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Music Media

5GB portable MP3 Player 231

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
DrunkGiz writes, "Remote Solution's PJB 100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs), and incorporates an IBM 4.86 gigabyte, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB 100 equates to less than $10 per playback hour vs. $250 per playback hour for flash-media storage units. " Now we're getting somewhere: 5 gigs starts being reasonable, 15 would be better, but hey ;)
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5GB portable MP3 Player More

5GB portable MP3 Player

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  • now that's what i call storage. it's about damn time they used a drive instead of solid state stuff.

    and since it's got that much space, we just have to convince 'em to drop a vga card in so we can use our winamp plugins. =)

  • It can store 82 hours of music, but can it _play_ 82 hours of music? I'd be curious to battery life, even with the buffering.

    What're the shock ratings of the IBM HD?

    Also, good idea putting USB on it!

  • Nice. I wonder if there's a power-control jack so my car's computer can upload scheduled audio to it overnight. I see the USB interface mentioned, but don't know if it will like being ON 24 hours a day...
  • With a wireless LAN and an IDE interface.

    Park outside your house and download.

    Then hack it to allow downloads from other cars.

  • Another rather cool MP3 player (Score:4)

    by G27 Radio ( 78394 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @06:48AM (#1230672)
    Here's a link to an MP3 player that is shaped like a cassette tape. It works in a tape deck, or you can plug headphones into it directly. It's only got 32MB, but I wouldn't mind having one.

    cli ck here for picture [cotrade.com]

    numb
  • I would guess the the RIAA is going to try and have a fieild day with them...especially after finding out that MP3s made them lose -900000 in sales. On a tangent, I wonder how feasable using DvDs in portable MP3 players would be. nearly the same amount of storage space, and the ability to add another drive for pennies a gig!!

  • Wow, new news (Score:3)

    by cronio ( 13526 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @06:48AM (#1230674) Homepage
    Hmm, wasn't this posted like a year ago? Lets see...that story would be here [slashdot.org]

  • It's a lithium ion rechargeable, and they claim both "Extended battery life through advanced" (whatever that means) and "Extended battery life through advanced MP3 buffering" to 12 megs of dram. But it would've been nice to know how much people will have to plug this thing in between plays (unless it really is just a glorified luggable).

    And ten ounces, while still less than a pound, is not what I consider lightweight.

    And is anyone else rendering the page as a gross combination of purple and yellow backgrounds? (White text on yellow background, what a wonderful idea!)
  • From the FAQ:


    Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I getspecifications for the programming interfaces for the PJBor the USB protocol?

    A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.


    Boo!

  • I have concerns with hard disk based MP3 players. How shock resistant are these hard disk players? Or rather, how shock resistant are the hard disks inside of them? I wouldn't want to buy one of these players, if I was afraid to take it anywhere, for fear or wrecking the hard disk.
  • I think it's worth waiting for FMD [byte.com], if you get rewritables of these, you can listen to your MP3's making a trip around the world in 80 days, without putting it on repeat.

    For the mean time, it sounds very interesting.

  • price (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02, 2000 @06:51AM (#1230679)
    i dunno if any of you guys bothered to look at the webpage. the price isn't exactly on the front page. it's $749. i'd rather buy a laptop, personally.
  • Damn, won't the RIAA just pee their pants when everyone on the freeway is napstering back and forth...

    Might as well do something instead of just sitting there sucking smog...

  • Now this is something I will buy!

    I'm not sure how many gigs of MP3s I have available to me. But the players that have only 64MB of RAM? Huh? Figure 3-5MB for a song (get up to the higher quality ones and it can be more) and I can only hold an album-and-a-half or so. What's the point of that?

    So the MP3 player is smaller. That doesn't matter at all to me if I'm stuck with the same 10-20 songs unless I go back ot my computer. If I took a long trip I'd probably want to kill myself by the end of it from hearing the same music over and over again! I'd much rather take a CD walkman and a a CD wallet with 15 CDs. The disc player is bigger than the MP3 one, sure, but not that much bigger. The wider music selection more than makes up for the extra size.

    I always said that when an MP3 player could hold multiple gigs of music I'd consider buying one. I believe that day has arrived!

  • This sounds nifty, especially for long airplane trips, which is where my exisiting MP3 player still sucks. Unfortunately, the player with the hard drive, at almost 10 oz. is a pretty bad solution for excercising.

    How about someone come up with a "combo" type player. Eg.) a traditional small player with flash memory, with an "expansion port" to attach a hard drive module.

  • Cool, but still expensive (Score:3)

    by Refried Beans ( 70083 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @06:54AM (#1230683) Homepage
    $10 per playback hour sounds good but $10 per hour times 80 hours = $800. Ouch! That's still expensive. I would pay spend $200 for 5 hours of portable music. If I need 80 hours, I'll spend $200 on a hard drive for my desktop.
  • This really is a little old. The PJB has been around for a little while now, and the reason people haven't been jumping all over it is the prohibitive cost. For that much money, why not just have a laptop that you can pitch in your car with a power adaptor and line out feed into an amp? The size of the thing really makes it unsuitable for much more than car listenting. I wouldn't exactly go jogging with a device that uses a hard drive either.
  • a couple of days ago. Thought it was at Sharper Image but couldn't locate it just now. I've got the link at home, I'm sure (doubt I can use this incident to cost justify a laptop in my wife's eyes --- maybe if I just say, "I needed some information today...")

    carlos

  • I plan to get one for the car that I can plug into my stereos audio in. Then just take it with me when I am walking around. I have a jeep so CD's get easily scratched and dinged up if the visor case migrates to the floor. At least with this I can make a shock mounting for it and just plug it in.
  • Are you kidding me!?!? Finally someone comes out with a device that actually demonstrates the definitive advantages of MP3 and it costs $800 bucks - WTF?

    If someone out there has the embedded systems knowledge, would you please slap a decoder onto a CDROM drive so we can have portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism - While it wouldn't be an ass-kickin' 5Gb, by using technology that is extremely cheap (Open Source Decoder, CD-ROM player & disc) you can put this thing out with a low price point and a high enough margin to make it worthwile to manufacture...
  • I'd kind of hope that the wonders of MP3 technology wouldn't be limited to portable units.

    Does anybody know anything about mp3 players for your car (I've already seen the cassette adaptor, I'm talking about the real deal)?

    I've even heard someone say something about putting a pc in their car to play mp3's (on a /. thread). Does anybody have any clairvoyance into this matter?

  • hoo yeah! that's what I'm talkin about. :) I'd DEFINITELY buy this thing. at the moment I have a burner, and I burn my favorite mp3s onto audio CDs so I can listen to them. this would be a tremendously useful tool to me, so I can concentrate on saving my blank CDRs for important documents and system backups.

    but, man, $750? :( time to start collecting loose change...

  • Coming up in Q2 of this year, Creative are releasing the Nomad Jukebox, a 6GB Digital Music Player. Note digital music, not MP3. This thing is supposed to have a DSP chip in it with changeable codecs. It'll play MP3 and WAV as standard... but I want a 6GB VQF portable. Then I can laugh at the technology curve. Check Nomadworld [nomadworld.com] for the info. I want one already. VQF. Mmm.

  • I still prefer solid state (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For a portable device like this, I think that solid state is better. Just the tought of having a hard drive on me when riding a bike or snowboarding (for example) makes me pretty sure it will crash sometime due to the vibrations or schock.
  • From the web site at http://www.mp3factorydirect.com/shop.html :
    Note: Please make sure you have the following hardware and software to insure that you can use all of the features of the Personal Jukebox: a Pentium PC running Windows 98, a USB port, and CDROM reader.
    I'm sure this will go over big with /. readers (even those of us who dual boot between Linux and NT).

  • Battery Life (Score:3)

    by Blue_Fox ( 112308 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @06:58AM (#1230694)
    A friend of mine is off touring New Zealand with one of these units in his pack. Battery life is about 10 hours, or about half of the flight there. The unit fires up the hard drive to load a song in memory and then shuts the drive down. Shutting down the hard drive will also improve the drop survival, since the parked drive will withstand much more than a spinning drive. I still wouldn't want to drop test the unit too often!
  • did you read this in the FAQ? no linux support!

    Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?

    A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.

    Sorry, but I think that's LAME
  • Good:
    -It has 5 gig.
    -It looks cool.
    -It encodes regular CD tracks to MP3.
    -It supports CDDB for track & disk titles.

    Bad:
    -Hard drive == corruption is possible
    -"Familiar Windows "Explore" model for viewing and managing Jukebox content" (Where do I want to go?)
    -$10/listening hour seems great until you realize that the unit is about $800!
    -Damn! $800 for a stupid MP3 player?!? WTF???
    -Oh, that is all of the bad...

    Well if $$ was not an option, I would go for it. Oh, and I am sure we went through this whole thing on /. before...
    Perhaps here [slashdot.org] or here [slashdot.org]

    In fact, I think that all of the above goods and bads were outlined in the comments of these articles too! Oh well...it is still a cool device..
  • Does anybody know anything about mp3 players for your car (I've already seen the cassette adaptor, I'm talking about the real deal)?

    Try mp3car.com [mp3car.com]. There's some cool stuff on there, including DIY info.
  • There's an MP3 CD player out there called MamboX which seems very cool. It supports just about anything (MP3s, especially). You can burn tons of CDs and never run out of space, and each CD is only $1 or so (depends where you shop). Of course, it's $170, and a decent CD-RW is around $200 at best. But hey, I think it'd be worth it. Just picture this, after pirating like 20 CDs, you'll have gained $200 worth of CDs for free! So inactuallity, you're SAVING money! ;)
  • I'd rather have a CD player that can play CDs with MP3s burned on them. 80 hours? I mean really, who needs 80 hours of music. 6 hours on 1 cd is plenty for me.. and it's pretty easy to carry more cds. I also don't know if I trust hard drive technology in portable format. Something that small, with a HD in it, I wonder how it stands up to a jog in the park. You can pre order CD MP3 players, only 2 I know of (i'm sure there are more), check out theMambo X [mambox.com] and theD'Music [pineusa.com]. Each is not much more expensive than a regular CD player.
  • I do believe you're referring to something like MegaCar [megacar.com]. =)

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • This is why they use 2.5" notebook drives instead of just a normal hard drive. Notebook drives aren't unbreakable but they can handle a lot more abuse than a normal drive. My notebook has been thrown around in airports and cabs and still works just fine. The downside is that notebook drives are very expensive in relation to normal drives. Upgrading from a 4GB to a 10GB can be VERY costly.
  • I am still waiting for a cheap CD player that will play both audio and MP3 cd's. I think I saw one advertised once but I assume it ended up in the vaporware bin. Forget this hard drive crap.. 80 hours is nice, but 12 hours * unlimited CD's is nicer! Anyone got any info about something like this?
  • Most of the time I'm at a computer nowadays, I've got at least a 1.5Kb/sec connection to the internet. Add 11Kb/s wireless connection to the mix (IEEE 802.11), make it pervasive, and all you need is some big, fat disk somewhere serving up your entire CD collection.

    Or write "Napster-on-the-Fly" and listen to other people's CD collections! ;-)
  • I honestly don't think that I could be bothered to cue up 80 hours of music; in fact, I don't think I even have 80 hours of music that I would want to listen to.....

    What would be nice if someone made the portable PSX that was being rumoured a while back: PSX on the back seat of the bus; now that would be cool ;)
  • USB, 4.3GB, etc are interesting but what I'm waiting for is something with these specs:

    IP addressable/Ethernet support for home networks
    Built in CD Player/Software for ripping
    Remote Control
    Standard Component Outputs
    Napster Support
    20 GB storage

  • mp3 vs MD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've had a MD player for years and years now. None of the current mp3 players excited me in anyway. They were just an expensive MD machine with fast write times and very limited storage. For a couple bucks I can buy another mini disc as opposed to shelling out for another 32megs..

    Despite costing $750 this technology does interest me. Finally a mp3 player thats more than just an geeky MD alternative! I can't wait to get one.

    We've known for years mp3 compression like this were going to replace ATRAC compression and MDs and this is the first one with a "buy now" button that is actually worth it.

    YAY!

  • http://www.empeg.com/ [empeg.com]

    Now that's what you want! A little bit pricey, but loads of space, and it runs linux :)

    I recall reading about what these guys were doing a while ago. Apparently, the original implementation had a radio link, so the guy could upload / download mp3s to his car while it was parked in the garage. Now why doesn't someone big like Compaq do something like that?

    Nik.

  • I remember seeing a portable MP3 player with a base station at COMDEX. It looked great because the base station could hold a bunch of tunes (as well as encode) and could quickly transfer a portion to the portable player.

    Now if someone really wants to make a cool product, make a portable player with multiple "docks." One dock for my computer, one for my home stereo, one for my car, one for my cube, etc.

    I think it would be awesome to just carry my entire CD library as MP3 anywhere and just plug it in, most importantly in my car. Right now the biggest CD player for a car is 50 made by Pioneer, I love it because it's huge, but quality-wise it is a big piece of shit.

    Also, I should definitely support Airport (or other 802.11) wireless networking so I could up/download to the player in the car form my machine in my room.

    _________________________________________

  • Really now, for 750 bucks is this thing really worth it? I would rather build my own for much less money, using PC104 boards, and pick a hard drive of my own choosing. This would cost less, and have MUCH more functionality than just a simple mp3 player. The Lizzy design by Thad Starner at MIT Wearables is a good example of how a machine using these PC104 boards gives flexibility and a fairly decent amount of power in a small package. I know what the first thing I will do when I start my new job is...


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
  • I think this will mean the RIAA will try to ban cars.
  • direct411.com has a listing for a portable mp3 cd player from a company called "Mambo". It's listed as being available for pre-order and will be released mid-February 2000, so I'm not sure what that means exactly. Cost is $200 and battery life is (claimed) 14 hours (making it just perfect for my 10 hour mp3 cd's + still have some battery left over).

    Here's the URL:

    Mambo portable MP3 cd player [direct411.com]

    Anyone else know anything about these and when they might be released?
  • I have the same problem...it's not solid state.

    Sure, a notebook drive might be better than a cheaper desktop drive, but it's still not that resistent to bumps and knocks...I've seen lot's of notbook drives go bad, but (relatively speaking) few desktop drives go bad.

    Those notebook drives might be good getting bumped around in a cab or an overhead compartment, but they don't normally have such abuse when they are being used.

    In other words, I want something with recordable music that I can jog with.


    ----------

  • Kenwood recently announced a car MP3 deck [kenwoodcorp.com] in Japan. I can't read Japanese so I have no idea what the specs are. The picture clearly shows an MP3 track being played and displayed. Any of you Japanese-fluent /.'ers care to translate? Support for car MP3 players from Kenwood should mean that the other big audio companies will offer car support as well very soon, meaning price drops and better products.
  • Go look at Mambo X (http://www.mambox.com)

    MUCH more reasonable approach. Your MP3s already on CD-R? Why not just plug them into a $200 player, with NO DOWNLOADING.

    Taiwan IC plant was destroyed holding up production of Mambo X. I'm still waiting on mine.

    Wonder how big the lawsuit is going to be for this player once the guys at http://www.empeg.com find out about it?? Empeg is a Linux box!...(c;

    Larry
  • It sure would be nice to be able to take my music with me, too bad its so much. I could probably justify 500 bucks for a gadget like this, but 700+ .....nope. I guess you get what you pay for though.
  • For some reason, the HTML formatting I entered didnt work, so here's a good old fashioned plain text version of the URL at MIT:

    http://www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/lizz y/index.html


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
  • you can put this thing out with a low price point and a high enough margin to make it worthwile to manufacture...

    Very good idea! And if something like this really became a big deal, it would drive the prices on the other players down as well!
  • It's neat, of course, but it just makes me wonder (OK, so I'm weird) - what is going to be the REVOLUTIOARY development? Think about it, we've gotten to where CPU power is small and cheap, and storage is small and cheap (relatively). What's the next Big Step? I can't imagine that 10 years from now, I'm gonna be browsing on my new 4GB RAM 1TB HDD 2Ghz laptop. We are rapidly approaching (maybe we're already there?) the point where you stand up, look around, and ask yourself "What's the point?". My personal machine is as follows (to make a point) laptop with a 14.3" TFT, 18GB HDD, 384MB RAM, P3 500Mhz. I read email on this and browse the web. See what I mean? What's the point? Am I just waiting for the next "Killer App"? Or something altogether different????
  • Kenwood is supposed to have a car mp3 deck out this summer in the US. That's what I'm holding out for.

    If you want to read the information straight from Kenwood, look at The Response To My Post On Kenwood's Support Board [kenwoodusa.com]


    --
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Mambo X MP3 cd player update (Score:3)

    by Gutzalpus ( 121791 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @07:24AM (#1230723)
    Here is information on the release of the Mambo X MP3 portable cd player as to why it hasn't been released yet (I noticed this device mentioned in numerous messages in this thread...):

    From: Jason Moh, Director of Product Marketing
    To: All MAMBO-X P300 Enthusiasts
    Date: December 31, 1999

    As some of you may be aware, we have experienced a delay in the production of the Mambo-X. The date has been pushed to March. We understand that this has been cause for concern with getting the product to market, and that both resellers and users would like to know the current status. We would like to address the problem.

    The player works, and performs well under normal conditions. Even with most stress testing, it works fine, and would not have any problems for the majority of users. However, during our extended stress testing, we found a problem that could potentially cause temporarily degraded performance for some users; It doesn't involve any physical defect that could break the unit, but rather is a technical one that could affect the playing in certain specific situations. We have found the source of the problem and are implementing an effective solution, which will allow production to go forward. Since this one issue is the only one that has come up with the player, we don't foresee any additional delays in production or shipping.

    It is our belief that our users deserve the highest quality for an item like this, and we genuinely want to deliver a superior product to our customers. We greatly appreciate everyone's patience in this situation, and we are confident that everyone will find the result to be worthwhile.

    Sincerely,

    Jason Moh
    Director of Product Marketing
    Tagram System Corporation

    The URL for this letter [mambox.com]

  • Been a /. headline before (Score:3)

    by [Xorian] ( 112258 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @07:25AM (#1230724)

    Maybe Rob should consider consolidating and/or eliminating the now-you're-talking department and the now-we're-getting-somewhere department, because this is at least the third time that this exact same device has been a headline on /.:

  • I'm not sure what it is specifically, but i know it's something OBSCENE, like 140 G's. (!!!!) Check the IBM hardware page for the exact number. Generally though, IBM stuff is WAY over engineered. I had one of their old keyboards, and we tried over and over to break it and it woudn't break. not jumping on it, not driving over it with a trooper, not throwing it off the roof. The way we finally killed it (but only sort of) was we put it under a city bus.
  • You want this then:
    http://www.empeg.com [empeg.com]
  • It's called Mambo-X P300 [mambox.com]. Runs of AA batteries and will last for about 12 hours. Weighs 9.3oz and comes with a remote control.

    I like this one because as much as I am a mp3 freak, I still have an existing collection of over 300 cds. This gives you the option of playing mp3's or regular cds.

    --

  • From their FAQ,

    "Q: I want to copy the MP3s from my PJB-100 back to my PC. How do I do that?

    A: You cannot. To ensure that the PJB-100 complies with the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), It is not possible to retrieve the MP3 files from the PJB-100. You should physically posess each CD that you transfer to the PJB-100, or have rights to the material you download from the Internet"

    "Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?

    A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation. "

    Frankly, if they are going to treat their customers like children, they can take someone else's money. There is no way I am going to pay any amount of money for an audio device that is incapable of giving back the data that I put into it. This is the same despotic mentality that gave Intel the idea for encrypting the signal from your video card to your monitor. If I wanted that, I would pay for it. But I don't and no one else does either.

    There is just no reason for it other than removing the right to use something you own. Actually, that you license because of course, you can't really own anything anymore.
  • I recently got one of these. Rad device. There is something so amazingly cool when you can carry around music for whatever mood you are in. With that said... Have you ever tried to load a portable device with this much storage? SHEESH. Its like having a second job, I've spent at least 8 hours moving songs over to it from my pc and from some cds I hadn't converted to mp3 yet... and thats only to get about 650 songs on it.

    The PJB *is* a high ticket item, but don't worry it comes shipped like one. The headphones have exceptional bass reproduction. The leather case believe it or not is nice and cushy. The only two drawbacks I've noticed so far is the requirement for 98 (and no 95 with USB updates wont do) and my unit is solid black. Not something to impress your girl with on aesthetics.

    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • Where have you been?

    http://www.empeg.com -- it's based on ARM and it runs Linux.
    --
  • Here [empeg.com] is a pricy pre-made one.
    Here [carplayer.com] is a much cheaper one that is also pre-made.
    And This [ryanspc.com] is all you need to know to make your own car MP3 player!
  • Hmmm
    What's the largest 2.5" drive you have seen?
    Anyone know if it take the 12mm drives or just the 8(?)mm ones?
    14Gb 12mm ones are about 250GBP that would be about 3.5 times the playback :-)
  • Do you need such large amounts of storage in a portable machine? I'd be more than happy to file away the Gb of MP3s on CD-Rs or HDDs or whatever and only squirt in (or transfer direct from audio CDs) what I needed temporarily, enough for the 2-3-4 hours I was actually going to be mobile.

    How stable is the HDD going to be for mobile users? The solid state's greatest marketing point over CDs and MiniDisc walkmen is no moving parts. Nothing to jog.

    256Mb of RAM (oh, go on then, 512Mb) will suffice - that's more than enough for a journey, you can refresh from your laptop when you get there!
  • Yeah - that is just a bit out of range for a portable mp3 player. When it comes down to ~$300, tho...
  • It's a cute start, but, I think they're jumping on this one a little too fast. I mean, I agree, it's a good idea, but, I have way over 5 GIG of MP3's. The other idea that occurred to me was perhaps using this idea, and putting it in a car.

    -genome-
    human genome project

  • Manufacturer's web site: http://www.romemp3.com/ [romemp3.com] - Wired News [wired.com] reviewed it a couple days ago.

    They say that they're working on an upgraded version including 64MB and an LCD display... I might be convinced to shell out for the 64MB version (would be nice to be able to play my tunes in my car).
    ________________________

  • I have wondered for years why someone hasn't just put a decoder chip inside a cd player and let people burn cd's with mp3's on them, or the recording industry selling mp3 discs? Oh wait, they would never do this, what am i thinking. Maybe someone could modify existing cd players to play mp3's?
  • Don't you EVER do that again!!!

    Do you have any idea how hard it is these days to find a keyboard that:

    a.) is of high quality
    b.) doesn't have Windows keys
    c.) has the damn backslash key where it freaking belongs?

    I'm down to my last one of those old IBM PS/2 keyboards, and if anyone wants it, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

    :-)
  • Is it really worth that much?
  • With regards to the article posted a few days ago, what will the cd industries reation be to this new player? Will they cower in terror from the immmense negative losses?

    Will they be able to cope with a negative 2 billion dollar loss, or a negative 200 million drop in cd sales?

    only the future can tell....

  • As someone who administers about 70 Windoze machines, I have to say, the Windows key is nice. When I have to reboot an entire room (which happens a _lot_) it makes things much faster (Win, u, r, enter vs. Ctlr-Esc, u, r, enter).

    --

  • CmdrTaco posted about this same player back in November.


    It still hasn't shipped, two months past the release date stated in November.


    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/10/1118237.sh tml

  • http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/10/1118237.shtm l
  • If the 4.86GB laptop drive is the same as the one in my laptop (IBM DBCA-24860, I think), then expect this to make so much noise that you'll want to smash it to pieces. :-) I can't stand the noise that drive makes, it's much louder than modern 3.5" drives and the fact that the laptop's thin plastic case (HP Omnibook 4150) doesn't isolate noise well doesn't help either...
  • Last time I checked you couldn't scratch a MP3 player and it would stop working, like a CD. It will also *never* skip like my portable CD player does. It also holds *whatever* songs I want, in whatever order. I don't have time to burn homemade music CD's, when I could spend 1/2 of the time downloading the info to the MP3 player. And if you have a Nomad, you can listen to the radio, or use the Voice option. Need I go on?

    Having this amount of space for music is ludicrous, you would never listen to all of it...that would be like giving me a 100GB harddrive at home. I could put everything I own on there and would still have over 80% of it free, and I wouldn't use most of the shit anyway.

  • You can get the player for $700 if you buy two of them [mp3factorydirect.com]. It's still rather expensive, but for the one who was going to buy one anyway, it is a nice extra. ' Just needs to find someone else as rich as him, or as frantic about getting this new toy...

    So who is interested?
  • What would rock:

    A Bluetooth (or similar-protocol-enabled) MP3 player that would allow you to skim the playlists of OTHER MP3 players in its range, and either a) snag a copy for good or b) just play a song from the other's playlist while it's in range.

    Imagine pulling into a parking lot, and hitting the "scan" button... and getting a complete playlist of ALL the other players in the lot...

    As well, you could just dump tunes to it from your desktop (also Bluetoothed) machine while your car is sitting in the garage...

    RIAA, chew on that! :)

  • I own one of these (Score:5)

    by cullman ( 29958 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @08:13AM (#1230752)

    I have one of these for about, 3 months now. I love it. Here are some answers to the questions I've seen.

    Battery life: 10 Hours.

    Danger of using a hard drive: Small. Basically the PJB-100 reads the next ten minutes of music into ram, (this takes about 10 seconds). So the odds of dropping it in a 10 second period out of a 10 minute period are roughly 1 in 60 (or even exactly). Now the dangerous part in my opinion is when you are transferring mp3s. I've dropped mine twice when doing this, with no ill effects. This reading ahead scheme also helps battery life. The funny this is, regardless of how you're listening, random, sequential, repeat, etc... the pjb reads ahead. So if you are listening in shuffle mode and you switch to sequential, there is about a 1 second pause, and you hear the hard drive chirp for about 10 seconds, then it's done.

    Size : It is slightly bigger than one would want. It's about the volume of one the first sony sports walkmans. However, it's a little longer and wider, but less thick. It is by no means luggable. I have 3 pound sony laptop, I would never use it for mp3s now. For starters I can put the pjb-100 in my shirt pocket, basically keeping it out of the way while I'm working. Granted with it my pocket there is not much room for anything else. Also, it's very usable for skiing and snow boarding.

    Data transfer: It takes about 18 minutes to rip the average CD. One intersting thing I noticed, was that you can listen to other CDs on the player while you're rippng new ones. That's kinda cool. One other nice feature is you can create different play lists using the same song, with only one copy of the song one the player.

    Weaknesses: No graphic equalizer, you can only adjust the base from three settings. No backlighting on the LCD.

    Bottom line: Great product, probably the best first generation thing I've bought (I buy a lot of first generation things, please don't ask me about replay tv).

  • 5 GBytes is enough memory. The problem now is that the battery life is only 10 hours! Now if they could only get the battery life up to equal the 80 hours of music...

    Also, $750 is a bit steep. For that much money, I'd want an integrated PDA and cellphone, all using the same CPU and memory.

  • Depends on the encoding. I've noticed that high bit rate mp3s which in turn mean more harddrive hitting greatly affects the battery life. Right now I am noticing about 8hrs between recharges with mp3s at 192 and 160. Then again I leave it plugged in a good deal of the time since its usually sitting on the desk next to me.

    The buffering seems at least a little bit intelligent as well. When you are in an album its obvious that if it can it will go ahead and buffer the next track its going to play. Again with lower sampled mp3s it can buffer a lot more.


    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • Creative makes a similar player with 6GB of storage.
    It's shaped like a regular discman so it can fit in all the standard carrying cases. Unfortunately i'm sure it's goning to cost a few dollars. but the concept is pretty cool.

  • htt p://www.hammacher.com/DefaultPage/default.asp?Cont entPage=/publish/74201.htm [hammacher.com]

    I saw this one about a month ago, and they looks strikingly similar :/

  • Now I wonder how much of Itsy is in there. If so, what OS does it run? :)
    --

  • You ought to be ashamed. You intentionally destroyed one of all-time best made pieces of computer hardware.

    I'm typing this on an IBM PC AT 84-key keyboard. A hundred years after my corpse has rotted to dust, this keyboard will still be usable. Do you know what the ultimate cause of this keyboard's destruction will be? Our sun's red giant phase.

    I wouldn't dare to put this keyboard into the path of a bus. I don't want to be responsible for killing a busload of people.


    ---
  • What I hear people saying they want is access to their music all the time, long power cycle, ability to easily add or remove music, trade with friends, etc. The price point is too high for a dedicated player? Then get or build a wearable. It's not that hard, you have all your stuff with you all the time, and the marginal price increase to add any particular feature, like IR or a camera, is much smaller then to add this same function with a dedicated unit.

  • I have enough cds that it would likely take a month to listen to them all. Do I need this sheer volume of music? No. What I do want is the choice to listen to what I want when I want. I want the ability to say "I want to listen to this song" and have it available, even if it is from a cd that I seldom listen to. With 5 gigs, there is enough room to put somewhat obscure discs on it.

    I won't listen to 80 hours of music straight, but I do want the ability to choose the music that I listen to.

    And I don't want to have to anticipate my musical tastes and limit them to 10 songs. Bah.
  • > would you please slap a decoder onto a CDROM drive so we can have
    > portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism

    Agreed. I have no interest in flash-memory-based devices. Nor do I have interest in devices which require me to run proprietary software to transfer my MP3s to the device. The former - hey, battery-operated portables that play an hour's worth of music have been around for years. As for the latter, I really don't trust most major companies' closed-source software not to embed RIAA-friendly codes in my MP3s. A CD-ROM-based solution wins on both counts.

    (For bonus points - scan the disc as an ISO-9660 disc or just use the ISO-9660-friendly part of the Joliet filesystem for *.mp3 - through all subdirectories - and ignore files not ending in *.mp3. Then you ensure that nobody will have to re-burn their CDs to use them with your device. Primitive solutions like "assume only .mp3 files exist" or "assume all files are in the root directory" are a cop-out, given the infancy of the market.)

    People have already mentioned the MamboX [mambox.com] as a possible contender - personally, it's been delayed so long that I'm not sure it'll ever get released. (That said, the day I see one is probably the day I buy one! :-)

    On the open source front, check out these guys: Soundbastard [go.to]. Looks like a group of geeks doing a decoder-in-firmware device that'll have an onboard IDE controller. It'll be your choice whether to use it with a conventional CD-ROM or an IDE (laptop or even conventional) hard drive. And the whole thing - hardware and firmware - is GPL'd!

    What's nice is that the Soundbastard folks seem to be doing it with a minimum of surface-mount parts, meaning that the end product should be assemblable in kit form by an end user with a soldering iron. Sweeeeeeeet!

  • 140G's can be incurred in much less of a drop than you think. It just has to accelerate at 9.8*140 (1372) meters per second squared.

    If the object is one meter high, and falls to a concrete floor, if it reaches a full stop in less than 7.14 milliseconds (almost certain if the material is concrete-like) it has exceeded 140G's.

    It may be possible exceed those ratings in a drop as short as a few centimeters.

  • I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy.
    The point is that I don't have to decide which few hours of music I want to listen to before I leave on the trip. I can just load up a substantial part of my collection and choose later.

    There's definitely a market for flash-based players that store only a few hours. There are lots of products that address this market. But there's probably also a market for high-end devices like this one.

    My complaint about it is that the disk stores too little. IBM makes 12G drives in the same form factor and with the same shock resistance and power consumption as the 4G drive chosen for the PJB. Hopefully they will offer an even more expensive model with the 12G drive.

    IBM also makes 25G drives that are only twice the size (17mm tall vs. 9.5mm), but still have very good shock resistance and power requirements. I'd be willing to pay even more to have a PJB with one of those, although it would have to be 9.5mm thicker. 18G is enough to store my entire CD collection, so 25G would leave me room for some expansion.

    Alternatively, a model that the drive can easily be swapped would be OK. My Toshiba Libretto palmtop uses drives in this form factor, and although Toshiba doesn't consider the drive to be user-swappable, it was design so that this can easily be done, and I swap drives on it frequently.

  • shame about the price tag.
    What's wrong with the price tag? Didn't you even read the article before replying? It says "less than $10 per playback hour vs. $250 per playback hour for flash-media storage units."
    Is it possible to use cheap RAM rather than expensive FLASH
    Cheap RAM? I don't know where you're buying it, but around here (Silicon Valley), RAM still costs on the order of a dollar a megabyte. And at 128 Kbps, that megabyte only plays for about a minute. Using RAM isn't going to make the player much cheaper than a flash-based player, and the battery life will be worse. Besides, if your battery goes dead you'll have to reload the player. Doesn't sound like a fantastic idea to me.
  • Whine whine, I saw this before.
    Why don't you e-mail CmdrTaco and let him know instead of just whining,
    "Oh no, my slashdot that I pay good money for has a repeat story out of tens of thousands of submissions"
    You want an interesting story?
    Go read THIS [slashdot.org].
    The JERKS hes talking about is you, and the two who replied to your message so far.
    If you don't like slashdot, fucking go somewhere else, we don't want you here.
    </flame></troll>
  • Even if you drop to 3 inch disks you still get approx. 200MBytes per disk which should be 30 or so songs.
    What kind of 3 inch disk are you talking about, and what the heck is your point?

    They're using 2.5 inch disks, and they get 4G on a disk.

  • "You see, boss, there's a couple of choices we need to make.s

    "The first is whether to make something that can't be used for privacy, still achieves the purpose of playback, and won't buy us a lawsuit that costs millions to defend if we win, and puts us out of business if we lose, or to buy a lawsuit that will costs us thousands of times the revenue from a a handful of extra units, but we'd get brownie points for standing up to the folks that would sue us.

    "The second is whether to enter the market now, while we can cover 90% of the potential consumers, or to wait six months and not sell to anyone until we have all 100% covered, losing millions in sales to our competitors."

    Sounds like a pass/fail intelligence test to me . . .
  • Is it where God meant it to be, next to the "A" (depending upon language)? I've never seen a ps/2 keyboard that doesn't suffer from CKIE syndrome (control key in exile).

  • Re:No Linux, write but no read, No way. (Score:5)

    by MitchL ( 158959 ) on Thursday March 02, 2000 @01:15PM (#1230815) Homepage
    I wrote that FAQ. I also wrote a bunch of the firmware in the PJB (here at Compaq Corporate Research). Not wanting to anger the recording industry is why you can't copy files back. Given a choice between that an SDMI, I pick this any day. Nobody's treating anyone like children... we'd just rather make money and let other people have MP3 players than give it to lawyers. As for Linux... let's see. I work in a research lab. Researchers like Linux. The only thing stopping an SDK from being released (under GPL) is legal stuff from the corporation. It takes more than just documenting protocols and stuff (reverse engineering wouldn't yield the best results) - real example programs derived from the real sources are the best way to get a Linux/PJB GPL effort started. Keep your fingers crossed, I'm hopeful we'll be able to get an SDK out soon. /Mitch.
  • I wish it had an ethernet port, but this is MUCH bigger, and cheaper:

    www.mp3changer.com [mp3changer.com]

  • but not the consumer's.

    I fully agree with what the previous poster was saying. We (consumers) don't need to spend money on a product that restricts us so severely, with the assumption that something illegal is being done.

    Sure, the company making this MP3 player wants to keep the RIAA happy and avoid being bullied. Fighting that stuff costs money and I understand the decision.

    But as consumers there is no way in hell we should be buying such a product. To do so is a tacit approval of the RIAA's point of view. Which, in a nutshell, is that fair use doesn't exist, and consumers should have to pay for each and every copy of a protected work.

    Well, frankly, that isn't what the law says. But if we just go along with what the RIAA wants, then it might as well be the law.

    If, on the other hand, consumers reject "crippled" hardware and other solutions that restrict their freedom then things change. Companies who are bold enough to challenge the RIAA will sell more products. And sooner or later, more court cases will come about and the laws will become more detailed and clarified (hopefully for the better).

    NOT buying limited products like this isn't just a moral decision -- it is a practical one.

    Best regards,

    SEAL

  • The concerns for the recording industry are valid but pointless. PDAs running Windows CE or Linux with equivalent capacities and processing power are coming out. They do allow bidirectional transfer. Is the RIAA going to dictate what kind of software we can put on our PDAs?

    Maybe what PJB should do is add general PDA and installable software support. Then, you can ship it as is, and people add the PDA application for bidirectional transfer between units and between a unit and their desktop themselves.

    Otherwise, I'm just going to wait for the next device. If I'm going to lug around a 5G drive, I at least want to be able to store some files on it as well.

  • That last link, that's what I was looking for.

    Many thanks.

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