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Music Media

MP3 CD Players? 21

Posted by Cliff from the ah-if-it-were-only-so dept.
Mischa asks: The nonmechanical mp3 players, such as the Rio and now the Nomad, but where is Sony/Panasonic/(insert fav corp here) and their cd player that can handle mp3s? A 64 meg memory stick is great, but it doesn't compare to the 650 meg storage of a CD, or the 2+ gigs of a DVD. Are the reasons for their conspicuous absence political, technological, or just plain dumb? :) " Actually, I think it's more due to the current industry view of MP3s. A CD holding 650 minutes of music is going to make the prevailent practice of selling a 74 minutes for $15 look bad. I'm personally all for something like this, and I had heard of projects like this to get MP3s to play on desktop boxes, but nothing really portable.
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MP3 CD Players? More

MP3 CD Players?

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  • Sony? (Score:1)

    by drix ( 4602 )
    Hah yeah right. Sony's problem is just plain greed. Perhaps you've heard of "Sony Music," the biggest of the big five record companies, IIRC. You'll see an MP3 player of any sorts coming from Sony at about the same time that Microsoft Open Sources the Windows 2k kernel. At least Panasonic is just dumb.
  • Yep, it's primarily about those three things, in my own personal opinion. During the past couple of years or so, I've often wondered why a Discman-like portable CD player that can play both mp3's and regular CD's, hasn't been brought to market. I even thought quite a bit about building one myself, although I never had the engineering experience to get it off the ground.

    Regarding the hardware issue, up until around 18 months ago, it just wasn't very cost effective for most large corporate entities to build a portable device that could do real time, or near-real time audio decompression. A powerful enough DSP, like something out of the Motorola 56300 series [mot.com], was just too costly to develop a consumer product upon. This is probably the least significant impediment of the three, as consumer technologies will be produced that are outside the domain of the average consumer (HDTV anyone?), nevertheless it was a logical impediment at one time.

    Eventually, though, the MPMan and the Diamond Rio were produced, albeit for some comparatively hefty prices. The production of the MPMan probably was of some concern to the various parties "protecting" the rights of artists, but the Rio was really what frightened them. Diamond Multimedia, a fairly large consumer electronics firm, was encroaching upon their interests, so the RIAA took them on in court. We all know what happened. Diamond set legal precedent, but drew some obvious ire from the recording industry by doing so. Since then, Diamond jumped on to the SDMI corporate bandwagon, to make nice with the RIAA and only one other consumer electronics firm- Creative Labs- has brought out a competing product. What about Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp and all the other large electronics corporations out there; why haven't they come out with any competing products? Well, one of the main reasons is that a lot of these companies have direct interests within the recording industry. Sony, as we all know, owns a record company. Others are either investors in record companies, or they believe that they stand to lose much from a falling out with the establishment.

    Imagine that you're the CEO of one of these corporations. Do you really want to risk getting blacklisted by the recording companies and by doing so, risk investor confidence in your company's stock? I really don't think so. These large companies like certainty. It pays to protect the status quo, especially if you hold all the cards. Bringing out a product that has the ability to play 150 songs on one, lone CD-R, will turn that status quo on its ear. In some places, like in my country, the recording industry has lobbied the government to impose ridiculous taxes [amoconsultants.com] on blank audio recording media. It isn't in their best interests for you to be able to hold that many songs on one CD-R. They will do everything in their power to thwart innovation if they stand to lose anything from the introduction of a new technology, such as mp3.

    A smaller firm will have to develop a CD-based player on their own and successfully market it to the public. I'm not talking about Pine's [cnet.com] offering, but rather, something from a larger, more established company. Until then, however, a device like this will be hard to come by and it will remain comparatively expensive. It will also obviously be looked upon as a device solely for music pirates by the recording industry, as the sheer volume of compressed music that can be fit onto one CD-R, must scare the hell out of them. They've never liked consumers being able to record their own music, so any sort of compressed audio that empowers the consumer, will compound their fears.

    One final thing to consider is that such a device can only possibly appeal to people with access to a CD-R recorder. Right now that market really isn't very large when compared with the amount of people who already own some sort of regular CD player. A corporation might argue that a legitimate market for a portable audio device that'll play mp3's off of a CD-R, just isn't there yet. You can't present that argument for devices that make use of non-volatile solid state memory, as they don't require anything other than a PC and a free parallel port, or some other interface, to facilitate data transfer. This is just a lot more convenient for the general public at this time, who are interested in listening to mp3's away from their computer. I would just love to be able to play mp3 CD-R's on my Sony Discman, as I own a CD-R burner, but you have to think about all of the people who don't have immediate access to something like this.
  • BTW, there is a new MP3 player out by Grundig [grundig.com] (in germany a really large electronics firm, but probably not as known outside europe). The technical data of the MPaxx [grundig.com] is much like the first Rio (32 MB), but the nice thing is that they support Linux, officially.
  • I personally think that such a device would be absolutely great. And there is one coming, Pine Technology USA [pineusa.com] is coming out with a device called the D'Music. It will read MP3s off burned CDs, Read Regular CDs, and I think I heard something about it having a FM Radio Tunner in it too. So there's the three best ways to get music, all in one device! And the best part....It's portable! They haven't really put much info on their page, but they do have a picture you can check out!
  • Such players are slowly appearing. A German company is offering a hi fi player to add to your other hi-fi components.

    http://www.p-c-c.de/indexeng.html

    The single CD device costs 363 Euros, the CD changer version (3 CD's) costs 414 Euros

    I might just buy one. Still, I wish they'd do a portable one though...

    Regards

    Junior.

  • All of the big audio companies are investing their time and money into Minidisc - not only players and recorders that are tiny, but when you need more space, just pop in another cheap (under 1 UKP) disc for another 74 minutes.

    As they've gone so far with MD, why would they bother making an MP3-based device? It not only competes directly with MD, but to achieve the same functionality (ie real-time recording from microphones, line-level sources etc) they'd have to comply with the RIAA and include SCMS copy protection (something a bit difficult with mp3 files)

    MP3 also has a bit of a bad rep with the public - it's widely associated with music piracy, something that the audio companies don't want to contend with.

    Audio companies also aren't very good at doing PC stuff (Sony being one of the few exceptions), and vice versa. The current MP3 player manufacturers really need to get some good audio people on their teams - brushed metal casings and good quality headphone amps are what's expected of a portable audio device.


    Before anyone asks, NO you can't quickly dump MP3s onto them - but I just set up a playlist of MP3s and let it record to MD while i work/eat/whatever.

    In-car players are a lot cheaper than an empeg as well (would you be happy with a $1000 headunit sitting in your car when you're away?)

    http://www.minidisc.org

    Until I can get an MP3 player that can record live concerts and friend's DJ sets, they'll stay on the shelf. MP3 players are a bit of a geektoy. Minidisc is just so much more flexible for the same cost, nicer players and not tied to the PC.

    (if this sounds like an MP3-bashing post it isn't. I've just finished ripping over 150 of my CDs to MP3 - the technology's great, but MP3 players really suck).

    :)

    qube
  • What needs to happen is an extensible unit that takes Minidisc as a media but has a programmable DSP so that it can play MP3's, or ATRAC (is that MD format?) files. Also needed is a MD reader/writer for PCs, preferable one that is USB/IEEE1394.

    My only question is why data MDs cost $13 and the audio ones cost $2.50 when they both hold digital info.

    One more note - Sony is suppose to have developed a 650 MB MD.
  • The problem with this argument is that Sony is the company behind MiniDiscs. Their advertising has clearly been aimed not at people recording music played by themselves, but people want to copy music from cds. The advertising certainly doesn't make it really obvious to people that it would be illegal to copy cds they don't own. If Sony were so concerned about losing profits from copying of cds, wouldn't they stop selling MiniDiscs?
  • First of all, minidisks don't store that much data. They use an algo called "ARTAC" to get 74 mins of music on the disk(~5:1) so a disk using mp3 whould only get 148 mins on it. Second the disks arent safe for data storage, they get alot of read errors(the "ARTAC" is a bit more fault tolerant that mp3). Third theres alway the Castlewood(tm) Orb(tm) 2gig disks for ~40$. It's an ATAPI so you just plug it into your favorite Linux box and start playing around. But if you like you can always plug your modem to your MD player and go 74 mins at 56kb/s |)(Disclamer: ARTAC may garble your data)
    LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
  • http://www.pineusa.com

    $299 us, in November.
    Looks nice and rugged, too!
  • Years ago there were SCSI MD drives announced, I remember
    seeing one in Circuit Cellar Ink. At 140 MB per
    disk they don't stack up to newer drives, but if
    Sony had persued this market more aggresively at the time they might have the
    marketshare that the ZIP drive enjoys now.
  • If you look to car audio there are a number of products coming out or out that play MP3's recorded on CD's. From there it won't be a big leap to portable consumer electronics using CD's.

    For all the love people seem to have for Sony's Mini Disks, they aren't as good as mp3's on a CD. You also really don't see that many of them. You can hold better than 10 audio cd's compressed and saved to a CD-R. I can take that same disk and put it in my computer at home, which you can't do with the Mini-Disk. More Music on a single medium, CD-R disks can be had for less than $1 a disk, and now they even make CD-RW so that you could have rewritable CD's if you want. (Although with CD's at a dollar a disk I wouldn't bother) It just seems to me that MP3 on CD is a better medium.

    Mini-Disk is great for Sony but MP3 on CD is better for the consumer.

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