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Music Media

Portable Mp3 player for $99 77

Posted by CmdrTaco from the coming-on-down dept.
Andrew Konkol sent us another portable MP3 Player, except that this one has 64 megs of memory and costs only $99. And of course, its not available until mid '99 (which by my math is only a few weeks away...
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Portable Mp3 player for $99 More

Portable Mp3 player for $99

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  • 64 Megs???? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't think so. Play up to 64 minutes of mp3 songs. Standard model has 32 MB built-in memory (32 mins).

  • Re:Rio is only $70 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Add buy.com's business practices to Diamond's poor rebate procedure and you've got yourself a mess just waiting to happen.
  • I downloaded the software, and the good part is, that having the CD/mp3 player integrated rocks.

    Bad news is that this is the most annoying eval version I have ever had the displeasure to suffer through. Annoying dialog boxes EVERY time you click a feature say "buy buy buy, or else suffer suffer suffer".

    Plus, the thing I was excited about was having the ripper, encoder, and both players all together. But the RIPPER DOESN'T WORK! I dont know if this is more eval-version hell, or if they couldn't do the math on getting the ripper to work.

    The web site is suspect. The software (like the hardware) shows good ideas, but no evidence of implementation. And the greedy, annoying crap in the software just pissed me off. I don't know how they expect to create buzz about their stuff (assuming it's legit), and therefore demand, if they dont let people get a feel for what it can really do. bah.

    As a final note, the mp3 player portion of ZipAudio is a hunka poo compared my current favorite (winamp). If everything else about Zipaudio worked, I wouldn't mind giving up the other cool features... but it doesn't seem to. At least not in the eval version. And winamp is free... *shrug*

    (sorry for the essay, but I know you kids are above winDOHs, so I thought I would make myself useful and pass on as much as I could)

  • sounds fishy (no pun intended) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look guys, I'm sorry, but this mp3
    player looks and sounds fishy.

    While it may in fact be a garage start-up
    akin to what Apple was in their dawn, this
    smells like a scam.

    Clues:
    1) Cheezy graphics on website

    2) The website is a *user* account on
    a foreign(Singapore) isp.

    3) Their price is half of diamond's and
    CL's with more features

    4) Few technical specs available

    If I'm wrong and they are legit, more power to
    them, but beware.

  • How? (Score:1)

    by cduffy ( 652 )
    If they pay Fraunhauffer for the patent use, how is making a hardware MP3 encoder more illigal than a tape recorder?
  • Tape recorders have no copyright protection. Does that make them illigal?
  • Posted by Fleeno:

    Maybe they can't afford a 30 second TV spot, but anyone can afford a domain name and a spell checker
  • Posted by Open Matrix:

    The decoding part takes a pretty small amount of CPU but encoding takes lots.
  • It says it is bundled with the software.

    I interpret that to mean that the software comes free with the unit.
  • They have a mid-year "release date", but only a dodgy artists impression of the unit on the site...

    I suspect a certain amount of bull*cough*...
  • I get ~12 hours our of my Rio with a single Duracell AA...
  • They'reprobably just a small startup company, but check them out first before you buy.

    But, more to the point, do they have Linux software?
  • Get a player that uses CF disks rather than hard wired memory. CF disks are getting cheaper and cheaper and bigger and bigger. They're hitting 128Mb at the moment and are rapidly getting larger.
  • This is probably a bit off-topic... if someone announced plans to make a portable MP3 encoder, a device capable of taking audio input from, say, a microphone or a line input, MPEG encoding it and storing it in a file on a Flash card or Clik disc or what have you, it would be more interesting. It could be useful for taping concerts, sampling and a lot of other things, and you'd get nice, convenient MP3 files out of it too, unlike MiniDisc systems.

    (Then again, MiniDisc (ATRAC) compression yields better quality, though you have to decompress it and convert it, as it's a proprietary algorithm.)
  • The reason? A walkman-style CD-based MP3 player would require (rough guess) around $1,000,000 upfront investment to get it to market. Reason? You need (a) a small CD-ROM mechanism - eg, like the laptop/iMac ones, with low power consumption and small size, and (b) huge wadges of cash for plastic moulding.

    This means that when one comes out, it'll be from a big company. Our empeg player sidesteps most of this as it's an in-car unit, so you can get away with CNC punched metalwork and just some custom acrylic (with embedded mesh for EMC shielding) - but just the development bill for this is well into 6 figures.

    The reason why hardware usually comes from big companies is that the up-front investment is HUGE: getting it into production is a NIGHTMARE - we practically have one person full-time just running around sorting out component sourcing, build issues, etc - and this is with a contract manufacturer actually doing the manufacturing. It's *not* something you can do on a shoestring: even FCC testing is well over $1000/day, and that's a legal necessity (and, if you fail you'll have to make a new prototype to production standard, at a cost of maybe $3000 and try again at $1000/day). If they're making hardware, they can afford a better website than that. I'm not saying ours is great, but at least you get the idea the product *exists* :)

    I wish these people luck, but I'm pretty skeptical that they can sell a product for less than Diamond with more cute bits. The Creative Nomad, which is basically the Samsung Yepp, is *made by the people who actually make the Flash chips* - you don't get much better pricing on storage than that...

    Hugo
    empeg
  • For those who are saying this mustn't be real becasue they don't have their own domain - they have:
    http://www.zipaudio.com/

    Details of their product are at: http://www.zipaudio.com/hardware.htm

    Of course that's not a definite indication they are genuine but you can draw your own conclusions.
    --
  • I suppose it is possible. I wasn't aware of the RIO's capability of working on 1 AAA battery, so I will be man enough to admit I was wrong. hehehe. (From what I understood, mp3 decoding took a lot of processing power, and required at LEAST a pentium. It doesn't seem logical that 2 AAA batteries would support it, but alas I was incorrect.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Operates up to 12 hours continuously.
    Powered by 2 x AAA Alkaline batteries

    12 hours of continuous mp3 decoding on 2 AAA batteries? I don't think so....

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Shut your trap, dorkwad. I seriously doubt that MiniDiscs are proprietary(sp?), as other people such as Kenwood and others make MiniDisc players and recorders.

    OMG, Sony made CDs! They're proprietary!

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack

  • Cripes! no wonder we have monopolies! (Score:4)

    by Cid Highwind ( 9258 ) on Saturday May 08, 1999 @11:01AM (#1899790) Homepage
    Look at the responses here. Every post seems to say (I paraphrase) "Their page looks like crap, and it's on a user account, therefore they must be scam artists"

    Have we all been brainwashed by the mass-marketeers to the point where we are no longer capable of believing good things can come out of a small startup company? It's no wonder the computer industry is becoming monopolized if we are afraid to buy from the upstarts. What the dominant OEMs seem to have done is ingrained in our minds that a slick public image and a top-of-the-line web site = a reputable dealer. They have succeeded in making a huge barrier to entry into the harware market. Web design costs money, something these guys probably don't have a lot of. I for one would rather see them put all their money and time into developing a better product.
  • The 'net - in fact this very forum - make this sort of speculation unnecsesary. All we need is a couple of rich optimists to front up the dosh, and report back as to whether they get a product that works. Then we slashdot the place.

    Duh,

    Kris.

    Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
  • Apparently the Empeg fellows have been doing some website revisions since last I visited. It's still true that when they started, they were just a bunch of photos and technical details, but I guess by now they've come into enough venture capital to start marketing. I wish them the best of luck (and if I ever get a car, I may even buy their product!).

    -josh
  • Actually, wandering about the site (to the FAQ page, for example) reveals that they've actually been through a few website revisions. I still think it's curious that they don't have any photos of their hardware, but their software seems like it could very well be legit, lending credence to their hardware as well. Anyone have a windows box to try out their software on?

  • I understand (Score:5)

    by Lupus Rufus ( 11262 ) on Saturday May 08, 1999 @10:19AM (#1899794) Homepage
    You're pissed that while some people complain that the "glory days" of computing have "ended" (I tend to disagree; the grassroots manner in which free software is taking over the world can only be described as a glorious revolution), people will write off a new face in the computing world because they seem to be marketing their product quite badly. Thus, the computing world of the 70's and 80's has been twisted into the corporate mess of the 90's.

    While I too lament the dominant force which media, marketing and corporations wield in our consumer society, I think in this particular case the naysayers have it right. Why do I think this? Basically one word: capital. Mass-producing a piece of hardware requires vast resources, and even constructing a prototype (which looks as nice as this one does) requires a decent amount of cash. Now, I'll accept that this could be a labor of love, the prototype painstakingly constructed, squeezing every penny available for what it was worth. But in this case, I would expect that the inventor would be proud enough of his invention to post information on his site. For an example of how I would expect such a project as this to happen, look at the Empeg [empeg.com]. The site is not as squeaky-clean as, say, Diamond [diamond.com], but it is full of pictures and tech specs. The love is clear. With the fellow linked to above, I'm not so sure the love is there.

    Hardware (especially consumer-grade hardware) has traditionally been made by companies with many resources to speak of. Think IBM, Intel, Sun, Apple, DEC, AT&T, Microsoft (in recent years), and so on. Occasionally people break onto the scene, but their products are almost never as polished as those produced by the big companies. Not that that is a bad thing necessarily, just that the polish of this product in particular is incongruous with the lack of polish on his web page. Also, why go to the trouble of drawing the thing when purportedly the real thing is sitting next to the computer ready to be photographed?

    Now of course, software is a totally different issue. Writing a piece of software requires no tools other than a computer, persistence, ingenuity and programming experience, altogether not requiring much capital at all. In fact, it is precisely this low cost of entry that got all of our favorite geeks on their way to fame and (for some) fortune: Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, Marc Andreesen, Linus Torvalds, and all the rest. And in fact, you can expect shitty marketing from a programmer (in fact, shitty marketing probably means the product is better). All I'm saying is that you can't look at hardware the same way.

    -josh
  • Sony can rot in hell. I'm not a free-software nut, but I don't buy proprietary formats.
  • You doofs. I put MP3's on my MD player, I put tracks from my MD on my MP3 player. They are not competing technologies.
  • Buy.com has it listed for $150, not $118.
  • I agree. Now I understand why "business people" still wear suits. Even Slashdot readers (who I thought were smarter than Joe Average) think that having a domain name makes a company more "reputable" than having a user account on an ISP. The more things change, the samer they get.
  • Well, the next step is taken towards public portable mp3 Hope they will soon make shoutcast available on it
  • Well, quite often small companies can't afford an ecommerce system, and don't have thee cash to set up to accept credit cards. They just timeshare on someone else's system. So while it might be bogus, there may be good reasons for what they have done.

    -c
  • Are you sure anyone can afford a domain name? Say (for example) they've spent all their limited funds on R&D. And they don't want to sell out to some big multi-national, who'll steal all the glory/money; not to mention completely trash the products intended image/etc.

    Anyway, I'm not going to debate my point. I was being theoretical(sp?).


  • I'm going off on a tangent here so, bear with me.

    I've read a few articles along the lines of, 'where have all the {can't think of the right word (but if I could the guys who founded Apple, Microsoft(pre-'90) and GNU/Linux would be described by it)} gone'. And I've wondered myself, why can't someone come along with something wonderful and great and new; that will change the world (as we see it).

    With responses like these it's not hard to see why no one's able to make revolutionary products in their garage. Everything's marketing. There's no such thing as a better mouse-trap, just a better marketed one.

    Ahh, hell I had a brilliant point to make. Some of you who read this will get the gist of what I'm trying to say. And others won't. I've completely lost my train of thought trying to hash out my point into words. Bugger it.

  • among the many other formats it understands, WinAmp plays CD's to--and will encode the new microsoft format, and wavs, and a couple other's i believe--the only reason it doesn't do MP3, I believe, is they don't want to pay the licensing fees

    of course, I could be wrong...
  • uhhh... 99 dollars, no actual pictures, isp web page, no specs besides the RAM... anyone else see this as sketchy?
  • i happen to know andy konkol in real life... this article is obviously B.S. so is anything else he says.
  • 12 hours of continuous mp3 decoding on 2 AAA batteries? I don't think so....

    What's wrong with that? I get about 12 hours continuous play with 32 second ESP on my Sony discman with 2 AA batteries, and I'm sure that by not having to constantly run a motor you can get that from 2 AAA's.

    "Software is like sex- the best is for free"
  • They say there is a 64mb model too, but don't give a price.
  • Isn't the rio 12 hours on a single AAA? :P
  • It would also be extremely illegal, i believe. One of the RIAA's main complaints in their suit against diamond when the Rio was first released was that it could be used to record, which of course, was wrong, it cant record. But anyways, such a device would be very illegal, I believe :)
  • Its not illegal because of anything to do with mp3, its illegal because of it being a recording device with no copyright protection or something like that, i dont really know much about this legal stuff :)
  • And I've wondered myself, why can't someone come along with something wonderful and great and new; that will change the world (as we see it).

    There's a lot of really cool stuff happening out there. One of my favorites is incubating down in Huntsville Alabama. If their stuff does what they say it will, then Time Domain [time-domain.com] will revolutionize wireless communications and a bunch of other stuff too!

  • Well, according to the web site, they got a standard version with 32 mb. I can only assume that it's the one selling for $99... doesn't mention if it's flash, eeprom, or normal RAM (sram? dram?)



    Hmm. Odd feature:


    Plays any mp3 file and stores upto 64 MB of song data.

    Play up to 64 minutes of mp3 songs. Standard model has 32 MB built-in memory (32
    mins)


    I guess it's $99, then you have to buy a super expensive 32 mb memory card. (from the picture, it looks rather proprietary... not even CF/SM).



    Is it possible that what this page was about is an old page referring to a planned but never followed-through hardware device (the ISP page seems to be an old version of their website)? Perhaps its to judge the market (i.e., willing to release it, but want to find out how popular it is before actually starting production)? Speaking of which, I have no idea how to get to the link of the page from their main website...

  • Correction: I found a way to get to the page, but not the one at the ISP, but at the domain.

    www.zipaudio.com, click on MP3 hardware. my bad.
    (http://www.zipaudio.com/hardware.htm, is what it leads to).

    Interestingly, no link to pre-order on this webpage...
  • I concour .. if they can't afford to hire a non-colour blind web designer how can they afford marketing, distribution etc...

    I can't see them making anything anywhere close to a profit if they have this form of apporach.
  • Allright here we go again. Minidisc uses a method along the same lines as MP3 does to compress audi0, it removes "in-audible" sound. On top of that it does it a set standard, you can't make a better mini-disc. Admittedly most of the MP3's currently available on the web are recorded and 128 KBps and 44.1 Mhz, you can record them at higher rates, in fact 160 KBps and any higher Mhz you can get better than CD sound. At the studio I work at we use MP3s to archive older sstuff and to send back and forth through e-mail for approval from artists. As for the problems with mini-disc and MP3 it's all in the midrange, they both blow goats on midrange sound. You want bitchin' sound buy a portable DAT.

    Mini-disc vs. MP3

    Artist Support
    Mini-Disc=none MP3=smal but growing
    Sound Quality
    Mini-Disc=median MP3=median-very good
    Downloadable media
    Mini-Disc=no MP3=yes


    just to name a few differences
    So before you go slamming MP3s get the facts right and maybe talk to someone in the sound industry.

    ________________________________________________ ________
    Can We trust the future - Flesh99
  • Scam ... enough said.
    But it is a nice attempt to at fraud ;)
    You've got to love the graphical representation of a product that's supposed to be on the market in a matter of weeks. Oh, and GET A DOMAIN! It's only a drop in the bucket for a company that's sooo technologicaly advanced that they can create an mpeg player with more features than the Rio at half the price.
  • The company does have a legitimate company URL, www.zipaudio.com, and some company info, but the contact and ordering info is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Hmmm ... It looks as if someone is diverting traffic and sales of the software using the posted URL.
  • The contact and ordering info on the ad page and on the home site (www.zipaudio.com) should AT LEAST be the same. Whether or not this is a poor company that can't afford the basics of an internet business, they should at least have consistent information across web pages. This is an accepted and EXPECTED standard. This doesn't cost a developer a cent. These little things we point out are trademarks of attempts at fraud.
  • From the looks of this website I would not buy this product, but some of these products could make some decent money if you were to invest in some stocks. Take a look at www.empeg.com, I'm considering putting some money into them if it is possible. I have read they already have a ton of people on a waiting list to purchase the player when it is manufactured.
  • No, Rio has a double A.

    Tripple A is in my opinion a waste of money
    because the contain less energy at nearly the
    same price.

    AlexS.

  • Re:Cripes! no wonder we have monopolies! (Score:3)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Saturday May 08, 1999 @12:08PM (#1899821)
    What the dominant OEMs seem to have done is ingrained in our minds that a slick public image and a top-of-the-line web site = a reputable dealer.

    It's a catch-22. I'm sure most of us here would like to believe in the next garage wizard. We'd be glad to support them. But how do you tell if they ARE just that?

    Let's take Apple for example. Their Apple I was hawked at a local homebrew computer club where enthusiasts got to see working prototypes. Later, the duo managed to take their garage-production to a local computer store. It grew from there. The point is, though, that there was physical proof of what they were selling. Interested parties knew with a reasonable amount of certainty that what they purchased would be pretty much what they expected.

    But The Steves were also less-known for another computer. My memory on the details is a bit fuzzy - so please bare with me. At a computer convention, Wonziac and Jobs (I believe it was both) put togeather a flyer that outlined, basically, the uber hacker's computer for the time. It had everything people wanted - and it was inexpensive. The conspirators managed to flood the convention floor with their bogus flyers. Pretty soon, there were hordes of people looking for this godsend hardware. But it was a hoax - it never existed.

    In this day and age, it doesn't take a convention and flyers to do the same. The 'web is just as effective. In fact, I would go as far as saying it is even more dangerous - it offers the unscrupulous a chance to pull off a hoax AND collect on it annonymously. We SHOULD be skeptical.

    So what proof do we need? Well I'm sure everyone would be happy with seeing one personally. But, like others have pointed out, clear pictures of the product and stats goes a long way towards proving the device actually exists. I've seen some pretty messy 'web pages talking about personal (as well as professional) MP3 players that offer that much information. And although they're obviously "garage" quality - they're able to offer more proof than these guys have.

  • any product with a homepage this poor, you should be weary of. they're running their page off some ISP, which doesn't speak to highly of them. how can a company afford to pay the R&D for a portable MP3 player and not have at least their own web address? also, their page is fucking horrible. it was automatically generated with Netscape's editor.

    anyway, all i'm saying is don't be surprised if this thing doesn't actually turn up in the market. it sounds kind of sketchy to me.
  • i never meant to imply that they were scam artists. i just thought that they were some fanciful dreamers who might have had a good idea, but whether or not the actual product was to come into existance remained a question (remember Freedos, or Fritors.. whatever it was called?). anyway, all i was saying was that they've done a really bad job or marketing..

    the company's page at zipaudio.com doesn't even highlight the fact that they've supposedly made a new breakthrough product worth hundreds of millions. it's no where on the index. if you click on "MP3 Hardware," you'll find out about their revolutionary idea. again, crappy marketing.
  • yeah, i got the product name wrong. do you remember the program that that 16 year old from Canada was doing? the one based on that guy from Berkeley's thesis or multiple OS implimentation with a single processor? yeah, well that's the project i'm refering to.
  • Regarding the eval version, I tried it out as well after checking out the page & had somewhat better results than you had - I was actually impressed by the ripping+MP3 encoding.

    Of course, it didn't crash and burn here like it did on your system. I also disliked the annoying messages, given that it was crippled elsewhere as well. (Not only does it limit you to one track rip/encoding at a time, but it limits you to a select few tracks of each CD)

    As you said, the player was limited. A better eval version, complete with a more functional player & less nags would win over more than a few people.
  • I think the graphic representation of the MP3 player could have been done better in MS Paint. I also can't imagine why the product would look like that. it more closely resembles a Caller ID that anything else.

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