakers. If you don't notice a huge difference, next go to the Beltone dealer nearest you and have your hearing checked.

    For one company's solution to the problem of computer-based music, go to www.12dax7.com. They produce a preamplifier that uses the USB port, high quality DACs, and 12AX7 vacuum tubes (!) to produce a decent audio output.

    I have a slightly different idea from the 12dax7 on the drawing board (and hopefully doable for about 1/3 the price!)

    • FYI, CD's are digital, so when you play them on your stereo it is still converted from digital -> analog. You could jut hook your computer to an amplifier and use it as a part of your normal audio system. There are some soundcards that can produce quality that you distinguise from a good CD player.
      By the way an audiophile listens to the music not the quality. You're saying that you can't enjoy listening to old records while most DJ's still use vinyl.
      • You said ... "By the way an audiophile listens to the music not the quality. You're saying that you can't enjoy listening to old records while most DJ's still use vinyl."

        It's impossible to really listen to music if the quality is poor. Listening to some jazz music through a boombox is nothing like listening to it through a good stereo system with a nice wide, deep soundstage, flat frequency response, etc. And, yes, I do listen to vinyl, and some of my records are quite old.

    • Re:Audio Quality? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:34PM (#2540949) Homepage
      and be sure the audio shop uses that $30.00 a food no-ox wires, they sound better......NOT

      99.995% of the audio you hear is the preamp-amp and speakers. NOTHING at a general store is decent. Hell my 1986 Bose 301's sound 70% better than any bose 301 in the stores now... My La-scalas sound immensely better than anything sold at any electronics store.

      dont even try to say that a $1000.00 CD player sounds better than my $250.00 Pioneer. I remember the audiophile scams when CD's came out... The Acoustical Lens to corect the horible wavefront distortion that CD's have.... pure BS to try and sucker someone into buying a $1500.00 box.

      Buy a decent amp, preamp and speakers... dont waste big bucks on a CDplayer or DVD player... only the uneducated buyer thinks that more expensive is better in the CD or DVD realm.
      • Respectfully, I must disagree. A $1000 CD player probably will sound better than your $250 Pioneer. It just likely won't sound 4x better. Having a decent amp, preamp and speakers is nice, but all they are doing is making the signal they receive louder. If they receive a crap signal (and I am not saying that your Pioneer is putting out a crap signal), you are going to hear nothing but loud crap.

        For the record, I spent a grand total of less than $1000 on the whole audio portion of my HT setup, and it sounds good enough for me.

        • Re:Audio Quality? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Friday November 09, 2001 @11:23AM (#2543238) Homepage
          when it comes to common sense than that would be true. But today EVERYBODY uses the same basic hardware. Home Theatre Magazine reviewed 30 DVD players and 30 CD players. The highest marks on DVD players was to the latest APEX dvd player... best video best sound, it beat out the B&O , $1500.00 DVD player hands down, the apex unit is $229.95.

          In Cd players the mentioned that if it doesnt have digital out, dont buy it. otherwise there was no perceptable difference from the $199.00 unit to the $3200.00 cd player they tested. (They also mentioned that audiophiles that use Scopes to check for better specs are either stupid or rich as only a dummie would pay huge dollars for something that you cant hear.)

          It's sctually very interesting to research Audio and so-called audiophiles... several audio masters, the great men that designed the awesome audio of today remark that a great majority of "high-end-audiophiles" are just spoiled rich kids that really dont know anything, and are coloring their hearing because they spent $50,000 on their stereo... A human cannot hear the differnce between Silver no-ox cables or 12gague lamp cord in a home stereo or commercial audio install. and many of the perceptions that people swear by are either artifical coloring of the audio (Ala Tube Amps, they sound different) or reflections.

          research the audiophile world, it's pretty funny and will give you new insight on how to snicker when a salesman trys to say that that $2700.00 Nakamitchi is the only choice in high end audio.
  • I've got 143 GB to date....

    I may just need a beowulf of these....
  • We have well over 100GB,.. and that doesn't include ripping entire CD's, for many CD's we only rip the songs we like. If we ripped every song from every CD, it would probably be a 300GB collection at least. So for those of you thinking 80GB is a lot,.. think twice. It only took me about 4 years to go from a few songs ripped from a few CD's taking up a few MB,.. to what I have now which is a MASSIVE collection of music, built mostly from ripping mine and my friends CD collections. I have at least 4 friends with 1000+ CD collections. Currently they are mostly played through my Rio 60GB car stereo (or most of them at least) and a custom Linux based jukebox based on mp3sb.
  • I don't know who has anywhere near enough MP3 music to need an 80G drive

    While this undoubtably has the capacity to fit a moderate (300 - 500) CD collection a few times over I'm sure the extra capacity would easily be put to good use.

    I imagine you'd even fill it with MP3's of CD's you didn't particularly like just to accomodate things like parties/entertaining etc. (afterall that is the point of a jukebox)

    Then there's the possibilty of burning at much higher bit rates etc.

    80GB is definitely not a problem
  • Why use the mp3 format when you have 80 gig. With that much space it would be easy to just copy over a WAV file and have high quality music stuffed into a small package. If done right, it could be quite the CD killer.

  • kaaamaaa hoooo (Score:2, Informative)

    by Nate Fox ( 1271 )
    Obligitory google cache link cause the site's hosed:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:IJYiCWaUCWc:w ww.reality.be/demo/sbac/+&hl=en [google.com]
    Course, pictures are slow if at all, but if you want to there's http://images.google.com/ [google.com]

  • Wireless (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lavaforge ( 245529 )
    This is cool and all, but I'd like to see a wireless network interface built into a dash unit. There would be nothing cooler than refreshing your available playlist by just driving in front of your house.
  • ...and counting. The dedicated mp3 server at my student apartment building. really great to have around. Cheers,

    Mike.

  • Disproportionate (Score:2, Informative)

    by byrd77 ( 171150 )
    Why is it that companies insist on charging so much more for larger drives? The difference between the 20G model and the 80G model is 264 dollars - There is no way the drive itself cost that much more. The same thing was true of the eMpeg - the bigger drive was almost a thousand dollars more there. Until marketers of MP3 devices start to price rationally, savvy customers are just going to ignore them. Profit margin doesn't mean much if you can't get revenues in the first place...

  • Enough for several radio stations... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by srvivn21 ( 410280 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @09:28PM (#2541191)
    From the article [mp3newswire.net]:

    A commercial rack unit, this player is targeted for radio stations and the like. When you realize that 80GB can probably hold the entire active libraries of most stations...


    Let's be greedy, and assume that the stations encode their music in such a way that each song takes 10MB. There is still room for 8,000 songs. That (from my very subjective viewpoint) seems like a lot more variety than any radio station I have heard in a really long time.
    • You apparently listen to the wrong station. Try KEXP [kexp.org]. Guaranteed to have enough vareity for all but the most pretentious listener (check out their review page [kexp.org] for a better idea of the vareity).

      Plus, they are, I believe, the only station in the world that broadcasts an uncompressed stream (true CD quality. Unfortunately the uncompressed stream requires WMP).
    • I've heard 2 different stations (both classic rock) do the gimmick of 'play everything in the playlist in alphabetical order'. The station in Oklahoma City took about 10 days to do so, whereas the one here in Atlanta took 21 or 22 days. I dunno how good mp3 compression is at high bitrates nowadays, but some quick back-of-envelope (ok, so I did it in bc, but) calculation comes up with 9250 minutes or around 6.4 days worth of space for raw wav files in 80G.

  • Interfaces? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jpellino ( 202698 )
    Looks like it's serial or USB. Anyone know for sure?
    If so, Yikes. What can we know:
    10 min to transfer 5 GB over FireWire;
    x 16 to fill 80 GB - 160 min
    x 33.3 if you move from 400 FW to 12 USB
    Sooo... something like 88 hours to fill via USB? That's half a week.

    Bet that iPod's looking pretty practical right about now?
  • You can also assemble your own mp3 player pretty easily and put whatever hard drive you like on it. I was just re-reading the old "Hackable Christmas Presents" story from not too long ago, and saw this link:

    http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/ [pjrc.com]

    The board that's sold here only cost $150. And 80 gig hard drives only go for $139 on pricewatch.com. You would have to make your own case, but so what? Plus, the firmware is GPL'ed and flashable. What more could you need?

    $800 just seems way too expensive to me.
  • By the way, what do you use for a hard drive in an automotive environment? Temp -30 to +50C, with heavy vibration. That's a tough spec. Are there drives that can thrive in that environment?

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