hobgoblin

thing is that i would love to not only be able to store files in data format but allso play them back on said player while traveling to a diffrent computer. yes i want my cake and eat it to

special in that you cantjust drag and drop files onto a removable media icon located somewhere on your desktop... using a iriver or iaudio player you can do this. and if one could allso do this with a himd player it would be interesting to say the least well for some reason i find those that came with my grundig portable cd player fully usable. sure there is better equipment out there but i dont feel like wearing big eardrums just for listening to music while traveling to and from places. but each their own. i guess it just shows that im no prosumer i guess yes it allways sucks. but the only way to remove that problem is to remove greed, and good luck with that... when it performs good enough, looks have a bad habbit of driving price way out of proportions. we humans are slaves to good looks. be it cars, clothes, partners in life or anything else. we are kinda trying to buy ourselfs status this way. and yes im fully aware of bang &olufsen. never liked their kind of design. cant agree more, im looking into any music player other then crative and apple products just for the sake of being diffrent. and as i can find some very nice and very diffrent products in those iaudio players (i like the idea of "large" lcd on the remote, with a clip on the back for attachment to clothing, and only 3 buttons on the player itself. may have to get myself a m3 before they are discontinued) im happy funny that much of the good stuff is coming out of south korea these days. now if only some company there would licence the himd format and release it from those silly requirements of sonicstage and drm. glad to be of service.

err, ipod allso requires a special program to transfer music to it. its only that its not a drm feature and therefor was simple for people using alternative os's to open it up. on the ipod the drm is on the individual files only from what i understand. on the md its in the very design of the player

funny thing is that i belive many corps are going MO media for backups these days. only reason tape is still widely used in install base. as in, why trow out that tape robot when its working so fine? but for a new install i would think MO would be a logical choise... funny thing is that its basicly the same tech as the MD... only that the discs are cd sized...

so, if i want to run a secure webserver it should be some homemade code on top of skyos or something?

woa, did a whole page of posts just go bye bye?

maybe so but for most people out there that either dont work with music or are not obesessed with out-bing-ing their fellows the low cost all on one boxes are good enough. so, posting about what something costs as a label about how good they sound dont work. atleast it dont do so for me. hell, im listening to music on my pc thru some fairly old pc speakers as i type this those that buy a apple ipod buy them as much for image as for listening yes. but what about those that buy creative, iriver, or any other brand and still use the stock earbuds? it often helps to understand what drives things by taking a step down from ones cloud of enlightend knowledge. ms office and windows stays in use not because it happens to be better, but because its good enough for the job people want to do, surf, mail, im and writing stuff. only thing that changes this is that people now see that one gets sued left right and center for piracy, and as they maybe cant afford that they rather go for linux or similar that dont cost them as much (if anything at all). its cost and convinience that drives the markets, not quality, atleast not past the point that the masses see as good enough. that is, unless they are going for image/bling. as in, people deck out their cars from a image angle, not from a quality angle. it just happens that in some areas quality and image goes hand in hand. like say how a well made suit helps with your image in politics and economics. come there with a cheap one and your automaticaly second rate. so i have stopped pushing stuff on people and rather inform them on the positives and negatives of each option, one of them being cost, and then let them choose based on what they feel they need. sure, maybe the world could become a better place if the enlightend elite ruled and everyone else just followed. but even enlightend rule can become oppressive given time. and what if one enlightend dont aggre with a thoughts and plans of a diffrent enlightend? i hate saying this but in the end its the lowest common denominator that counts. thats why 99% of the music files out there still is mp3s even tho one have better and more effective codecs. its good enough for the "unwashed masses". it may at times help to take a step out of ones ivory tower and see what the world looks like for the rest of those that live there. im sure i dont do it enough tho...

heh, true. but how about either waiting with the ripping until after the others have watched said movie. or are you in a hurry to get said cd ripped? yes it may become a bit of a mess if several people want to do something at the same time, in the same area. so maybe put a second dvd player and tv in a diffrent room, but wired into the same system. that way people can go watch something on the other tv, or use it as a ripping terminal. this is the usual solution with say kids in the house. a secondary unit that the kids can use so that they dont take up time on the primary one. and how long does it realy take to rip a cd? surely they can wait a bit with said movie it they just walked in the door with it. or how about ripping and dvd rental is redundant with a setup like this. why not just download the entire album from a online music shop or rent said movie as a stream that you can start watching at any time? in this house there are atleast 3 computers, all networked together. this is so that we dont have to argue about who gets to use the computer at any given moment.

err, what do price have to say about quality? sure i know about the old saying that you pay for quality, its the same argument they use on anything branded with that partialy eaten apple... also, its about the top 1-10% of the whole music market that feel the need to spend masses of money on equipment. hell, i have more or less stopped reading reviews as they allways talk about having to use their own special headsets just to get music they can tolerate. i have been perfectly happy with the sound in the earphones i got with that protable cd player i bought some years back with mp3 playback ability. and by the looks of it most people are very happy with the quality of sound they are getting from most pod products using the stock earphones... and one comment about managing music on computers. there is a reason why ms and others are pushing more and more for that living-room pc. turn on the tv, tune to the right "channel" and you have your music collection there. no need to go into a seperate room to deal with it. you can then set up the playlists you want to have on your portable player, hit transfer, and then grab it out of the dock/charger when leaving. the age of the pc as a gray box in corner is more or less gone. check out the small and quiet ones from the likes of shuttle or for that matter apple. and while the hardware is becoming more and more pc based it allso becomes more and specialized. im guessing that 2-3 generations from now the computer will be a set of interconnected boxes with a central hub in the living room. want to add a extra hardrive plug it into one of the other boxes and the system will automaticaly detect its precence and set it up. it may even download drivers of the net automaticaly as needed. basicly the pc becomes just another part of your multimedia setup. most likely it will be a small box with only a cpu, ram and gpu. like a console basicly. hook it up to the dvd player/recorder and it becomes able to read and write cds and dvds. hook up a hardrive and it will be able to store files on that. hook it up to the inet connection and it will be able to locate music shops, movie shops, tv guides and other stuff online. the tv becomes the display. most likely when people buy their first pc it will come as a package deal where you can opt out on parts you allready have. parts that are fully usable on their own. hook a hardrive to the tv and you have a tivo. hook a dvd recorder into all this and it should be able to get stuff of the hardrive for recording. with the right standardized protocols and connectors and anythings possible. only problem right now is that the big ones in computing and the big ones in home entertainment are to used to control their sphere. when those two spheres overlap one gets a big war as noone wants ot cooperate on their turf. therefor its perfect time for someone small to come in and scoop them all.

latest from the music biz is that the ability to do just that is a privelidge, not a right. basicly if they could have their way you would only be able to play it one their designated devices, and only on one pr bought media or file...

hmm, how about those mp3 wrappers?

may we live in interesting times...

ugh, put a bullet in my head allready will they? managed copy: its an attempt at getting the "fair use" crowd to shut up. but it says nothing about being able to media shift the content. and to me thats part of fair use, that i can pop a old disc into the right device and transfer the content on to the next gen media. kinda like how you can go from analog media to analog media, or even some digital ones as long as you keep a pcm copy around to. problem is that unlimited media shift allso allows for unlimited piracy. cant take that chance now can we? superior interactivity: ugh, if i have to go head to head with yet another disney disc that have unskipable commerisals for other disney products im giving up and going p2p. its bad enough that one have commersials at the start of movies in the cinema but when they show up on rentals or even bought media then its over the top. i want a simple disc that i can pop in the drive, select language and/or sub-text and start watching. right now its x number of drawn out multimedia menus you have to dug thru. hell, setting up a pc game is faster then this! it may be fun the first time round. and may fit the team on disc like animatrix but come on! as for the higher capacity, only place it have a point is on writeable media, atleast thats my view. just look at how the dvd media gets used for audio. the same number of tracks, just higher rez files. sorry but im quite happy with my cds. so unless they can bring something new to the table in terms of ease of use then both blue-ray and hd-dvd are going to flop for everone except mediaphiles. sure, over time it will trickle down but dont expect the turnaround that one have seen of people going from vhs to dvd. the dvd have clear ease-of-use advantages over vhs. i kinda think thats why only sonly is/was pushing hi-md. most users that have md are quite happy with those and want equipment that can play those back. sure its nicer to be able to either fit more songs on a media or record in higher rez, but there isnt much point for most users to do that. so yes, the only place that hi-md can be put forward as having an advantage is recording. and that will only last until someone makes a hardrive based field recorder as one can fit about 10-30 hi-md's most hdd based players right now. so the only way i can see hi-md get a second life would be as a new age floppy. its smaller then a cd/dvd-rw, so small in fact that you can pop it in most pockets when needed. the media is cd level cheap for its storage and size. and if the usb drive for it can allso mask as a mp3 player without the need for extra software (just drag and drop the files onto the drive in any os) then things get interesting for the common user, fast. it would have all the abilitys of a hdd player but with less bulk. make the drive slotload to boot and it can realy be made slim. but this cant happen under sony, the music and movie deparments cant have that risk. so unless someone is willing to licence the tech it will go into pro recording and then slowly walk out of view completly. to littile to late...

hmm, what about buffalo? they licenced the tech right? anyone knows what happend to that player? will sony force them to stop using the hi-md tech? and if not, cant they fill the void, that is if they feel there is a market for it?

wanted to add some stuff about ease-of-use issues killing ideas that was good on paper. betamax: from my understanding you had to flip the tape over in mid viewing. laserdisc: rember those big LP sized cds that contained movies? not only where they big and bulky, but you had to physicaly turn them over to watch the other half of the movie. see? ease-of-use can be vital. so lets look at current tech: cd: it killed the cassete tape on two vital areas. 1, you dont have to rewind. 2, you can jump to any song you want instantly. this makes collection cds much more usable then collection tapes. dvd: same as above. you dont have to rewind, you can jump to any scene that you want to see, and its about the size of a cd you can fit 3-4 dvds in full covers on the same space as one vhs! still tho, they should not have given the dvd makers the ability to put in non-skipable commersials (but thats kinda besides the point) so lets look at the hi-md... thing is realy that the only killer negative thing against that i can find on the ease of use (outside of the drm stuff, but thats a implementation, not a weakness of the base tech) is that you have to swap discs ever so often. thing is tho that some may see this as a blessing rather then a curse, but for people that have gotten used to having their entire music collection sorted, with allmost analretentive (sp?) id tags and sorted into all kinds of automatic play lists, the hi-md is archaic. still, i cant stop wonder what could happen if sony started to play on the hi-mds ability to be a storage unit as well as a music player. yes you can do this with a hdd baed or flash based player, but let me finish first of all, the ability to fill a whole disc with songs and another with data, or for that matter mix it up is very flexible. a hdd unit, while having larger storage in a single unit, have a upper limit. you have to allways juggle between how much music and how much data you want on it. a flash unit can have the same fexiblity as a hi-md player by using removable flash cards. but there is one small "problem" there, for the price of one 1GB card you can grab atleast 1 box of 10 1GB hi-md disc problem is tho that all this plays to the power users and their want of flexiblity. so the hi-md is basicly a power users tool. and sadly the number of power users are often 1/10 if not 1/100 of the total market. and often a non-drmd hdd player (like say a iriver or iaudio) can be flexible enough for the power user most of the time. so it makes sense that sony is dropping it. its basicly to low volume for a company their size. i just hope that say buffalo or other companys are still able to licence the tech and produce new units.hopefully dropping the DRM in the prosess.

yes ease-of-use and flexibility is king. for the (often) ignorant user the ease-of-use is vital. even a one sheet foldout is often to much for them when it comes to manuals. for the power user flexibility is king. you want the ability to use and abuse the equipment you have bought as you feel like. these are the kind of people that fix stuff themselfs when its broken and allmost never return something unless its DOA. question is, can you combine both in the same package? right now im not sure. thing is that often the stuff that attract power users may well make it "blow up" in the hands of joe. allso, joe often have a bad habbit of trying to pretend to be smarter then he is by using the power user features without knowing (or wanting to know) how said feature works. these are the kind of people that give mediaphiles and similar a often bad name. the have this bad habbit of sounding like some used car salesperson that dont know squat about what they are talking about most likely the best way of merging these two user personalitys are to lock down the power features under a menu option that you will only find by either playing around deep in the menus or looking in some deep section of the manual

thing is that they could easy licence the tech away and let someone else keep the tech rolling. like say that other company that was making md players. thing is that the hi-md system is one of the most fexible systems out there with its cheap media with relative high storage (i still think of 1GB storage as high, atleast when its one a media of that size and at that cost). they should have pushed it harder as a computer product rather then a audiophile product. personaly im not into doing field recordings but the idea of having a unit that i can play music on at one moment and then plug it into a computer and use it as a storage unit the next, and with virtualy unlimited storage (just bring more discs) at that, and i would say its a killer. problem is that they killed it with allmost no commersials, late mp3 support and draconian drm to say the least. hmm, anyone know what happend to that buffalo player?

i realy dont think so, creative had hdd players out before ipod got going, but for some reason there was no detectable talk about them outside of the computer press... heh, maybe it was the apple records vs apple computer legal stuff that helped allso, it seems that some select the ipod because of the itunes software... but then again, i have allso seen a lot more talk about apple mac, mostly ibooks, these days. its as if apple is in fashion across the board...

strange that they released that mac software then. i have a feel that hi-md isnt dead pr see, but its dead in the consumer sector. ie, you will not see it in your corner electronics store as people are looking for flash and hdd based players there. thank you ipod *gah* i have a feel however that it may well have some life left in it in the pro music area. but this is just me dreaming and guessing. most likely its dead, dead, dead... to bad realy...

heh, sorry about that post. i just had to get it of my chest... im just wondering what it is that makes every apple release get allmost frontpage press location while a creative or sony release isnt even talked about unless you go to special gadget sites... its more an comment on people and fashion then on ipod directly...

hmm, its kinda fun going around the diffrent tech sites and watch the apple fans come out of the woodwork to declare the sonys the most ugly players to date. yet at the same time their latest gizmo, the ipod nano, is just a shrunken version of the original ipod. same shape, same color, only smaller size. i realy dont get it, people where replacing their pc cases based on them being boring and gray and now a similary colored gizmo is suddenly the highest tech fashion... reality distortion field indeed...

hmm, the PSP. i want one. tryed it out the other day at some shop and man!!! i had missed the fact that it have this small analog stick hidden below the cross pad. hell, i like that analog stick more then i like more conventional analogs as this one stays flat to my tumb while the others angle the top when pushed around so in the end i no longer have the tumb on top of the stick but to one side of it, leaving me with less control overall. but this is as off topic as it may well get

hmm, i have seen similar dumping of mz-nh600's here in norway. im feeling like grabbing one but im not sure i feel like transcoding my mp3 collection just to get them onto the discs...

im guessing that they are trying to more directly link the tought of the program with the tought of the online music store. with the sonicstage name there is no link in the name to the connect music store. but with the name connect player its a more direct link. just like itunes and itunes music store are basicly the program and the service and when thinking of itunes you may well end up thinking about both. i wonder if not they will start to label all their connect enabled products as so and so the customers know that with a computer running the connect player and connect enabled products from sony you will be able to access content from the connect store on all of the products. basicly they are uniting all their electronics and content production under one channel of access. buy a sony brand tv and it may well have a ethernet port on the back or maybe its wifi equiped. turn it on and one of the menus will be a connect entry. select this and the tv will send out a call over the LAN to a computer running the connect player and ask for what kind of content it can supply. hell, you may even be able to order new contect via you tv and computer it turns a computer with the connect player into a sentral hub of the entertainment home. but its a back end server and enabler more then a item that needs to be in the living room. but this is all guesswork. but if they can pull it off it will be interesting to say the least. and yes i know much of it can allready be done using itunes and other apple products. but remember that sony is the brand name in home electronics. if they can get their entire brand to walk in one direction it will a tsunami to say the least. every tv, every vcr, every playstation, every dvd player sold coming bundled with a cd containing the connect player software and the hardware being able to plug and play into a network. want to see the latest blockbuster from the sony movie houses? no problem, its available on the connect store. want to grab a copy of the latest album on the sony record label? same place. basicly sony can crush apple by sheer volum and the number of markets it can reach given its existing product areas.

hmm, about that scradle connection. make sure to make its specs available publicly thats one of the strengths of ipod, the third party addons...