There is money to be made in music, or at least so think many electronics manufacturers and online music distributors. Evidence is the latest round of portable "MP3" players hitting the market. Most of the new players have capacious internal hard drives, some as high as 60 GB (gigabytes)! That is more storage than many PCs have!
Leading the batch is the Apple iPod. The iPod has been the darling of the industry for quite a while now. Its performance, package, and usability rank it on the top of the heap. Add to that the ability to now store and display digital photos, and you have quite a package. The later of course implies that these new beasts have color displays rather than the older (and cheaper) monochrome units.
Why do you want to store and display digital photos? The answer is quite simple. Even though digital "film" memory modules are relatively inexpensive these days, they are not as cheap per byte as hard drive units. Also, if you want to store a lot of digital photo files (perhaps you are going on a long trip) you would have to buy and carry around a lot of these modules. Having an MP3 player that can also double as a photo storage device solves that problem. You would carry enough digital film for only a day's use, and then upload the photos to your MP3 device at night - then clear out the digital film for the next day's shooting. Neat.
Other manufacturers are also in the running. Dell and Creative have units that I hear are "related" (share internal components), and there are also iRiver and some others.
These units can hold tens of thousands of songs (or photos) and therein lays the problem. Where do you GET thousands of songs? Think about it. If you purchased the songs at the going online rate of about $1 ea., then it would cost Ten Thousand Dollars or more to fill one of these units up! Most people start by digitizing (ripping) all of their CDs, or some (like me) have most of their CD collections already done and in MP3 format. But I bet all the CDs that I have hardly come to five or six thousand songs at the maximum.
Coming to the rescue are some new online services that allow you an unlimited number of downloads to your MP3 player for a fixed monthly fee. But I believe there are some restrictions to the duration that the songs can stay in your player.
As you can probably tell by now, I am in the market for a new player. I want to carry my entire music collection with me wherever I go, to be played in my cars, via headphones, or attached to a large audio system. What are the attributes that I should look for?
Obviously, the first is audio quality. Since I will be attaching it to bigger audio systems (car or home), this is really important. Second is battery life. Few of the new units run on AA batteries - preferring to use internal batteries and chargers instead. Its not uncommon these days to have units that play only five hours or less. Newer units can get that time to perhaps 15 hours. So, get the home and car chargers!
Third is the sound file formats supported. One big drawback of the iPods is that they do not support the Microsoft WMA (Windows Media Audio) format. Unfortunately, most of my audio collection is in that format, as the files are smaller and I can get more songs in my older flash-based players. If I get an iPod, I would have to re-rip or convert all my songs. The Dell and Creative offerings do support WMA.
Finally, I would like my new unit to support the USB Storage Class. This means that the device, when plugged in via USB, appears to Windows as a standard drive letter. Thus, any program or Windows explorer can be used to control loading and using the files on it.
So, I will keep all y'all posted. I did go to a Wilmington electronics store today to see the new iPods, but couldn't get a salesperson to help me. I DID get a salesperson to help me look at $4,000 plasma TVs, however. Wonder why?
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)