WorldCAD Access

Nano: The Form Factor is Correct

What I like about the Apple Nano MP3 player is its form factor. Not smaller, but thinner. While it is possible to design and build very small devices, they still need to be navigated with our relatively stubby fingers. Making buttons and displays tiny is wrong. Apple got it right by keeping the Nano's width and height relatively large, but very thin. Read more →

Too Plain to Sell

Betanews.com notes that Apple's iPod is selling poorly in South Korea. Why? Its design is too minimalist. " Consumers in Asian countries have traditionally opted for tech gadgets with more bells and whistles, and MP3 players are apparently no exception." Market shares in South Korea are: iRiver = 35% Samsung = 14% Cowon = 13% ... Apple = 1.8% Another reason might be nationalism: the Top 3 sellers are all Korean products. Creative Losses Meanwhile, the company that hoped to unseat Apple is not doing so well. Creative says that disappointing sales of its MP3 players caused a quarterly loss... Read more →

10th Anniversary of .mp3

The Register reports: On 14 July 1995 Germany's Fraunhofer Institute chose to use the .mp3 extension for files holding audio data encoded using the MPEG standard's Audio Layer 3 specification. The MPEG Audio Layer 3 codec was standardised in 1992. In the last few years, .mp3 has become MP3, with few people realizing it is short for MPEG Layer 3, with MPEG an abbreviation for "motion picture experts group." The first portable MP3 player was Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300, in Sept 1998 Read more →

$5 Noise Reducing Headphones

Noise-reducing headphones are wonderful for making music sound better in noisy environments, such as on airplanes and when lawn mowing. You can spend $100 or $500 for fancy ones, such as Shure's E5c Isolating Earphones for US$489.67, but Koss has a nice set for about US$20, called "The Plug" earbud stereophones. The Plug's ear cushions, however, are a bit large for my ears (which suffer from being smaller than most earbud headphones), and tend to slide out when I move. Last night at Wal-Mart, I noticed a pair of Excel CD101 earpads for CDN$5 (about US$4). They have a different... Read more →

The Two Ways of the MP3 Player

When we had records and cassettes and 8-tracks, our music filing system was physical: each one contained a single recording. If you were like me, you kept the records and casette tapes in alphabetical order by musician name. If you were not like me, you didn't. Or used another system. (Classical music was always a problem for me: should I sort by composer or by orchestra name?) When we moved our music to computers and MP3, we needed a different system of sorting the music. Discrete units no longer worked. And so two sorting systems emerged: folders and tags. Folders... Read more →

Sun Bear Concert

Once in a rare while, things are cheaper in Canada. As a treat, last week I purchased Keith Jarrett's 'Sun Bear' concerts, an 8-CD collection of jazz piano concerts made in Japan. (While I was a university student in the late 1970s at UBC, the multi-record LP version was around $100 -- completely unaffordable, considering I was making around $5/hr in my summer job at Alcan in Kitimat. And unreasonably priced, considering most pop records sold for $3.99 back then. My friends and I would handle the boxed set upstairs at A&B Sound on Seymour Street -- the most expensive... Read more →

X-Fi = Xtreme Fidelity

Creative Technology says its developed a chip that makes MP3 music sound better. In music, "better" is subjective, of course. But in marketing, "better" is always better, absolutely. Just look at how much better the chip's name is: X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity. What can a CPU with 51 million transistors running at over 10,000 MIPS [million instructions per second] do that's 24x more powerful than its predecessor? Perhaps place cell phone calls at the same time as playing back songs, as Bill Gates would like? Creative will tell us this week at the E3 entertainment expo. Read more →

Apple Becomes the Microsoft of Music

NPD is a market research organization not to be confused with the socialist NDP political party in Canada. Couple of days ago they reported statistics that indicate Apple is locking up the digital music industry: * Apple's flash-based music players attained 58% marketshare in March. (This means that 58% of all MP3 players sold in March were Apple branded.) * iTunes music store has 70% of digital music downloads.* Apple harddisk-based players remain at 90% of the market. That makes me all the more glad that the brands of MP3 players in our household have names like Samsung, iRiver, Sony,... Read more →

How Do I Get My CDs onto an MP3 Player?

Kids know how to get music onto their MP3 players. All it takes is a brief phonecall or MSN message, and the word is spread. It's adults, when I show them my latest MP3 player, that ask, "How do I get my CDs onto that thing?" "You have to rip them," I reply, to their bafflement. While it is illegal in some countries to make copies of music from others, it is (almost) always legal for you to make a copy of the music you've purchased for yourself. I enforce the rule at home, when my kids, upon occasion, ask... Read more →

When Corporations Levy Taxes

The Netherlands is getting publicity for proposing to levy (tax) on MP3 players. Get in line, Holland, Canada was first. Levies on recording media have been charged for many years in Canada -- on cassettes, CDs, DVDs, video tapes, and MP3 players, but not hard drives. The levy has been in place so long, there's already been one price increase,and the recording industry is eager to jack the rates higher. (There is an excemption for non-profit agencies, like churches.) iPods cost $50 more in Canada because of the supersize levy on its large-capacity hard drive ... until recently. Last December,... Read more →

Tips for PhotoTainer Users

It has been frustrating for PhotoTainer users that InnoPlus has a policy of not responding to questions and problems posed on their online forum. Often, the problems are of such a technical nature that other users cannot answer them. Fortunately, SmartDisk has stepped in. (They resell the PhotoTainer as the FlashTrax.) The SmartDisk Web site has a long list of FAQs (fequently asked questions) that will apply to the PhotoTainer. Topics include: - How do I view a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on FlashTrax? - How does the "Randomness" setting affect music play? - How should I interpret the "Battery Life"... Read more →

The New "PhotoTainer"

The PhotoTainer (from InnoPlus of Korea) is famous and unknown. Famous for being the first portable multimedia device, upon which so many others are now modelled. Unknown, because you've probably never heard of it. Do these specs sound familiar? - 20GB hard drive - 3.5" color screen - Playback of MP3 music, JPEG, TIFF and RAW photos, AVI movies, and TXT text files. - Playlists, slideshows - Connect through USB2 and CompactFlash ports - Acts as an external hard drive; backs up photos from memory cards - Compact size. The PhotoTainer had them first. But to we PhotoTainer fans, the... Read more →

USB Hosting

mobilemag.com reports on a new portable video player with an important new feature: USB hosting. (MobiBlu's DVH-100 portable video player has a 2.2-inch LCD display, and can record audio and video from many sources.) USB2.0 and USB1.1 host support means that the DVH-100 can act like a computer in connecting to almost any other USB device -- "even browse files on your PDA." I think that USB hosting will become increasingly important, because it allows our devices to become independent of the mothering computer. Imagine hooking up a PDA to your camera to your MP3 player to your 250GB external... Read more →

Microsoft Wants to be Your MP3 Buddy

Over at slash.dot, contributors are chortling over Microsoft's "advice" on buying MP3 players. You know the advice is worth skipping when it starts off with: "1. For the active person, a player that uses flash memory to store music has distinct advantages over a player that uses a hard disk. Simply put, flash memory players have no moving parts, meaning that you can take them jogging and your music won't skip." Too simply put. I have two hard disk-based MP3 players, neither of which has ever skipped due to motion. (The older one skips, just because its MPEG processor sometimes... Read more →

The Curse of Digital Music

The disappointment in digital music (aka MP3 files) is that there are no sound-related upgrades. Hooked up to my stereo (to use that quaint term), each of these sounds identical: * Portable CD player capable of handling MP3s. * Another MP3-ized CD player, this one being skip-free. * MP3 files played on my desktop computer. * MP3 files played on my notebook computer. * MP3s played on my Sony Clie PDA * MP3s played on the InnoPlus's 20GB PhotoTainer portable entertainment unit * My son's first MP3 player, a Creative Nomad * My daugher's MP3-ized CD player * My other... Read more →