Just thought i'd pitch in here:
> > I just don't find anything compelling (yet) about those overpriced
> > little MP3 boxes, sorry. Maybe I'd feel differently if I listened to
> > tunes during high-g sports activites.
> >
> > Rick
>
> I see a market for MP3, but unless they solve the high cost of
> taking MP3's
> with you (which is solved using MD), I don't see a very bright
> future. I've
> seen that there are some 'stand-alone' home-decks comming out. They enable
> you to record a MP3 and to store it on the internal HD.
Which is kind of useless, if there's no easy way to get the tracks back off
again. I worked out a while ago that storing high-quality MP3s on HD was
actually more expensive than MD - it may not hold true any more with HDs
getting cheaper, but MD isn't far behind.
You're right though - MP3 needs a cheap, removable media to compete. MP3
player owners harp on about "memory prices coming down", but I can't see SM
or CF memory dropping below the $15 mark for several years to come.
> For me MP3 is a 'consumer-unfriendly' format.
> 1) you need a PC.
> 2) You just can't push the button and a WAV is converted into MP3. You
> need to fiddle around with settings to obtain the best sound!
For me, MP3 players are far too much hassle. I have a lot of MP3s; I ripped
my 200+ CDs over the summer so I could have all my music with me at uni
without using up a couple of shelves. Problem is, they're mostly at 192k (I
figured if I'm ripping them all, I may as well do them at a decent quality).
At that bitrate, it's about 1.44mb a minute. 22.2 minutes on a 32mb card, or
44.4 minutes on 64mb. Either way, it's not a lot of music (most albums are
longer). I could squeeze more on if I re-encoded them, but by then the time
to re-encode (usually losing ID3 tags) and upload to the player is roughly
the time it takes to dump it onto MD.
I don't fancy going through all that every morning/evening just to have
fresh music in my player every day. I'd rather fall out of bed, grab my MD
player and a couple of discs and leave.
> It's also a format that will be brought to dead by the
> music-industrie. Why,
> simple, they just hate it that there is no copy-protection on MP3 and the
> underground MP3 sites that come with this. (type MP3 in altavista and you
> see what I mean. (80% of the responses are 'warez', 'games',
> 'mp3z' sites).
>
> Cheers,
> Ralph -> may I say that one of the reasons MD is getting more popular by
> the day is MP3?
I think there are a lot of people who get blinded by all the "free music!"
hype, only to find that the easy-to-get free music is from mp3.com and
similar, where good tracks are chucked in randomly with utter rubbish. Then
if they go looking for their favourite commercial songs they're confronted
with links that don't work, tracks put in geocities webspace (non-resuming),
or several porn banners.
Of course, a lot of MP3 trading goes on that isn't like this - but how would
someone who's new to MP3 know about that? The majority of people still go
into shops and buy their music. For them, the easiest way to get that music
into a portable format is MD.
--
Simon > discmans are too big to be "portable" :)
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