Audio

HDD MP3 Players: Round 1

03.07.05 | Comments

I’m probably going to be writing several posts about the progress of the hard-drive mp3 market. The interesting thing right now is this move towards the smaller 5/6GB players for roughly the same price we were paying for 20-40 GB players last year. It started with the Ipod mini, and even then it didn’t make much sense given that you could buy an Ipod that held 20GB and was only slightly bigger for $50 more.

At first I was interested in HDD players because I wanted to have the ability to carry around my entire music collection (~40GB), and also have a place to serve as a backup. Now with the smaller players, I’ll still have to choose just like I do with my trust 128MB iRiver (180T). Given, I’ll probably be rearranging the contents of the player much less than before, but now I just can’t convince myself to get one of these smaller players as easily as I could before for the larger ones.

I think I’ll just sit on the sidelines and see where things go. I’m very interested in the iRiver H10 right now, but I hear it has a ton of problems plus it lacks ogg support, so I guess I’ll just pass on that. I’m not sure if music players have much room to improve, they can only get so much smaller given the size of the microdrives they use. Improvements will most likely be seen in UI, increased codec support (I would kill for musepack support), or a plugin based system for handling other formats. There’s also the option of a Pocket PC for around $350, but that’s a topic for another day.

For anyone interested in a decent player there’s a good deal just posted today at Bens Bargains.

JR.com: RIO Carbon 5 GB @ J&R for $150


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    on a related, but different subject, it seems like products for flash drives are coming up faster than products for mini-disks... but this should reverse, right?

    i can't wait for the cheap and decent phone / organizer / mp3 player / camera thingie comes out. so far, O2 XDA2s and Treo 650 are all i have looked at
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    Well the strictly flash-based players seem to only be serving a small market right now. The inexpensive ones (~$100) allow people to jump into the portable audio game easily, this is the main draw of the iPod Shuffle. On a tangent of my own, I find it amazing how Apple was able to market the Shuffle. What other company could accomplish that?! "Life is random" is just the best excuse for the lack of a display, and people eat it up! As you can tell, I'm not an Apple fan ;)

    The big thing in portable players right now are the microdrive based ones. I find it amazing that the 4GB iPod mini sold so well at $250 when the 20GB Ipod was $300. This trend towards portability is interesting in its own right. Personally, I'd rather have a hard drive player that held alot, instead of sacrificing space for portability. On that rare occasion that I exercise outside, I find the flash-based players to be infinitely more useful than a microdrive one. I would rather not have to worry about the drive heads crashing and whatnot.

    I think I may discuss this further in my second article, still not sure what to cover there...

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