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Music Media

Creative Enters MP3 Player market 120

Posted by Hemos from the return-of-jaws dept.
behhl writes "Newsbytes says that Creative has announced a "Project Nomad" range of portable MP3 players. No actual machines are specified, and the Creative site has no news. " Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.
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Creative Enters MP3 Player market More

Creative Enters MP3 Player market

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  • http://www.soundblaster .com/corporate/news/nomad040399.html [soundblaster.com]

    Duh. Before ya say there's no news on creative's site, check :-). Must say, this looks like it's gotta be on my next Christmas list...

    --

  • Posted by DonR:

    just put a node in the family room. Get a small case, and incorporate into into the stereo system. All you need is a NIC and a Sound card that'll hook up to your stereo system. Control everything else remotely

    ---
    Donald Roeber

  • Oracle? (Score:1)

    by stoney ( 780 )
    Look at Jukebox [ratisbona.com] for a rough framework.
  • Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?

    How many mp3s do you have that are less than 2MB? What you need is a WinCE machine.


  • Hey, it lost the last line of message which said [ampersand]lt;ducking[ampersand]gt;. It showed up correctly in the preview page.

    In case you missed it, the reference in WinCE was a joke.
  • "Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier."

    Of course, one of Creatives biggest problems *now* is that standard they set years ago limits them today. While other companies have created some really whizz-bang products, we are still stuck to CL's older tech (ala Ensoniq, now owned by them, and the GUS). But, I agree, they did help us climb out of the primordial goo of bad PC sound...
  • the "ala" part i meant to stick in front of the "older" part... oops :)
  • Current portable CD players with a 50-second anti-skip memory system never skip while walking, but skip a lot while jogging or running.

    But if the same system could be used for MP3s, then you would have a 500-second anti-shock memory. It would start to skip a lot too if you were jogging for a while.

    How about this idea; install a shock sensor (like the article about the PalmPilot hack a few days ago) to detect when the unit is experiencing a level of shock that won't cause skipping. Spin up that 32X CD player, and read 500 seconds of music into memory, then spin down the CD.

    It will definately eat more batteries than a solid-state memory system, but it also will let you store over 11 hours of music on super-cheap removeable media. I'd love to have my entire music colection on a few dozen $2 CDs, instead of a few $300 hard drives (ala the Empeg car system).

  • Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.

    AFAIK, what gave Creative's initial boost was the SoundBlaster, an AdLib with an 8-bit DAC attached to it. Which looks very suspiciously like a bastardisation technique (unles they actually had a licence).

  • The reason beta lost out to VHS was because JVC kept VHS an open standard and freely licensed the technology to other companies. When an open standard goes against a closed standard, the open standard almost always wins.

    Mp3 vs. VQF is likewise. MP3 is a published ISO standard. VQF is very closed and proprietary. So despite VQF's supposed technical superiority, it's not going to get anywhere in the marketplace. I admit that MP3 is not as open as I'd like it to be. Fraunhofer still enforces their patent rights to MP3. However, VQF is much worse -- the specification is not even made public.

    AAC has more promise than either VQF or MP3. It will be interesting to see how open the AAC standard is.
  • I've been thinking about this for a while.
    It should be trivial to load all your MP3's into an Oracle (or other) database as Binary Large Object (BLOb) files, and write a simple C/perl program that can autogenerate playlist files based on search criteria. (and pipe the output directly to mpg123?)




    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Personally speaking, looking for mp3's is one of the bigger wastes of time ever.

    Heh. You just don't know where to look.
    Try IRC.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Honestly man, you're killing me over here.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Their modems suck ass, too.

  • I spent over six months recording our record. Nearly got a divorce, did lose a job. Free? Are you nuts?

    The thing that makes mp3's great is that it cuts out the fscking middlemen.



  • Is there any radio stations that play mp3's? I don't mean internet radio stations either....
  • Been there, done that.

    I setup a small Linux box to interface to my PalmPilot (via Serial port). Pop a CD in, control it from the Pilot, output to a stereo (it's in the same room as that), yay, 5 hours of music at a pop.

  • If you have a sound-capable laptop with cd-rom (I realize, of course, that these don't grow on trees!) you could 'dock' it on top of the stereo without spoiling the decor, and get a y-cable...
  • Sorry for the repost, but the previous mp3 article is scrolled so far down the screen and only has 6 comments, so I guess it's a dead thread.

    I've started ripping some of my CDs with cdparanoia and bladeenc, but I haven't really organized the resulting files. How do those of you with huge collections deal with them? I just have them all in the same directory. I go to the playlist (I use GQmpeg) and add all.

    It would be really great if there were some kind of database interface that would generate playlists based on search criteria. Kind of like the Windows softare for the empeg car player.

    A lot of people on slashdot act as though they have hundreds of mp3s, so some of you must have come up with a good system. Tell us about it.
  • As referenced in one of the replies above buried under a few layers, a company called naiam.com is making one available in time for christmas. Info can be found on this site [naiam.com].
  • Did y'all see this?

    its "Project Nomad" players will use
    proprietary technology to make next-generation, compact, affordable players.

    I thought someone would have caught this by now.

    and:

    But the firm said it will not just make a player. It also intends to use its audio marketing muscle to make an impact on the entire fledgling industry. In an announcement, Creative declared, "Creative intends on driving the technology, direction, and strategy associated with the creation, playback, and distribution of digital audio content via the Internet."

    It seems that CL wants to get a monopoly on the industry.

    How about this:

    The market has been waiting for Creative to make its move, said Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and chief executive officer at Creative.

    Since when has "the market" been waiting for Creative to make its move? They seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. It seems the market is doing just fine without them so far.

    It doesn't look to me like they want to play any MP3, but use some sort of proprietary encoding/encryption/whatever wrapped around an MP3 (I suppose to stop all those "pirates" out there)

    If they want to give it a try, I say go for it. However, for all of you who have the "give me free stuff or give me death" attitude, this may not be what you want.

    Film at 11.


  • Creative had a terrible record, until recently, for not disclosing the details of the internals of their cards. In contrast Gravis had the completely opposite attitude, and much cool software was developed which was GUS only...
  • I'm currently working on this. I'm combining a ripper/encoder with CDDB (I know, it's been done...) then storing all the info, plus the location of the resulting MP3 file, in a database. No web page for the project yet; it's still in its early stages. All of the cddb stuff works, and the ripper is, er, well... started. All that's left after that is the encoder, and cleaning up the database stuff. Should be tres cool.

  • Oracle? (Score:1)

    by skroz ( 7870 )
    That's sorta like my idea. I'm using mySQL, though.
  • True, it does. And I've used it. It doesn't do EXACTLY what I want it to do, though. Besides all that, yeah... I do like to recreate the wheel.
  • No... what does that have to do with his point?
  • They'd need 1> more memory, and 2> a faster processor. That, of course, is on top of changing the audio support (16-bit, stereo, etc.) It would be expensive, and make the thing bigger.

  • I Do (Score:1)

    by cmalek ( 8559 )
    Thing is, you would have to drag far fewer
    CDs (e.g. one), since a CD can hold hundreds
    of MP3s.

    And then you could change which several hundred
    songs you wanted to listen to that day simply by switching CDs, instead of having to upload new ones vi serial port.

    I liked the CD + 32 MB flash ram idea.
  • Before giving Creative all the credit for PC sound's initial evolution, how about taking a look [cgocable.ca] at (just some of the) cards that came before (and after) the Sound Blaster that kicked ass.

    Hailing Creative products, especially their early ones, is a tribute to their market share, not their quality. Watch it Hemos. You'll be reminiscing about what WFW 3.11 did for networking next.

    SAVE THE BATS
    -Khyron
    SAVE THE BATS


  • Although, I am eager to hear one of these newfangled 3D sound cards that actually has seperate rear channels. Are they any good? Any games supporting this yet?


    There's EAX, which is pretty impressive, and A3D 2.0, which is stunning, but only for two speakers afaik. Many games support both, though the quality varies somewhat. Unreal's EAX support is pretty weak, HalfLife's is amazing -- that chopper is scarier than hell when you hear it circling all around. I'd say most games coming out now support either A3D or EAX now.

    But I have a nice Cambridge Microworks system, which is two speakers. I'd have to toss that to get a surround setup...
  • Who really cares?

  • You are correct. Adlib should've been the real winner here--the Sound Blaster was the same Yamaha chipset with a DAC tacked on. If it weren't for the Adlib's popularity beforehand, the Sound Blaster wouldn't have taken off.

    Why? Because Creative's original idea of music for a PC was the Creative Music System, also sold under the name "Game Blaster" at Radio Shack. It was essentially four Tandy sound chips in stereo. Anyone who remembers their sound standards can easily tell you that Adlib's 2-operator FM was much better than the TI chip in the Tandy.

    Go visit http://www.oldskool.org/pc/sound/ [oldskool.org] if you want some audio examples.
  • I like that! I've always wanted to set up a linux box in my car for MP3s and the like, but the power consumption for the monitor(or the cost of a LCD screen) was one of the big killers. Just forget the monitor, run a serial cable from the trunk or wherever, and use the palmpilot with a terminal emulator or some front end controller to run everything.
  • "The GUS was a proprietary piece of hardware, developed solely as the commercial product of Gravis. There is no way it could survive the long rampup time that Linux has endured."

    If what you say is true, then that means there is no way for any hardware to ever have a long life, right? Then how did the Sound Blaster itself (which is even more closed than the GUS) live up until now?

    Perhaps I missed something?
  • Actually ads do benifate the record comapanies, and in some (rare) circumstances the artists. The radio companies have to pay the record companies everytime they play a song, the ads provide the revenue for the radio station, some of this money goes to the record companies, then (if they're really lucky) the artists get some of the cash.
  • I doubt there will be an injunction, the RIAA tried the same thing with the RIO and failed, I really don't see how they could get an injunction against creative after that.
  • I wrote a summary of MP4 audio and its relationship to AAC and VQF. Go here [webnoize.com].

    In summary, some of the technology from VQF is included in the MPEG-4 standard, but a .VQF file is not really an MP4 file since MP4 has its own file format, and VQF is only used in certain restrictive ways within MPEG-4.

  • I wrote an overview of the MP4 audio standard. You can find it here [webnoize.com].

    Technical work on MP4 was completed in October 1998, and it is in the publication process at ISO now. I'm not aware of any fully-functional encoders/decoders yet.

    -- Eric Scheirer
    Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

  • Some sort of Sound capability for a Palm Pilot would be cool, all right. What I'd like to see is an "Internet Transistor Radio": a Palm Pilot plus sound plus a Ricochet modem. You could wander around the San Francsico Bay Area listening to a college radio station from Austrailia.

    Unfortunately, the WinCE world may actually be a little closer to this. The Cassandra already comes with a head phone jack (though I bet the sound is awful, voice quality only: they intended it as a dictation gadget).

  • It's all about inertia. It takes more juice to get the thing started than it does to keep it turning.

    Why do we need to spin at even 1x? mp3's go as high as, what? 256kbit or so? That's one heck of alot less than 150kbyte(that's what, 1200kbit?). So you'd need to spin it up to less than 1/4th to constantly keep up with an mp3. I think I'd prefer to spend the extra cash on 4-8 meg of ram and cache whole songs and a bit more though. But what uses more power? Only spinning up to 1/4th single spin, or spinning up/down. Or heck, maybe a constant half spin with read ahead? :) I know it wouldn't be using off the shelf equipment to obtain these speeds, but this thing probably isn't using all that much off the shelf stuff. Am I babbling again??? :p
  • What we need is a CD-ROM based MP3 player. That would be really cool.
  • Yes, CDs can skip, but with a mere one Meg of memory, you can read ahead a full minute, so that shouldn't be an issue.

    True, spinning a CD will consume batteries faster, but it will still last much longer than traditional CD players. Imagine one with four Megs of RAM: It would initially fill its memory and then stop. After playing 3 Megs, it would replenish its memory while playing the last quarter of its memory. This might need to be adjusted slightly for high bitrate MP3s, but would work well.

    Or does spinning up the CD take more power than keeping it spinning for a few minutes?
  • Perhaps what would really be cool is if they put a headphone jack into the PalmPilot, so you could use it as an MP3 player. Why have all the memory and processing power dedicated to a specific task when you can use it for anything you want?

    For that matter, this could be a chance for Creative to get into the PDA market.
  • I'm in about the same situation as you, except that after using cdparanoia and bladeenc, I use id3ren to tag the files, so the artist, album, year, and such are all stored in the file, and players like mpg123 can display the info.

    Unfortunately, the tags don't let you have enough characters for long names, and there isn't an entry for track number (some albums sound better if you play them in order, so I use the comment field to log the track number). I saw some reference to a newer tagging method somewhere--is there a new revision to the tagging standard?
  • Of course, emacs can be used to solve any problem. (That's why I run a emacs/Linux system.) :)

    What we need for tagging MP3s is an emacs MP3 mode. Just load an MP3 into emacs, and it's set up for editing the tags.

    Anyone want to write one?
  • I played with one of Creative's alpha-grade portable MP3 players at Comdex back in November.

    Honestly, it sucked. It was really low quality sound, more like fm radio than CD, which by comparison to a good software player is unacceptable.

    There's a chipset on the market that does hardware mp3 decoding... I wonder who's using it? Some german company whom I can't remember makes it.

    Anyways, the point is, by comparison to the Saihan product that was also showing (mp-man), it was no competition. I'm waiting for the one with the 2 gig drive.

    mindslip

  • The funny thing is, I don't see MP3's ever damaging the recording industry. Sure, there's rampant pirating going on (I'm quite a leech myself). But just like most pirated software, it's property that wouldn't have been bought anyway. I mean, am I ever going to go out and buy an entire album just so I can pick up that Pump Up The Volume remix? Never.

    Now check this out. I've purchased around 15 new CD's over the last year because of random MP3's that I've downloaded. So it's really not the record companies that have to worry, it's radio stations!!! (Besides, broadcast media industries will have to face the fact that people want entertainment on demand, and that traditional forms like radio and TV will eventually be replaced by streaming on demand.)

    The only thing record companies lose is the programming control they have over radio stations. But that can easily be changed by strengthening their promotion efforts in other media markets, like TV, movies, and the web.

    -Eyeball [mailto]

  • oops.
  • Free hardware design: The components all exist already: embedded systems cards (with on board scsi, ethernet, vga, memory, the works), cd transports, sealed motorcycle batteries, shock-mount cases, those cute hi-fi compact speakers. What if somebody (an EE student? some mad scientist NRL geek?) hacked out plans for a boombox which ran linux and that could store your entire record collection compressed as MP3s. Which anyone with a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and the ability to follow directions could build in a weekend? And published these plans on the internet along with links to all the component suppliers?

    Why isn't this possible? What needs to happen to get me one of these machines? How much would you pay?

    -bonkydog
  • i thought it was: minds are like parachutes, when they're open they only slow you down. ;)
  • Agreed. That's the only reason I continue to buy
    systems with an ISA slot. I have the GUS 1.37,
    and as long as that sound card works, I'll continue
    to use it religiously.

    Probably the best PC sound card of all time, with
    the technology of the era, and will _still_ whip
    the pants off anything Creative can come up with.

    I observed this at an ACM meeting wherein our chapter
    played PC demos on a big wall on the outside of the
    CS building. The demo machine was a P133 (still decent at the time) with plenty of RAM to spare. The
    Unreal Demo choked the machine because the CPU had
    to do all the sound sequencing. This was, IIRC, an
    AWE32 (or maybe even a 64). I played that demo on
    my 486/33 with a GUS (after the GUS patch came out), and it was perfectly smooth.

    Creative simply blows heinie. I wish Gravis had been
    able to bring that card to prominence in the market. PC sound would be much better today if they
    had.

    On a side note, is there any place to get a bunch of
    those sound cards? Surely they didn't all sell, so
    where did the excess go? I'd buy a bunch of them if
    I could find 'em. :)

    --Corey
  • I'd have to beg to differ. Time to pull out of that shortsighted state of mind, because the medium isn't the problem here.

    There are many people who utilize mp3's in a legal fashion. Just because some people use it for less than legal purposes doesn't make it wrong, evil or term people "freeloading-idiots." Email has been used for wrongful purposes, do you see the pulp and paper mills in an uproar? Do you see them taking sendmail to court? Nope.

    And as for the wrongdoing that *is* done with mp3's nowadays. Personally speaking, looking for mp3's is one of the bigger wastes of time ever. You end up spending over an hour looking for one frigging song, and what you do get is usually of a poor quality. Not worth the navigating (and closing of all the browser windows these sites usually popup). I would much prefer flipping a few bucks to get a song *I* want. And I would prefer it if the artist got the big chuck of that cash.

    That's what those record companies are afraid of. I don't think they care NEARLY as much about pirated mp3 songs as they care about losing their middleman status.
  • Well, working things out, I make about $25/hr working. Since having a family comes into play, I'd consider my free time slightly more valueable than my work time. So, in the time it would take to find an MP3 or two, we're already at the cost of a CD.

    Like I said, I'd pay for legitimate MP3's no problem.
  • Also, spinning a CD sucks tons of power.

    If you're playing mp3s it doesn't take a very fast rate to play. With a typical 128kb/s rate, it will take about 1/8th the speed of a normal cd player to get a good playback. Make the spin rate 1/6 of a normal cd player to be safe. So the power comsumption can be 1/6th that of a normal cd player. A pair of batteries will last about 6 times as much assuming the additional electronics don't take much more power.
  • Wow, that would be, like so heavy. I'm talking MAJOR bummer with a side order of HECTIC.

    I would, like, photocopy them and stuff, and post them to yourself.

    Peace..

  • This is a big ole smack in the face for the RIAA and other stupid members of the record industry who wish to keep overcharging for something that should be free. Creative is gonna have a killing in the market too, why drop $17 bucks for a cd when you could buy a portable mp3 player, and then just download the songs off the net for free?

    Of course this does open up all sorts of legal issues, there will probably be injunctions to prevent Creative from selling this equipment( much the same as Sony attempting to prevent Connectix from selling their Playstation Emulator). But once again the demand will take over, and who knows, maybe the suits will jump in on this one cuz all they need to see is those beautiful dollar signs.
  • I found a reference to one while hunting around for an MP3 player on the web. Check out Naiam's [naiam.com] web site.
  • I'm in the process of developing my own in-car PC,
    one function of which will be to play MP3 audio. I have been doing just what you are, ripping all
    my music CDs like crazy to get as much of my music
    collection into MP3 format as I can, and my scheme
    currently is to make a main parent directory (e.g., "My MP3 Collection") and just make subs inside of it for various artists, and then in those make subdirectories for each album, where finally the MP3 files will be stored, simply as "TrackXX.mp3". I am working on software which will perform functions similar to the empeg Windows app for organizing your music. You can check my website at http://home.earthlink.net/~jisweb/ next week when my new website is up detailing my in-car PC project.

    --Jason
  • Have one in development. Hopefully will be able to talk more about it in 6 months...Lets just say that it will do more than you could possibly imagine...
  • According to a recent article on Wired (http://www.mp3.com [mp3.com]) the artist gets about 10% of the cost of a CD from a major label. OTOH, if you upload a tune to mp3.com and use their CD production and distribution service, you get 50%. My band hasn't tried that yet, but we probably will when we do our CD this summer. I don't think that people should pirate CDs for mp3s but I think that places like mp3.com sound like a great way to by-pass the major labels with their legions of suit-wearing dirtbags. FWIW.
  • Everybody knows Beta is a better tape format than VHS. If it weren't, countless Usenet and Slashdot arguments would crumble and there'd be a paradox of the universe. Therefore, Beta is superior. :)

    Seriously, I think that Beta/VHS is a bad analogy as each tape format has certain advantages and disadvantages for certain applications. VHS was just better suited for the home market.

    But all that will become irrelevant in a decade or so when everyone switches to DVD, except for a few diehards who are convinced that "metal oxide" provides richer picture and sound quality than all that digital crap.

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