Re: MP3 players

[brian moore <bem@cmc.net>]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 04:07:54PM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
>   but does any of these USB jukebox players work with linux?

The Pjbox does.  Works great.  You can get one from thinkgeek: they're a
bit spendier than the Nomad Jukebox from Creative, but I find them to be
much nicer: the Nomad, for reasons known only to Creative, is -huge-,
about the size of a CD player.  The Pjbox, otoh, is small, quite
literally I put mine in my shirt pocket.

(The Nomad has other problems than size: the battery life is a paltry 4
hours or so... the pjbox charges in about 3 hours for a 10 hour play
time.  It even uses a Li ion battery, ie, the same one in modern laptops,
for nice rechargability without the 'memory' problems of NiCads.  Oh,
yeah, and Creative hasn't been forthcoming with docs needed for Linux
support, while Compaq release a stack of docs, a kernel module and demo
client code.)

All in all, the pjbox is superbly engineered.  The packaging (ie, the box
it comes in) is ugly as sin, the manual is sorta, um, silly... and
Compaq, who designed it, has a goofy generic license on their software
web site, though once you download the software, it's all very happily
GPL'd.  (There was a stink on /. about the generic license that Compaq
has on -everything- you download from that site, even when it is
specifically stated to be GPL.... but you know how /. stories go...)
It's certainly a product designed by engineers, and, it seems, marketed
by them: the 'marketing' side of things like the box and the manual are
cheesy, but who cares? :)

Oh, yeah, it even comes with a cute adapter/charger thing that takes
anywhere from 110VAC to 220VAC at 50hz-60Hz with replacable 'prongs' so
you can take it abroad... and the USB cable and a cable to plug it into
your stereo and a pair of very nice sounding Koss folding headphones (how
the hell they have decent bass is beyond me....)

There's a gui thingie being written for it, but I find it easy enough to
use Compaq's command line thing to copy mp3's to it.  Alas, Compaq's
command line stuff doesn't do deletion (which actually -is- a tricky
problem with the way the things works), but that's trivial to do: I just
download the song list (ie, "catalog"), delete what I don't like, change
names, etc, and then re-upload it.  The rest of their software is smart
enough to use that to figure out which blocks are allocated.

[A nifty feature of the filesystem on the pjbox is that you can copy a
huge file, such as a single giant mp3 of an entire album and then have
individual tracks represent just pieces of that mp3... and you can have
items in the catalog overlap or just be listed twice, for cheapo playlist
type stuff, effectively the same sort of thing as a hard link in Unix,
but taken at the 'block' level instead of the inode level.]

And, no, I don't work for thinkgeek or pjbox's maker (HanGo Electronics
of Taiwan) or Compaq or have any real interest in them except for the
one I now carry with me. :)

The little baby 64M players, I don't see the point of.  I don't know what
song I want -next-, let alone for the next hour, or "you're stuck with
this hours worth of music all day".  Icky.

-- 
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