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Music Media

New mp3 Hardware 49

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-hear dept.
rbb writes "Another new hardware based mp3 player, the mozart music box for $499, has arrived. Their Dutch reseller offers other hardware based MP3 players too, such as the Trackz! player. I'm not going to get too excited about this one though, since it's anything but portable. However the price of $299 for the do-it-yourself-kit or $449 for either of the two pre-built kits sounds more like we're getting somewhere in hardwarebased MP3 land. " I think we mentioned the Mozart awhile ago, but I'd never seen Trackz! before.
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New mp3 Hardware More

New mp3 Hardware

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  • Maybe you didn't read after the zooming image, but the thing is not a CD-ROM, but a DVD-ROM capable of reading DVD-RAM disks. I remember when the theory was that DVD-RAM would hold 5.6 gigs or something, but that equated to 6 1/2 days of music. I'm not sure what the stard capacity now is, but it's humerously large all the same. That's pretty spiffy if you ask me, now I just need to find the $500 for the player and the $700 for the DVD-RAM drive.
  • Right here [2600.com]

    (and don't close that pop up, you might miss it :) )
    RB
  • I don't know if you noticed the same as me, but that Trackz! MP3 player look very much like any clock radio that you can buy at Radio Shack or Walgreens, specially the red LED display... ugh.

    OTOH, I'd very much like to be awaken by MP3 music...
  • MiniDiscs still offer the best portable music solution. The only benefit an MP3 player has over Minidisc is that you can tranfer songs faster. With minidisc you have to record in real time. However, with an mp3 player, atleast all the ones out right now, you have very limited storage. blank minidiscs cost about $2-3 and can be rewritten over a million times, and store 74 minutes of stereo (148 mono) per disc. Plus the sound quality is much better. I can't tell the difference betweeen minidisc and CD, but my roommate, who's an audiophile and was the one that introduced me to minidisc, says that they sound about on par with 190k mp3s. The portable players are much cheaper than comparable mp3 players (if by comparable you don't figure in recording time). You can get a player/recorder that's only a little bit bigger than a rio for about $300.

    And if you have about $800 lying around you could get a MD-ROM from overseas which will allow you to write to the discs instantly, and store up to 140 megs. Just recording discs overnight or when I've got an hour where I don't need sound on my computer is fine for me.

    MP3 player still have a loooooooooooooooong way to go.

    Nicodemus

  • Why not? (Score:1)

    by AT ( 21754 )
    North America imports a lot of hardware from Taiwan. What makes this different?

    From a legality standpoint, it should be ok. It doesn't record, so it should fall in the catagory of devices as the Rio and other portable MP3 players. The fact that MP3s are played from CD and not from RAM might cause some concern from the RIAA and their lawyers, though.

    Perhaps the demand won't be as large here. MP3s on CD are certainly not widely available here, so access to a computer with a CD burner would be a requirement. Even so, I'd buy one to go with my stereo.
  • Now that AOL owns Winamp, do you think the RIAA will have an easier time of bullying them into supporting their new "CD watermarking" scheme? Future versions of Winamp may not play those "horrible pirated mp3s." Meanwhile, could the RIAA win lawsuits now that they have an alternative to regular mp3 players? I know this is somewhat off topic. Please excuse.
  • Oh jeez,
    You must see this. There is a bizzarre parody of precisely the type of "personal" website that you speak of. It's in three parts (be sure to view them sequentially!:) Some unusual high-profile people in the graphic design world were involved...
    http://www.tank20.com/MARSHA/ [tank20.com]
    cheers.
  • http://www.mp3enhancer.com [mp3enhancer.com]

    the site's weird and a little buggy - but thats the one.
  • Ah, this is a little off-topic, but an extremely small MD recorder would be good for you (perhaps, read on)

    That is truely where MD shines - good hardware.
    There is a lot of BAD ASS kit that is being released in japan. Go to http://www.minidisc.org [minidisc.org] to read up on the latest japanese units.

    With regards to getting an extremely small recorder: The sony MZ-R55 [sony.com] is the one to buy. The price is around $350 msrp ($275 discounted street price?) and it is the top-o-the heap recorder at the moment. It's even pretty easy to get a hold of one.

    With regard to recording at concerts:
    Depending on the type of music you are recording (this applies particularly to symphonic music) using binural microphones (a tiny stero pair that can be clipped to your ears) can yield remarkable fidelity. You should check out this article. [connact.com]

    Cheers!
  • >>Future versions of Winamp may not play those "horrible pirated mp3s."

    I see that possibility as all-too-plausible, but you know that SOMEONE will hack the offensive code out of the new winamp before you can say "RIAA"
    cheers!
  • Annoying, yes, but if that's the _most_ annoying thing you've seen on the web, you need to get out more... :)

    My vote for most annoying goes to an Intel banner ad done in Java (not Javascript, _Java_) that was about a 500k download and prevented the rest of the page from rendering until it was loaded.

    I've seen a couple of home pages that were much more annoying in and of themselves... heavy use of animated GIFs, Shockwave, huge JPEGs, bad MIDI music in the background, horribly clashing flourescent colors, BLINK and MARQUEE tags to annoy those of either major browseral preference, text forced into no-wrap and all on one incredibly long line, incorrectly done frames too small for their content and with no scroll bars, broken IMGs everywhere, pop-up windows with useless Javascript crap in them, unclosed quotes forcing chunks of text to appear inside HREFs... and that's all on _one page_.

    The Intel banner gets my vote, though, because it was actually preventing me from seeing something worth seeing, whereas the other stuff was a general offense against good taste, but didn't limit access to anything worthwhile...
  • I mean, come on now... let's start seeing an option to transfer mp3 files to the bloody things via ethernet, usb, firewire, etc... but for the love of God get away from that pathetic parallel interface!

    ppt tape drives, zip drives, camera interfaces, mp3 player interfaces.. let's just go back to skins, fire and rock tools, shall we? "NEW PARALLEL PORT 19000 RPM ULTRA SOOPER DOOPER HARD DISKS!!!! " *heave*
  • I love it! It's damned hilarious! I almost fell off of my chair laughing when I saw it. It only needs eerie pulsating sound effects and a distant voice murmuring "buy me...buy me."

    Of course, it might. My work computer doesn't have speakers.

    -awc
  • i really couldn't use one of these things at all. i suppose i'll just have to wait until someone comes out with a portable (discman size) mp3 player that uses cd's....the greatest thing would be if it played audio cd's too. we'll get there...eventually.
  • Since the player is being marketed by a company in Taiwan, we'll never see it in any of the Berne convention countries. Piracy is legal in Taiwan and local companies like Son May Records do nothing but sell pirated CDs/VCDs/VHS/DVDs/CDROMs. Expect the RIAA to jump all over this to make sure this "pirate device" nevers sees the light of day anywhere else.

    --
    Cmdr Taco, not affiliated with CmdrTaco.
  • The signal loss on an analog line over most long runs is terrible, particularly without properly shielded cable, which costs signifigantly more. Unless you were using an outboard DAC and running the digital signal to it, it could be problematic. Plus, someone like myself who is looking at DJing with MP3s would find something like this more convienient than lugging my computer to all of my jobs. I'll buy one.
  • As I understand it from the description on the home page for this product, it:

    A) Is totally independent from your computer.

    B) Requires headphones or speakers.

    C) Requires a CD-MP3, with no recording/encoding capabilities.

    D) Is moderately priced.

    Therefore, on my scorecard, the main use for this product is to play MP3s in your first-floor living room when your computer is in the third floor bedroom.

    BUT

    If you already...1) Have the MP3s (and have therefore already encoded your songs into MP3 format and burned them onto a CD), and 2) Have the speakers you want to listen to the MP3s on...then it wouldn't it probably be less expensive just to buy some cheap extension cords and converters, and then run speakers from your computer down to the first-floor? I have the same sort of thing done with my stereo in my house, and I don't think it cost more than $75-100.
  • Although this newly released version is not portable by any stretch of the imagination [check out those physical dimensions!]... MacPower will be offering another model specifically for car use, the MP3-5200C which comes with a +12V 1.5 Amp adapter cable. Apparently available in July.

    I don't think its worth holding your breath over though.

    For real portable specs check out the I-JAM [mp3ijam.com]. The PDA of the MP3 world.
  • Amen, Hallelujah brother! I understand their shooting for the lowest common denominator, but jesus the paralell port is so slow. Especially since we have better things available. I vote for ethernet personally 10BT are SO cheap, and you can get one to work on almost anything. Just have a button on it to cycle through 10.0.0.1 -> 10.0.0.254 and we'll be set.
  • but it is SMALL

    the part that decodes and plays mp3's is exactly the size of a 5.25 inch drive bay. It will fit in your car easily.

    that's the point. small == ca$h
  • I don't see why you couldn't set up a cron job to start mpg123 at a certain time of the day with the specified playlist. Of course, this assumes that the computer is in the same room as your bed & that you run some *nix variant :)

    I'm not sure how exactly to do it (I need to read up more on my 'man cron'), but it should be doable.



    -mike kania
  • What is stopping companies from making portable mp3 players that read a cd? I can understand that it would cost a lot of $$$ but then again what new technology doesn't.
  • IT PULSES TOO!
  • All you need to do is put your laptop in the living room and hook it up to the stereo system. You could do the same in your car as well.
  • I'm actually doing that... I find at to be handier than cron, however, because I don't always get up at the same time... meetings and such'll require me to get in to work earlier some days, and there's no regular schedule to them... and then there's three-day weekends... Those aren't a problem with at, but I do have to remember to set it every night.

    I've got a script (alarm) set up that kicks up the volume and starts splay on shuffle-play through my all my MP3s... I'm thinking I should restrict it to a subset of the collection, though, because Steppenwolf or Republica are likely to get me out of bed much faster than Jethro Tull or Concrete Blonde... :)

    cybil:~$ at 0830
    /home/jcampbel/bin/alarm
    ^D
    cybil:~$

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