On Monday 24 August 2009 04:50 am, Ron Johnson wrote: > > First of all, I had to wait until one shipped with something other > > than the tiny SSDs they put in the Asus EEEs and as, it seems, the > > primary option on the initial AA1s. I'd been waiting /years/ for a > > proper MP3 player with > 100 gigs of space, that ran a user > > replaceable firmware, > What *possible* use could *anyone* have for a player with > 100*10^9/(5*10^6) = 20,000 songs (1,667 albums, if each song is 5MB > and each album has 12 songs) in the palm of their hand? The > organizational task itself is enormous.
Here's a geezer flame right back at you: How lame and low-bitrate must someone's collection be to *not* want a large hard disk based jukebox? I've been collecting CDs for about 25 years. I have over a thousand of them. My 160GB Archos that I bought a year and a half ago is full. My MP3 collection itself is just over a hundred gigs, and that's only the CDs I've physically ripped from my own collection. Throw in things like live shows downloaded off of the net and a small fraction of the music videos I have (about 300GB), and 160GB rapidly becomes insufficient. The Archos was my first hard disk MP3 player (I bought a 40GB one for my partner when he was still alive, and that was enough for him because his collection was only 200 CDs and a lot of vinyl he never got around to digitizing) because it would at least cover the bare minimum of what I wanted, but I want a bigger one now that I don't have to jailbreak to put my own code on. Plus, its hardware buttons are starting to die from heavy use, and I think the hard disk is already going too. I wouldn't recommend Archos as a brand, btw. They used to offer serviceable products with standard charging/sync ports and clunky but simple interfaces. Now the interfaces are even clunkier with touchscreen but they have proprietary and fragile charging and data cables that cost 15 bucks apiece and once the company goes under, your Archos device will eventually become a brick. What's more, they've locked down their Linux-based players so I can't fix the bugs in their crappy interface, and there aren't enough users to have either widely available accessories or a vibrant jailbreaking community like the iPod has, ironically making Apple's products the most "open" of the jukeboxes currently available through no intention of their own. (Apple had no 160GB product when I bought the Archos and I don't know how thoroughly it's been jailbroken now that it's been out a year, but you can install your own Linux on the older ones.) Organization is no problem: my albums are stored in directories in the format "Artist Name - Album Name" and within those, the songs are "Track Number - Artist Name - Track Name.mp3". I have a homegrown tagging and rating system, which came to be when I discovered that there was no music management system that would let me rip albums on 6 or 8 CD drives spread over 4 computers simultaneously, that lets me make arbitrary playlists in a few seconds by running a script. I started working on a GUI but then I realized GUIs just slow me down and I'd never be able to simplify the installation of my system enough for someone who'd need a GUI anyway. I'm an avid music listener and collector as well as a musician, am active on the Linux Audio Users list (but not the Linux Audio Developers list), and I want to be able to take my collection everywhere without lugging 8 or 9 large trunks of CDs weighing as much as I do. These devices are called "jukeboxes" for a reason. I don't know when the last time is that you saw a real jukebox, but they have a lot more than 160GB of storage. Some of them actually connect to the Internet and download songs from some central repository if you pay extra. Once I hack that feature into my Palm Pre (and I've already done this using the homebrew terminal app, scp'ing mp3 files from one of my machines into its memory), I won't need a hard disk anymore. Then again, once I hack that feature into my phone, I'll still essentially be using a big hard disk player; it's just that the hard disk will be a network drive on my server at home. Do I need that? Probably not. But I've wanted it all my life (literally; somewhere out there is an essay I wrote in 1983 describing how we'd someday have all our music on little memory chips and get new albums over the air), and now I can have it. > 16 "albums" on a 1GB player is more than anyone needs Yeah, and 640K ought to be enough for anybody. Right, Bill? > at any one > time, giving you more than enough room for an eclectic selection of > music, easily (if you've organized your PC's HDD well, and have some > good scripts) replacing the music any time you're home. 16 albums isn't even a day's worth of listening when I'm on vacation. I have about 10 albums worth of songs on my 8GB phone, but that's a single playlist covering only one genre. One gig isn't even enough for my 14- year-old niece and her friends, who listen to a song for a couple weeks and then forget they ever heard of it. About the only use such a player would have for me would be as a disposable unit I brought to a party not caring if someone stole it, or as a podcast catcher if I still had time to listen to podcasts. Your view of how people use digital music isn't reflective of age, just a bit parochial and short-sighted. Rob _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
