Rob posted on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:01:49 -0400 as excerpted: > 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.
Hmm, gmane had a hiccup earlier today and was offline for a bit. Ron's message must have come thru during that, and I'm missing it. Maybe it'll catch up later... Meanwhile, I more or less stopped collecting @ ~300 CDs, but that's a decent number right there. For awhile I was still buying maybe 2-3 a year, but I haven't bought any at all the last three years or so, in part because I've spent enough money supporting the RIAA pigopoly and they're not getting any more -- I could still buy some CDs if I had a reliable list handy of what to avoid... perhaps possible once I get my AA1 setup, but meanwhile, it's too much hassle to look it up most of the time, so I've just defaulted to buying nothing from anyone. Saves me money anyway. =:^) But I'd have over 1000 if I was still collecting at the rate I was 15-20 years ago... Meanwhile, most of my music now is Inet streamed, in part because those CDs are too much hassle too, and shoutcast is narrowcasted enough that I can always find /something/ I'm in the mood for... while @ home with access to the broadband, at least. And there's streamripper for recording off the (Internet) radio, which AFAIK is fair use, at least in the US. That gives me time and space shifting, even if my inet is tied down. But in addition to those 300 CDs, which if I ever get to it (and there'll be a reason to when I get a decent sized player) I'll probably rip @ 256kbps or even lossless. And as you mentioned, there's lots of video, etc, too. Again, without mobile broadband, there's reason to store a lot of even youtube, etc videos, locally (which I basically have to do anyway, even when I delete afterward, given my viewer is kaffeine/xine/ ffmpeg as I don't do proprietary software and thus don't do flash, gnash never worked for me and swfdec does reasonably well, but not as well as kaffeine @ full-screen with pause, replay, etc, from local... of course that's kaffeine from kde3, kde4's live development version isn't quite as advanced yet), and at storage prices these days, a year's mobile inet subscription will by a LOT of storage! Basically, tho, even before thinking about video, it has always been my dream to have my entire music collection available in a single device, no media jockeying required, and a long time ago, I calculated that at 128 kbps MP3 (~ a meg a minute) and figuring an hour a CD (a bit long I know), 300 CDs = 300 x 60 megs or 18 gigs. Double that for lots of growth room and you're at 36 gigs. Double that to 256kbps because 128 kbps really is the minimal acceptable quality, even for "free inet radio stream quality", and that's a minimum of 72 gigs I'd need just for my permanent audio collection. Throw in a few extra gigs of time/space shifted inet streams, and that's getting near 100 gig already! Then figure video is many times the space intensity of audio-only, say a gig a movie, heavily compressed HD or somewhat less compressed STD, or 4-5 gigs a movie straight off the DVD (25 gig a movie once BluRay becomes standard). Plus some extra space for whatever misc mobile storage (aka thumb drive replacement), plus whatever misc games and general OS stuff I put on it. Now 100 gig isn't looking so big after all! Actually, I didn't mention it, but one of the things I wanted that was one of the reasons I got the AA1 with the 120 gig hard drive, wasn't necessarily the hard drive itself -- I figured I'd eventually replace it, but the standard SATA interface, so I /could/ replace it, without having to worry too much about compatible interface or limiting myself to only semi-standardized ZIF-ribbon IDE, the interface the SSD units, including both the first-gen Asus EEEs, and most of the initial second-gen netbooks including the AA1 SSD version. The 120 gig disk version came with a standard SATA interface, and that was a prime buying point here. Eventually, I actually plan to stick in a SATA interface based SSD like the 128 gig SuperTalent mlc units that at the time were priced @ ~$500 or so. But the economy tanked about that time and my income shrank, and that has been put on hold for awhile. No matter tho, as I've not gotten to the Gentoo upgrade on it yet anyway, and meanwhile, SSD prices continue to drop, so likely by the time I get to it, I'll be looking at an even faster quarter TB or so SSD. Which, 100 gig has been my long term minimum, but as I explained, that's looking much smaller now than it did a few years ago, and 120 gig isn't much bigger. The 160 gig iPod is looking reasonable, but a quarter TB SSD would be /sweet/! Or, if I were to do it today, I believe there's half TB spinning disks, 2.5" which is what it takes, and that or at least a 360 gig or whatever is what I'd try to fit, if I stayed with spinning disk. But the point is, I've a lot more options in that regard with the SATA interface than I would have with the IDE ZIF ribbon interface more common in those things, at least back then. (I've not kept up on what's in the newer ones.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
