I was just looking at the IBM microdrives when it occured to me that they would be a great way to store mp3 files and transfer them between your PC and car.
There is already a portable mp3 player that supports these drives (can't remember which one exactly) but it requires you to hook it up to your existing deck and add a power supply .....
Just load up each 340Mb disc with your favorite music (around 6 hours worth each) and slot them into the car player just like a standard CD.

Although the microdrives are a neat technology, I don't think they'd fit into Empeg's plans. For pretty much the same reasons why Empeg doesn't have a CD-ROM capable model.

340 Megabytes isn't much storage by today's standards. The idea of the Empeg Car is that you should be able to store your entire CD collection on the thing. The bottom-of-the-line Empeg Car (4Gb) stores all of my favorites from my CD collection, but I need to add another drive soon so that it can hold everything. And my collection is a small one. For most folks, 340 megabytes is just a drop in the bucket.

That's why I laughed at the Diamond Rio. I have no idea why people are buying the things-- they have so little storage. Something like the Rio is useless to me. Even if the Rios had 340-meg microdrives, they would still be useless to me. The only reason I would want to go to the trouble of converting my CDs to MP3s is if I could get everything in one place. If I have to swap memory sticks, microdrives, or burned CD-ROMs, I might as well just cart the original CDs around with me, and not waste the time ripping them.

Now, a digital camera with a microdrive and an ethernet port, THAT would be proper application of the technology.

The device you refered to is the Lyra from RCA, but they (RCA) have since declared that it will NOT support the Microdrive. Another problem is it doesn't play real MP3 files. See links below and make your own determination. As far as a Microdrive for the car unit, I think it would certainly add to the user friendliness. Of course, the same port that supports the Microdrive should also support memory cards, making it that much more adaptable.

Link: http://hardware.mp3.com/hardware/individual/portable/2335.html
Link: http://bboard.mp3.com/mp3/ubb/Forum55/HTML/000008.html

I just read those links to the Lyra you posted. It's basically a Rio with copy protection enforced. Oh yeah, that'll fly.

Wow, I can't think of a better example of bandwagon-jumping and then getting it all wrong in the process. It's obvious that RCA decided that the Rio market looked cool, but then said, "Hey, but we have to avoid the piracy issue, so let's add copy protection." Either that, or they had to bow to pressure from their record-company division to add the copy protection. Jeez, when are these folks going to realize that you can't enforce copy protection on MP3s when the cat is already out of the bag?

I mean, even if the whole world passed laws that required copy protection schemes on all new players and software, I'm sitting here with a perfectly good set of non-copy-protected encoding and playback tools that could easily last me the rest of my life. The only way I could be prevented from ripping tracks off of CDs at this point is if the record companies started making copy-protected CDs. And you know they can't do that because such CDs wouldn't play on any existing CD player.

The record industry needs to embrace MP3, not fight it. They need to accept the fact that they opened Pandora's box all by themselves. They chose to embrace the CD format over a decade ago: a non-lossy digital distribution medium that allows the consumer to make bit-perfect copies. The entire world moved from LPs to CDs almost overnight, because the format was so perfect. Now the record industry is reaping what they've sown: every consumer now has the power to make perfect copies of their CDs if they want to.

Now, I'm not an advocate of music piracy. My only interest is in being able to encode my CD collection into MP3 format for playback on my computer and my Empeg Car. But it just makes me laugh because RCA is trying to sell a product that's deliberately engineered to be worse than the competing products. It's just like the DIVX players. The consumers never bought them because they could just as easily get a real DVD player that didn't have those restrictions.

You just know that the people who came up with these ideas were non-engineer, middle-manager, card-carrying MBA-weenie types. They're probably the spitting image of the Pointy-Haired-Boss from Dilbert. They don't understand the technology, and they think that their marketing degrees give them some sort of supernatural ability to make the masses buy useless crap. If they want to sell something to the world, then they need to make something that's better than the competition, not worse.

I *think* the device he meant was the eGo from i2go - it seems quite cute, but they've stopped saying that a unit with microdrives will run off the batteries for more than tens of minutes. Microdrives are also expensive - around $500 for a 340Mb one last time I looked.

Hugo

Okay....

And how do empeg's copy protection restrictions fit into your scheme of things?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Empeg doesn't have any copy protection as far as I know. I can upload, download, and play any files I want.

Now, the Emplode software doesn't, by default, do downloads in its main UI. But there's nothing to stop me from doing it in Linux. And that's not the kind of copy protection I'm talking about anyway.

The copy protection in the empeg is unidirectional - you can put music into the empeg, but you cannot export it back out (other than through the speakers, I guess). You can't download your MP3's into another player or another computer.

There are a few threads on the bbs that discuss this in more detail.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Unidirectional file transfer doesn't fit my definition of copy protection. According to what I read about the Lyra, they didn't want any files related to the player to be transferrable in any way. You couln't put anything but Lyra-encrypted files onto the thing. The Empeg, on the other hand doesn't limit what kind of files you can put into it.

Besides, it only applies to those who can't use a terminal program and don't know how to use the Linux command shell. If you can log into the box as a shell user, you can do whatever you want. (I actually haven't tried this because I don't need to do it. But as I understand it, simple RZ and SZ commands will do the trick, both ways.)

Anyway, aren't almost all of the other dedicated MP3 players the same way- unidirectional?

wow, that looks...horrible:)

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

Yeah, thank God there isn't a "blink" tag on this message board. That would be a crime against humanity.

Ok, Ok you guys -- I'm suitably chastened. I won't do it again, I promise. But I had to try it out to see how it worked....

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"