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Music Media

4.8G Portable MP3 Player 161

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
[Xorian] writes "There's a new portable mp3 device called the Personal Jukebox. Apparently, this is the result of a research effort from Compaq's Systems Reserach Center (one of the two Compaq research groups that developed the Itsy). The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music (it's got a a 4.8 GByte hard disk) and have 10 hours of battery life yet fit in your jacket pocket. No word on pricing yet though. "
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4.8G Portable MP3 Player More

4.8G Portable MP3 Player

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  • Moving parts (Score:3)

    by maroberts ( 15852 ) on Wednesday November 10, 1999 @05:55AM (#1545789) Homepage Journal
    One of the major plus points of MP3 players is that they have no moving parts and therefore are not subject to shock [well most types of shock anyway].

    Doesn't putting a hard disk in here sortof spoil this ?

  • I keep on hearing about all of these wonderful mp3 players that hold oodles of music and have wonderful battery life..


    but where are they?
  • Taken from the website:

    The PJB 100 Personal Jukebox limited Premier Edition will be available the week of Nov 15, 1999 at a major web music site. If you would like us to notify you by e-mail when additional product is available please contact us at pjbinfo@mp3factorydirect.com [mailto]

  • MAME support yet? (Score:3)

    by eries ( 71365 ) <slashdot-eric@@@sneakemail...com> on Wednesday November 10, 1999 @05:59AM (#1545793) Homepage
    Can I play my favorite arcade games on it yet? I heard that after the Kodak camera this was now a standard required feature for all hi-tech toys :)
  • From what I can see on the page, you USB it to your 'puter and use Windez Exploder to copy the files over.
    Familiar Windows "Explore" model for viewing and managing Jukebox content

    Hmm.
    This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for, esp. the part where it rips directly from CD to the unit. That's seriously cool.


    Pope
  • ibm 2.5" drives are HIGHLY durable and stable. the player will have a huge memory buffer since it claims that it will only spin the hard drive up once every 10 minutes.
  • I want one of those for in my car!

  • This is not what I would call usable. Hard Drives, even the most modern, would not really be able to withstand the shock of hitting the ground when you drop the device, even when the HD is not spinning. HDs might be rated for 1000G for 0.1us, but you get that force by dropping a HD from 1 or 2 foot onto concrete. Maybe the HD could be encased in some kind of jelly bump-soothing gel?

    Of course, being able to fit over 4000 minutes of music on a portable device sounds like fun, but surely a more durable, but lower capacity medium would be better, say fitting a Superdisk into such a device or something similar. Even CD mp3 players seem to be the most popular option amongst those here on Slashdot!

    I am assuming that the device has some integral RAM in which to buffer the mp3s from the HD, 16Mb should be the minimum, so the HD only has to spin up every 15 minutes or so. That would increase battery life considerably.

    What I am waiting for is the integrated portable digital camera, portable games machine, mp3 player and sound recorder of some kind. I know that MAME was ported to a Kodak digital camera (cool use of resources!).

    Sorry I couldn't beat the Elite Hacksaws. (3l337 H4X0RZ) :-)

  • Now I have to decide between buying one of these things or an empeg [empeg.com]! The Empeg is cooler, but this PJbox thing is almost certainly going to be cheaper. (At least, it had better be! If Compaq/whoever is going to try to market a piece of pocket-sized consumer electronics for more than about $300, I imagine they'll have a really tough time moving them off the shelves.)

    I suppose I'm just going to have to put in some overtime and get both...

    -=-=-=-=-

  • I'm guessing that it's going to price around 800$. This is based on this quote:

    Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units.

    If they store 80 hours, and it's price/length ratio is 10$ pe rhour, about 800$.

    This price is also supported by the fact that they compare the price to flash-media devices at 200$ an hour. The 200$ MP3 players store about an hours worth of music.
  • Compaq, more so than any other computer manufacturer, embraces these new mediums. I wonder if it is because they see their core business (duh, computers) receding to Dell and the others.
    The company has also been going through a lot of difficulties lately with management and making the transition to a direct sales company.

    On topic here... one of my friends was recently spouting on and on about his newly discovered Real Jukebox, and how he was thinking of buying a sub woofer and new speakers just for his computer, he enjoyed it so much. His largest wish was that he could copy his set lists onto CDs. So I think this sort f thing could really catch on. Obviously the largest factor will be price... but as always, I am sure it will come down. If I had the option to pay less for say, only 3 or 4 CDs worth... I would certainly do it. But that might not be an option.

  • Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units.

    Sounds like it'll come out to under $810. Probably $800.

    As for shock absorption, the hard drive will probably go corrupt after a few bumps. The heads on a hard drive that small will continuously smack against the disk and cause bad sectors/physical damage.

  • Isn't it amazing what companies release right before the holidays??? My wife thought I was nuts when I wanted teh $200 Lego Mindstorms set...now she's gonna have a heart attack when I tell her I want a $800(approx, they said less than $10/hour and it holds 81 hours) MP3 player!
  • I guess I gotta ask the required question: "Will you be able to access it from Linux?" Since it *only* contains USB, that's a good question. I hope Compaq "does the Right Thing" and realizes the huge number of mp3 fans on the market who are also Linux fans and at least releases specs, if not an actual API or something.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • Ok, before everyone starts posting about how the hard drive will not work, or it's good because memory is too expensive, check out this story [slashdot.org] posted by Commander Taco about..the exact same thing.

    (a 4.6GB portable mp3 player with hard disk)

  • On slashdot it states:
    The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music..

    On pjbox.com it states:
    Storage huge volume of songs squal to approx. 100 pieces (not 100 songs) of normal audio CD.


  • I'd love to have a portable MP3 player that runs Linux. That would rock. I'd be able to have total control over whatever it does--imagine being able to control the device at that level.
  • This ought to make the stupid record companies happy.
  • Well, from the site(s) the "Personal Jukebox will be available December 1999" or "The PJB 100 Personal Jukebox limited Premier Edition will be available the week of Nov 15, 1999 at a major web music site."

    MP3.com [http] perhaps?

    Regards, Ralph.

  • ...I want a radio built in as well. I'm just never satisfied 8-)
  • I'm not impressed though. Why not insert a 13 GB HD, at least? If you are going to use those noisemaking/krasching devices, why not have some space??? Yea yea, prices, but they are not that expensive nowadays...
  • Well if it's a 2.5 inch drive, it's more than likely a laptop drive. Shouldn't it be just as reliable as any IBM laptop harddrive. The last laptop I had was a vaio so it doesn't quite compare. What's the MTBF on IBM 2.5's?
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
  • Okay, I'm going to rip 100 CDs onto a harddrive that only has enough portable power to play 10 hours with of music.

    Let's think this one through:
    Each Cd is roughly an hour of music.
    10 hours = 10 CDs.

    Why do I care about the other 90 CDs that I could rip to its harddrive?
  • Unless it's loaded with REALLY high quality MP3s, you'd have to recharge it 5 times just to hear all the songs. There better be an AC adapter available with it.
  • I've been looking for one of these at a reasonable
    price for a while - any idea if there's one coming out for under $150? There have been a bunch of /. stories out them, but they're all ridiculously priced.

    I've got a CD burner, and would really like to be able to carry all my music with me on only a few CDs - after all, once you get to have more than 30 or so, it's difficult to find carrying cases with enough capacity.....
  • With a hard-drive, as others have mentioned, it'll be prone to shocks (which will cause the disk heads to skid merrily over the delicate surfaces of the disk..), and, to give 10 hours of battery life, will probably need a car battery to be strapped to the wearer's back. The two main Rio features I like are that it's light and runs on "dead" AA batteries.

    How long does 4.8Gb of data take to download over a parallel port or USB port, anyway?
  • I'm wondering if the Jukebox is crippled, in that it only allows files to be written to and delete from the player.... not read from the player.

    If so, what makes the Jukebox from a laptop, in that bidirection file transfers are enabled on a laptop, but not the handheld player? Maybe the industry's just too scared of being sued by the RIAA for coming out with a player that can be used to share music. Sad.....
  • CE or Linux? Why? All you really need is an MP3 player. Its not like you are going to program this mp3 player as a firewall or an X server. It most likely has a special purpose DSP programmed mostly with assembly language and perhaps some C thrown in.

  • My Xmas list is all ready..... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 10, 1999 @06:14AM (#1545820)
    These all seem like pricey-kinda-kludgy solutions... check out a review at http://www.tech -report.com/reviews/1999q4/mp-shuttle/mp-shuttle-1 .x [tech-report.com] or you can go shopping at http://xeenontech.safeshopper.com/ [safeshopper.com].
    Seems like a real solution to me.. 2 different models.. one has a pullout HD rack, and the other just has a CD drive in it to read normal burned CDs with mp3's on them.. and it is shipping now! This is what I want for Christmas!

  • it will be less than $800 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The page says it has 80 playback hours and it's price per playback hour is less than $10, so final price is less than:

    80 playback hours * $10/playback hour = $800
  • Do you always listen to your music linearly?

    I have 12 CD's with me at school today. I doubt
    I will listen to them all, but at least I get to
    choose which one I want to listen to, depending
    on my mood.

    I started with The Stooges (skipping several songs), then The Queers, and now The Vapids....

    It would be SWEET to have several hundred CD's worth of music right here with me, even if I couldn't play it all right away...
  • well, this is just a quick thought off the top of my head, but -- you could recharge the batteries and use the device more than once!

  • One of the features that I love about my Rio is that I can take it running with no skipping, and no fear that I will be breaking something mechanically (except my legs! I'm in bad shape).

    If I were to try to run with a spinning hard drive attached to me, I'm sure it would be only a matter of weeks before I destroyed it with the constant shocks... I'm sure they shock-test those things, but they're not meant for the several-times-per-second jarring of someone who is jogging. (Or running to catch a train, for that matter).


    - Drew

  • About two weeks ago slashdot had a reference to a press release from some company called Hangjin or something that had developed such an mp3 player in conjunction with Compaq. It will cost about $800 when released in November. All the relevant issues were already discussed on slashdot (hard drive spinning down to conserve juice, shock resistance of the mechanism, etc.)-- so check the previous slashdot discussion for some good info. [slashdot.org]

    Dillrod

  • The drive is supposedly on only "once every 10 minutes" to read more data into a buffer. The claimed purpose is to increase battery life (and given they're claiming 10 hours with a HDD it seems to work). I'd tend to think that means that except while filling the buffer the shock resistance is that of a non-operating IBM portable drive, which is actually rather high.
  • Do they exist? If so, where can I find an mp3 player that uses cds as its medium?


    -xyster
  • Well, I would think that this would be a good thing because you might want to have a choice about what 10 hours of music to listen to at any given time. If you put 100 hours of music on the thing, then you never have to do it again. (Assuming that you don't have more than 100 hours of music total that you want to rotate through.) Then later when you decide you want to use your 10 hours of battery life, you have a selection of music to choose from instead of just being able to play whatever is currently on the drive.
  • This may seem off topic...but what-ever happened to mp4's? Last I heard was that NWA used it for a song. I sure hope that mp4's come soon cause I can't stand the quality of mp3. Most people can't tell the difference, but when you create music of your own you really see the difference when cd-audio is converted to mp3. It takes alot away (espically brain-wave synch, and different types of echoes). Anyway when mp4's come out I hope these modern mp3 players will have upgrades to play mp4's!
  • I followed the link on their site to get "Technical Specifications", and was mildly disappointed. I've gathered from previous posts that the "Personal Jukebox" (yeech... the name... make it stop) uses a 2.5" IBM drive. Does anyone know of a source of some technical specs on the IBM 2.5" drives that are in these players?

    I do a lot of jogging, and would love to use one of these, but I want to take a look at some detailed specs for a couple reasons:
    • Resistance to Shock: How well do these players hold up when they're shaken? How about dropped? I currently use a Sharp MD-702 minidisc player for portable music - its been dropped multiple times and has never had any of its (important) parts damaged. I would imagine the solid-state MP3 players would present even more resistance to shock and acceleration.

    • Time Before Estimated Failure: Hard drives usually have a MTBF given to them in terms of thousands of hours of operation. Say I jog 45 minutes to an hour every day for two years, carrying the unit in my hand. The disk drive would probably hold up that long, but would the repeated shock of jogging decrease the estimated time before failure?

    Can anyone (at least semi-scientifically) address any of these issues or point me to some relevant shock/mtbf specifications? Is this design anywhere close to as durable as CD/MD players? Are the drives replacable?
  • Great! This is just great! I finish my own portable .MP3 player, and two days later somebody announces that it's already obselete!
    Granted, mine won't do anything near real-time encoding, but thats what my desktop is for.

    Specs:
    Micro-GX motherboard (4.5x4.1x1/2) 166 MediaGX processor
    1 x 32M DIMM
    2 x IBM 2.4G 2.5mm HD
    1 x Tulip Fast Ethernet
    1 x custom PCI 'L' connector
    1 x custom power supply
    1 x custom plexiglas case
    3 x Compaq laptop batteries

    It may have no screen, but it runs for up to 16 hours on the batteries, plugs into the lighter socket in the car, and it Runs Linux(tm)!

  • MP3 Music on Portable Hardrive = Junk (Score:3)

    by MaxMahem ( 98979 ) on Wednesday November 10, 1999 @06:23AM (#1545832)
    While I don't want to sound like a spoil sport, but this product, as I see it, is something I will never buy.

    1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.

    2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.

    3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.

    4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.

    For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.

  • Fits 100 cds, eh? I'd love to get rid of them, just have a little playlist thingy to access all my music. I've filled my 72 count cd case, and still have about 20 lying around. Even if i can only listen to 10 hours before recharging, it's still better than having 100 cds with me.

    -Raskolnik
  • Sorry to sound pessimistic, but does this mean that every 10 mins, your player is going to be accessing your hard drive whilst you are jogging round the park ?

    I can an ill timed footfall would fsck your hard drive! I can see it working as a car player though, where suspension is rather better, but for a personal player I'll stick to solid state devices.

  • Taken from the website, they're estimating a cost of $10 an hour of music - at 81 hours, that's $810. A very steep price for an MP3 player.

    Also, it's got 10 megs of integral DRAM for caching MP3 music, thus spinning up and down the HD occasionaly.

    My question is the following: Doesn't spinning up and down that much severely reduce the lifecycle of the hard drive, and isn't a ten minute cache an "best-case" kind of thing? I'd assume most songs are 5 minutes, and you don't know if the user is going to want to play the next song in the set, or whatever.

    It's been proven, though, that HDs these days can take high shocks (witness implementations in cars, etc, that ended up not needing any padding). I'm sure, though, that Compaq has put the HD in some sort of gel.

    So many things couldn't happen today
    So many songs we forgot to play
    So many dreams coming out of the blue
  • It's been said here [slashdot.org] already... Sheesh!

    Unless of course eyeballs on adverts count for so much.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a CD mechanism delicate too? Wouldn't dropping a CD Walkman (or a CD-based MP3 player) from any height have about as much chance of causing damage to its mechanism as dropping a powered-down hard drive from the same height would? Keep in mind, hard drives can withstand much higher forces when they're off, and the drive in this thing would be off 99.9% of the time.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Since many of the Itsy folk were doing USB on BSD on ARM, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the same -- the Itsy could easily have been made small enough, it was already low-power, and then with a daughtercard tacked on it could do this sort of thing trivially (and fairly inexpensively).

    So I'd guess that it's some species or variant of BSD.

    Nobody doing embedded control work is anything but openly contemptuous of Wince; I doubt the folks at these (ex-DIGITAL) research labs would even think hard about that direction.
    --G

  • what about minidisk? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At about $2.60/hr, minidisk is cheaper than mp3. And it's better quality sound. And I can fit 20 disks & headphones & a player in my shaving bag. & it doesn't tie up my computer for recording. I can record quality sound by plugging in a microphone. And I've dropped mine (a sony mz-r30)
    4 ft. onto concrete, and it lived.

    So why bother with these MP3 players?
  • You can replace/recharge the batteries you know.
    Having all that music on the player means less time transferring to and from your desktop machine. Who wants to spend all their days managing the memory and playlists for a machine that only holds a few songs?
    And of course there is the "Jukebox" aspect of it. With the ability to host music wholesale you can pick and choose the mix without worrying if you downloaded that particular song or not. With that much space it could conceviably be your main MP3 storage device.
  • Both CD/Radio combination units I've tried have been crap -- they barely fit into standard CD carriers (partly because of fat cases, partly because of imbecilic placement of the volume knob and headphone jack), highly vulnerable to skipping (even when the buffer was allegedly working), and built with thin plastic casings (obviously an AM loop antenna can't be put inside a metal casing, but that's no excuse for such flimsy plastic, and if necessary they could forget about AM and pick up FM via the headphone cord).

    Surely there's no actual engineering reason for this -- the electronics for a basic radio tuner ought to fit in the unused space of most portable CD players -- so I can only assume that it's the work of marketing droids.
    /.

  • In that price range, it'd be worth it, but if that IS the case, I'd LOVE to know what the heck 10$ per hour is based on..
  • Well, having some with no moving parts is fine... but do all of the mp3 players have to follow that model?

    Some of us would love to have something portable, that can play lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of music. Me, for one.

  • To me, the primary advantage of an MP3 player (which the Rio does not quite get there yet) is being able to hold a lot of music that can be carried around. This is the first unit that is getting close to the promise.

    In any case, IBM 2.5" disk drive are extremely rugged (the heads have extremely low mass).

  • According to http://www.mp3factorydirect.com/pjbspec.htm, it will be a "10MB DRAM buffer [that] holds 10 minutes of music", therefore the HDD will only have to spin up every 10 minutes or so, just long enough to copy over 10MB into memory...

  • No price given, but they say "up to 81 hours of music" and "less than $10 per hour of playback."

    I'd guess maybe $650 street. That's way beyond other MP3 players. However, it's cheaper than the Empeg in-car player. But to have enough memory to hold enough music for a cross-country road trip (a round trip, at that), hell I'd pay it. I was never looking forward to having to hook up a 64MB MP3 player up to a computer just to get some new music. And I thought the one with a 340MB microdrive was going to be cool!
  • This device, at 9.9 oz, is almost 4 times the size of Diamond's Rio, which is 2.75 oz. I guess the difference is probably attributatble to the IBM hard drive. I'll probably stick with the Diamond Rio and hope the flash memory prices come down. I think I can survive jogging 5 miles with just a measly one hour of music.

    This device sounds interesting, but not for my needs. I don't plan on doing anything for 800 consecutive hours, and if I did, I don't know if I have 800 hours of music that I would want to listen to.
  • I believe you mean media as plural of medium, mein froind!


    Pope

  • Cost (Score:1)

    by CoolAss ( 62578 )
    "The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units."

    Do the math... that's gonna mean that it's between $800 and $900 bucks. If we're lucky.

    Screw that... too much money.
  • oops. sorry about the typo. I meant 80 hours.

  • I could swear I saw discussion of this topic a couple or three days ago on /.

    --Corey

  • The CD Mechanism may be delicate, but it is not a drive head hovering millionths of a inch over the top of a spinning magnetic coated plastic platter spinning over 5000 times a minute. A CD mechanism is optical and is only 200rpm. If the CD mechanism breaks, the CD is usually fine (the exception being when a lorry drives over your CD device). With a HD, if it corrupts itself, say bye bye to the data held on it...

    Also CD mechanisms are far more robust than HDs, even the latest 2.5" ones from IBM. They cost a lot less as well, I am sure you could put an 8 speed CD-ROM into the device (um, 1600rpm?) to read data into the on-board memory supply. (It should only take 10-30 seconds for 16Mb of RAM, 15minutes of music). The battery in such a device would last ages :-).

    I imagine a HD could take being jogged around with, but it won't take being dropped, and it will happen! You know it would be your luck for the device to smash onto concrete just as the HD was spinning up ready to load in the next 10 minutes of music :-)

  • IIRC, the .mp4 file was invented so that NWA could release the songs after their record company said they couldn't release .mp3s.
    So, they just changed the name. :P
    AFAIK there ain't no such thing as ".mp4"

    There's a spec for MPEG-4 compression being studied, based on Apple's QuickTime. I don't have any *real* information about it, although I've seen .mpg files on UseNet compressed with a Microsoft MPEG-4 compressor. I think it's bogus.

    Don't forget, .mp2 and .mp3 are ACTUALLY MPEG-2 layer 2 and MPEG-2 layer 3. neither is really "better" than the other, except most people assume that .mp3 must be better because it has a higher number, and therefore must be newer and better.
    IIRC, .mp2 sounds much better at higher bitrates.
    I honestly don't think that you can get more compression than .mp3, and I don't know why you'd want to either.



    Pope
  • Compaq, more so than any other computer manufacturer, embraces these new mediums

    I didn't know Compaq was in the business of contacting the dead. Well, I guess the way they've run their business into the ground, it's probably appropiate.
  • What is the point of this? 80 hours of music? 10 hours of battery life? So you're looking at roughly 144 hrs needed to hear all of this music, figuring 8 hrs of recharge time on that battery.
    =]

    I just don't get this at all. I've already ordered a Nomad that will hold an hour of music and has a FM receiver in it. No delicate harddrives, just some flash memory. I'm sure it will last longer than my old Sony CD Player has after being dropped a couple of times on tight corners! And I also have no reason to carry every song I've ever liked around with me. Who has the time to even set that up?!?! I'll stick to spending my time playing Homeworld or 1/2 Life.

    _______________________

    Mello like the Yello, but without the fizz.

  • Although I might carry it around a little, I think that my primary use for this would be as a component to my shelf stereo. It does have an A/C adapter, which means I can play all 100CDs worth of music in a row if I want.
  • With this guy, all you need is the unit and a pair of headphones.
    Really, for MP3 playback, which all this is, this is an ideal solution.
    I'm not too wacky about the price, but if something like this came to say $250 in a year or so, I'd get one.
    I'm pretty careful about my portable sound equipment, so I have no worries about dropping this.
    YYMV :)



    Pope
  • Anyone know if these hardware MP3 decoders support bitrates other than 128kbit/s? I generally encode all of mine at 192... nothing worse than jamming along to your favorite tune and hearing just a tad of "metallic" compression... even if it's only occasionally and barely noticeable. My goal of moving all my CDs to a server WILL be achieved with the help of Grip/cdparanoia/bladeenc (even if it takes another 6 months and two more harddrives), I just hope I'll be able to do something with them besides listening at the 'puter.
  • The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.

    CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.

    Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.

    Bill Kilgallon
  • The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.

    CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.

    Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.

    Bill Kilgallon
  • I thought starting and stopping hard drives was extremely hard on them... something to do with the lubrication on the spindles. Has this been solved for these small drives?
  • The website says it will cost somewhere between free and $10 per playback hour.

    Seeing as the unit as 80 playback hours, it'll probably cost less than $800. ;)

  • Pricing (Score:1)

    by BigEd ( 6405 )
    From their page:

    Remote Solution?s [sic] PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour...

    Assuming that "less than $10" means $9.99, which it almost always does, then this puppy is going to be at least $799... spendy.

  • I have over 800 CDs spanning 7-10 different genres. one hour of music couldn't possibly adequately represent my musical tastes. I also listen to about 5-10 hours of music every day. If I had to listen to one hour of EVEN my favorite songs five to ten times in a day, I'd probably go postal.

    also, Mike Oldfield's _Amarok_ is a CD with one track on it...which is longer than one hour. I couldn't put that one track on your player.
  • With that kind of storage capacity, why should you accept any kind of quality degredation? Why not give the device the capability to play wav files as well? Or better yet, do that and come out w/ a lower cost one that only does wav files. No mp3 decoding makes for less hardware, fewer liscense fees, and a cheaper product.
  • "Playback of MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3) at bit rates up to 320 Kbits/sec"
    ----------
  • I didn't know Compaq was in the business of contacting the dead. Well, I guess the way they've run their business into the ground, it's probably appropiate.

    Heh... maybe they should be doing that. I can think of a number of "deceased" they might want to learn from... Packard Bell?
  • There are already portable players from sony, panasonic, and a couple of other manufacturers. I have the PBD-V30 which is MSRP 799.00 (I paid 40% less due to my company getting anything sony wholesale). Anyway, building such a thing yourself would cost much more in man time as well as the single products made up to build it.

    I'm assuming you don't mean straight transfer, as DVD movies are usually 6.5 - 9.4 gigs (around 7.1mbps).

    The only thing breaking CSS does for us at this time is allow non-licensees the capability to produce DVD player products as well as enabling pirates to rip, reduce, re-encode in mpeg1, and place on 2 vcd's. Previously they were reduced to using PC players and grabbing it frame by frame; or just grabbing and recording from tv-out.
    ----------
  • put in a small plug for a project I'm working on. It's an mp3-cd player that also plays audio CD's. I eventually plan to add hard drive capabilities and offer an option where someone could send me systems specs and I could send them back a boot-disk with all the required software.

    Currently, it's not portable, but with smaller hardware it could be. I'm using mine as a home stereo component.

    It's all open source with code available for download, and documentation is in the works.

    http://cs.atu.edu/~ewyles/mp3000.htm

    BTW, sign up for our mailing list if you want future update.

    PEACE

    ps -- sorry for the shameless plug, I just think this project is cool.
  • Don't bet on that. I've held some of those drives (Put a 6 GB in my dad's laptop from work a few weeks ago). Those things are barely there. Although I'm not sure what else might be taking up that weight, I'm not sure that its due to the disk.
  • Ever consider the possiblity that you can take more than one set of batteries with you?

    I know when I drag my CD player with me, I usually have two sets of Nickel Metal Hydroxide battries with me. They last a whole hell of a lot longer than a normal NiCad battery.

    BTW does anybody know what type of battery they used for the battery life expectancy?

  • I think what he is talking about tranfering is not the sound but the actual digital file.

  • Re:Mp4's? (Score:4)

    by Eric_Scheirer ( 14197 ) on Wednesday November 10, 1999 @09:01AM (#1545893) Homepage
    The MPEG-4 Audio standard is done. It was finished at the October 1998 MPEG meeting and is now "out for ballot", which means the various countries that are members of ISO vote to approve it (countries have had several chances to suggest changes, so it's unlikely to be disapproved). After formal ballot approval, it goes to ISO for publication, and then you can buy it. It will likely be available in final form before the end of the year.

    The "reference software" (slow, user-hostile code to demonstrate how the standard is supposed to work) was completed in August and the source is available as part of the spec. Non-MPEG organizations are already building tools for user-friendly use of the standard.

    The whole MPEG-4 Audio standard (not including Video or Systems) is about 1200 pages long. It is formally ISO 14496-3:1999 and is divided into 6 Sections:

    • 1. Introduction and Overview
    • 2. Parametric Speech coding
    • 3. CELP Speech coding
    • 4. General Audio (AAC/TwinVQ merger)
    • 5. Structured Audio (audio synthesis)
    • 6. Text to Speech Interface

    The part that is most like MP3 is Section 4. Section 4 enables music and other wideband audio coding from 16 kbps to 64 kbps/channel. At the high end, the quality is nearly transparent -- most listeners will not be able to tell the difference between the coded and the original signal. MPEG-4 GA at 96 kbps (stereo) gives about the same quality as MP3 at 192 kbps (stereo) -- thus, files are half as big for the same quality.

    There are no "layers" in MPEG-4 Audio.

    Some of the sections of the standard (2, 3, 4) are protected by patents and cannot be freely implemented. Section 5 is not protected by patents and can be freely implemented without paying license fees.

    Here is the hype from the beginning of Section 1:

    ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.

    MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high-quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the-art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object- based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.

    Best regards,

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

    More info: http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio [mit.edu]

  • Now shiping is the best solution for all your MP3 needs. It has a 6 hour lithium ion battery, upgradable 3.2 gig drive, CD-rom, comes in two stylish colors and can run linux with it 300 mhz G3 processor! Connect it to your network with it's built in 10/100 base T connection or download songs with its built in 56.6 modem. it also has a 12.1" active matrix display! The total cost is $1599. thats right - it's an apple iBook. Why pay $800 for something that does nothing but play mp3's?
  • 10MB is a little light for my taste. I'd like to see something like this with 64 MB or so.. that way I could make it to work and back without the drive having to spin more than once. I think an MP3 player should support the best of both worlds. Have the hard drive for storage capability yet use as much solid-state storage for skip and hardware protection. Also, it would save battery life by using RAM vs a HD.
  • I for one can't imagine going on an 80 hour jog. Well, I don't jog anyway but that's not the point. I doubt the purpose of these device is to be worn on the belt while jogging. If you're going to do that you might as well just use a portable CD player -- 1 hour's not bad.

    But I can tell you it would be a lot handier to carry the music selection to a party or a friends house in one hand than to pack up the whole computer and all its cables to get it over there. I don't know of any other portable media that can hold that much. There are dat tapes, but you need a reader at the destination and I'm guessing the port on this player is more standardized and ubiquitous than tape drives. Tapes are also much slower (at least last time I checked).

    Ok, so I don't go to friends' houses or parties either, but once again, that's not the point :)
  • why not make the harddrive arbitrary. Now a 13GB hardrive might be possible but who knows what size of hardrive we will be able to buy next year. I'd love to plug in a 50 GB harddrive when one comes available (assuming 2 1/2 inch and whatever interface the current drive is using, IDE?)
  • Seems to me with over 1000 possible songs stored this is the perfect device for a professional DJ or in place of a Car CD changer. How many folks would want to go jogging wearing a $500 walkman? I get sweat all over it and have a habbit of dropping those things a million times, and praying everytime they survived.
  • Who listens to that much music in MP3, and feels like carrying it all with them? I have about a gig of MP3s, but by no means do I want them all with me at once.

    ~Owen


  • Yeah, if only I had $800 to spend on a portable MP3 player...

    Earth to Slashdot, come in Slashdot.

    For my money ($200-$300) I'll pick up a portable CD MP3 player (I've only been waiting for one to be released for the past year and a half). The Pine [pineusa.com] SM-200C [pineusa.com] has a very yummy list of specs [pine-dmusic.com]. According to this C|Net article [cnet.com] it's supposed to come out this month.

    Another player is Vertical Horizon [evhi.com]'s CP200 [evhi.com]. It's got fewer features but it's $100 cheaper. Unfortunatly the CP200 won't be released until "sometime before the end of first quarter next year".

  • ---snip---
    2: No, i could also use this player for exchange in a pinch...which i see as an advantage.
    ---snip---

    How so???
    Remember the rio was made so as to not let
    people get music OFF of the player(of course
    that was cracked, but that's beside the point).
    I doubt, especially with this much storage space,
    that compaq is going to let you use this to take
    music off the player. If they do let you get music
    off of the palyer, I have a feeling that the RIAA
    is going to get on their back hardcore.

    Or maybe you are thinking of outputing the
    sound to the audio in of a reciever, and
    then dubbing it from there??
  • Quite possibly, 64Mb of DRAM in an active state (ie, you need to be accessing *some* of it) will take more power than nothing, which is what a HDD which has had the power removed takes.

    They won't just be putting the HDD into standby - they still take a non-insignificant amount of juice for a battery-powered player.

    Hugo
  • Making anything emovable makes it more expensive. You have to figure out how to make it clean and easy to replace, and how to not let the user screw anything up, as well as cleverly fit the port thingy into the case. I would guess that the expensive part of these machines would be the hard disks, not the codec chips or the amps. Therefore, it would probably be cheaper to buy a new one than to buy an upgradeable one, and then buy more disks later on.
  • 1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.

    2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A
    couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.

    I doubt it, those laptop drives are extremely durable. They can withstand 100G's non operational, and a few g's operational. Besides, if you do frog the drive they're not _that_ expensive.


    3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.

    Audio tape + magnet = audio mush.

    video tape + magnet = video mush.

    floppy disk + magnet = data mush.

    credit card + magnet = credit card mush.

    but nobody complains about that. Honestly, if you subject any of those to a sufficiently large magnetic field, you're screwed... but when does that happen?


    4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.

    you've been buying cheap hard drives, tsk tsk. I haven't "lost a drive to bad sectors" since about 1990, when I had that 100mb kalok hard drive that had 50% bad sectors. I have a 4.3gb samsung drive, a 3.5gb maxtor, and a 16.8gb IBM drive and I haven't "lost" any of them to bad sectors... and i'm rough on my drives.

    For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.

    The rio works, and is solid state and all... but there needs to be a larger storage medium than nvram.... it's waaay to expensive.

  • Hmm, maybe not with a stressed-out 33Mhz DSP. The Kodak 265 has a powerPC and runs something like VXworks, so it's a decent CPU and a decent RTOS.

    Hugo
  • It's not an ARM, it's a DSP @ 33Mhz.

    USB slave (as required on a device like this) is not too hard, really. Nothing like the complexity of a USB host (as is currently in 2.3 kernels). The driver I did for the empeg is in the kernel source, but it's not very useful unless you use a USBN9602... which is found in zero PCs.

    Hugo
  • I guess it's a good thing not all of us (myself included) place ourselves in front of footballs very often :)
  • Completely the wrong comparison. The smaller the drive, the lower mass the heads, which means the higher the shock rating. Hence why the IBM drives have an *operating* shock rating of 150g.

    We use similar 2.5" drives in the empeg, and it's been through full vibration testing - we also keep them in a shock-mounted cradle though.

    Hugo
  • You got a good point here, but still a removable harddisk offers some advantages over a fixed harddrive (as long as the price of the player is so much higher as the cost of a harddrive) that make it worth it.
  • Now whats the point of having a large (expensive) hard drive when the battery can only play for 10 hours! are they going to make a less expensive 1 gig verison? i would like that!
  • If you read the site, it uses an internal rechargeable battery to give 10 hours of life. The HDD only runs once every 10 minutes, for (my guess) around 15 seconds.

    Hugo

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