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Non-Tech : The New Iomega '2000' Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Solder who wrote (1630)	7/13/1999 2:12:00 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5023

All - I don't know about anyone else, but as I look at the various proposals and media for playing downloadable music, I see problems with each of them. MP3 players such as the RIO are far too limited in terms of the amount of music a person can carry. If I'm using only the 64MB onboard with the latest model, then I have, what, two hours of music or less, depending upon the bit depth of the recording. Higher quality recordings will take up more space, yielding less playback time. In my personal opinion, only the very best quality, 128bit MP3 rips sound good. I can buy additional flash cards to increase the amount of music I can carry, but that's still quite expensive. Clik! MP3 players will solve the music time limitation problem, but if the music is bound to a specific Clik! disk, then that would limit the creation of disks with different mixes of songs (as Rocky pointed out). I, personally, would hate that. Clik! players might have battery life problems as well, but I think it wouldn't be a big issue. Minidisk players work, and the one I use now (Sony EP-11) provides more than four hours of continuous play from one AA battery. A Clik! player wouldn't need to spin the disk continuously, thus might provide a longer playing time with the same AA battery. As I think about this, I believe that the Clik! solution might work out better over all, but only if a user is free to move files from one place to another, at will. And that really applies to the flash-based MP3 players, too. As far as the check out/check in concept goes, it wouldn't matter which medium you wanted to use. The fact that it is possible to bind digital material to a Clik! disk doesn't mean that you have to. Either flash or Clik! could be used to temporarily store "checked out" files. So much for the idea that the SDMI has taken sides on the media issue. THE New York Times writer is correct. If the SDMI's final solution is too cumbersome, people will simply bypass it. In any case, although faster internet connections are now possible, most people are still using modems. After the novelty wears off, people aren't really going to want to download music by modem, because it simply takes too long. Perhaps in a few more years, when high-bandwidth Net connections are more common, download time won't be an issue any more. By that time, I'm sure that all the technical and pricing issues surrounding storage media will have changed. - Allen