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March edition of Eclipse 'Attention' webzine out - mentions the HD1213: http://www.eclipse-web.com/attention/63/63_body/05.html
Link to PC World mini-review:
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,110044,pg,2,00.asp
I recall an RP statement something like that, but it was posted several years before the O 1000 debuted. As far as lawsuits from AAPL over the O 1000's cosmetics, I never saw anything on that subject anywhere except on Applecentric message boards - if such lawsuits were feasible, the auto industry (and the apparel business) would have self-destructed years ago. I have seen no evidence one way or the other as to what source or sources are responsible for the iPod's operating system (old or new). The previous Portalplayer platform (the PP5001-based Tango) used the RTXC open-source real-time operating system.
Songs in the Key of Steve
Steve Jobs may have just created the first great legal online music service. That's got the record biz singing his praises.
FORTUNE Monday, April 28, 2003
By Devin Leonard
Steve Jobs loves music. But as with a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley, his musical tastes are a little retro. He worships Bob Dylan and is the kind of obsessive Beatles fan who can talk your ear off about why Ringo is an underappreciated drummer.
So Dr. Dre, the rap-music Midas whose proteges include Snoop Dogg and Eminem, is the last person you'd expect to see huddled with Jobs, for hours on end, at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. No, they weren't discussing whether John or Paul was the more talented Beatle. Rather, Steve had invited Dr. Dre up from Los Angeles for a private demonstration of Apple's latest product. After checking it out, Dre had this to say: "Man, somebody finally got it right."
The product that wowed him was the iTunes Music Store, a new digital service for Mac users offering songs from all five major music companies--Universal, Warner, EMI, Sony, and BMG. Though Apple had yet to sell a single song by the time FORTUNE went to press, Jobs is already causing a stir in the record business. Forget about rumors that Apple is bidding for Vivendi's Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company. Jobs says he has absolutely no interest in buying a record company.
The real buzz in the music trade is that Steve has just created what is easily the most promising legal digital music service on the market. "I think it's going to be amazing," says Roger Ames, CEO of the Warner Music Group. Jobs, not surprisingly, is even more effusive. He claims his digital store will forever change not only how music is sold and distributed but also the way artists release and market songs and how they are bought and used by fans.
One thing's for sure: If ever there was an industry in need of transformation, it's the music business. U.S. music sales plunged 8.2% last year, largely because songs are being distributed free on the Internet through illicit file-sharing destinations like KaZaA. Unlike Napster, KaZaA and its brethren have no central servers, making them tougher for the industry to shut down. The majors have tried to come up with legal alternatives. But none of those ventures have taken off because they are too pricey and user-hostile.
The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, is as simple and straightforward as anything Jobs has ever produced. Apple users get to the store by clicking a button on the iTunes 4 jukebox, available for download when the service made its debut on April 28. You can listen to a 30-second preview of any song and then, with one click, buy a high-quality audio copy for 99 cents. There's no monthly subscription fee, and consumers have virtually unfettered ownership of the music they download. Jobs is rolling out the iTunes store with previously unreleased material by artists including Bob Dylan, U2, Missy Elliott, and Sheryl Crow. There will be music from bands like the Eagles, who have never before allowed their songs to be sold by a legal digital music service. And Jobs is personally lobbying other big-name holdouts, like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, to come aboard.
The iTunes Music Store may be just the thing to get Apple rocking again too. As everyone knows, it's been a tough couple of years for the computer industry as well. Apple swung back into the black in the first quarter of 2003 after two quarterly losses, but its profits were only $14 million, compared with $40 million a year ago. And as popular as Apple's iPod portable MP3 player may be, it contributed less than $25 million of Apple's $1.48 billion in revenues last quarter. So Jobs is betting that by offering customers "Hotel California'' for 99 cents, he can sell not just more iPods but more Macs too.
Apple's competitors dismiss the iTunes Music Store as a niche product. How, they ask, can Apple have any impact on the music industry when its share of the global computer market is a minuscule 3%? "It's a very positive thing for their community," says Kevin Brangan, a marketing director at SonicBlue, which makes Rio MP3 players. "But their community is a very small percentage of the overall market."
Jobs, however, isn't targeting just Mac users. He plans to roll out a Windows version of iTunes by the end of the year. (Apple already sells a Windows-compatible version of the iPod, which accounts for about half of all units sold.) It is a dramatic departure for Steve, who has deliberately kept the Mac's best features off the screens of the much larger Microsoft-dominated world.
Steve isn't suggesting that his new service will lift the computer industry out of its funk. But he is 100% convinced that the Music Store will rejuvenate the ailing music business. "This will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry," Jobs told FORTUNE. "This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!"
The idea that anybody from Silicon Valley can swoop in and save the music industry seems laughable at first. But by nearly every account, this is not just some Steve Jobs sales job. In fact, the Music Store is being copied by rivals even before it hits the market. The reason, as Dr. Dre noted, is that nobody has come up with a better plan to sell music online. So iTunes or something like it had better work. Otherwise, the music industry as we know it could soon disappear.
It's a sunny afternoon in early April, and Jobs is rhapsodizing about his new music service at Apple headquarters. He is clad in the same outfit he dons nearly every morning so he doesn't have to waste time choosing clothes: a black mock-turtleneck shirt, jeans, and New Balance sneakers. There's been a slight change in his uniform, though. The 48-year-old Apple CEO now rolls up the cuffs of his jeans. (What would Dr. Dre think of that fashion statement?)
But Steve isn't interested in talking about his new look on this day. (He later allowed that he just bought pants that were the wrong size.) He's here to talk music. "It pained us to see the music companies and the technology companies basically threatening to take each other to court and all this other crazy stuff," he explains. "So we thought that rather than sit around and throw stones, we'd actually do something about this."
He was equally appalled by the music industry's reluctance to satisfy the demand for Internet downloading that Napster had unleashed. Who could blame him? After bludgeoning Napster to death in court, record companies promised to launch paid services with the same limitless selection and ease of use.
They did just the opposite. Universal and Sony rolled out a joint venture called Pressplay. AOL Time Warner (the parent of both Warner and FORTUNE's publisher), Bertelsmann (BMG's owner), EMI, and RealNetworks launched MusicNet. But instead of trying to cooperate to attract customers, the two ventures competed to dominate the digital market. Pressplay wouldn't license its songs to MusicNet, and MusicNet withheld its tunes from Pressplay.
The result: Neither service had enough songs to attract paying customers, who couldn't care less which record company a particular song comes from. "It was strictly the greed and arrogance of the majors that screwed things up," says Irving Azoff, who manages the Eagles and Christina Aguilera. "They wanted to control every step of the [Internet] distribution process."
The record companies were also fearful about doing anything that might cannibalize CD sales. So they decided to "rent" people music through the Internet. You paid a monthly subscription fee for songs from MusicNet and Pressplay. But you could download MusicNet tunes onto only one computer, and they disappeared if you didn't pay your bill. That may have protected the record companies from piracy, but it didn't do much for consumers. Why fork over $10 a month for a subscription when you can't do anything with your music but listen to it on your PC? Pressplay launched with CD burning but only for a limited number of songs.
At the end of last year, Pressplay and MusicNet licensed their catalogues to each other, ending their standoff. MusicNet also now permits subscribers to burn certain songs onto CDs. But MusicNet users still can't download songs onto portable players. "These devices haven't caught on yet," insists MusicNet CEO Alan McGlade. Never mind that U.S. sales of portable MP3 players soared from 724,000 in 2001 to 1.6 million last year. Pressplay, for its part, lets subscribers download some songs onto devices, but only those that use Microsoft's Windows Media software. That means no iPods.
Pressplay and MusicNet say it's too early for anybody to dismiss them as failures, but it's difficult to see them as anything else. The music industry has little to show for its investment--Sony and Universal are believed to have spent as much as $60 million so far on Pressplay. The two services don't release their subscriber numbers, but Phil Leigh, an analyst at Raymond James, believes that together they have signed up only about 225,000 customers. "It was clear to me in my first 30 days on the job that Pressplay was a first effort and a work-in-progress," says Andrew Lack, who took over as CEO of Sony Music Entertainment in February. "No one was saying, 'This is it. We can't sign up people fast enough.'"
Consequently, the five major record companies have had to slash costs in the face of declining sales. BMG laid off 1,400 people, EMI shed 1,800, and Sony Music recently announced it was reducing headcount by 1,000. Even with those cuts, average profit margins for the five majors have slipped to 5%, compared with 15% to 20% in the late 1980s when the CD came into vogue. "All the chickens are coming home to roost at the same time," says media analyst Claire Enders. "This industry has never been faced with such cataclysmic conditions before. It has no roadmap on how to cope with them."
The irony is that the music industry has always survived by introducing new formats--from the 78-rpm single to the 33-rpm vinyl LP album in the 1950s, to the cassette tape in the 1970s, to the compact disc, which sparked a rebirth of the industry in the 1980s. Now nearly everyone in the business admits that the only clear path to the future is to come up with a legal, online alternative to KaZaA and other illegal file-sharing services. This could be the mother of all format shifts, because it would largely eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs. But nobody in the music industry has been able to get there. "This new technology has swept by us," laments Doug Morris, chairman of the Universal Music Group.
As long as people can get free music online, the music industry's chances of recovery are dim. But stealing songs on the Internet isn't as much fun as it used to be. For one thing, file-sharing services are teeming with viruses. The Recording Industry Association of America has also upped the ante with a new suit accusing four college students of operating piracy networks. That's likely to put a damper on illicit computer activities in many dormitories. In addition, the record companies are planning to introduce new CDs with two sets of the same songs--one that can be played on your CD player and another that you can listen to on your computer but that can't be uploaded onto KaZaA.
In a world where CDs can't be shared on the Internet and music pirates are hauled into court, there may be huge demand for a legitimate digital music service. But it's going to have to be one that's a lot better than what the music industry has offered so far. Apple's timing, in other words, could hardly have been better.
Jobs didn't set out to be the music industry's savior. He was such a latecomer to the digital music world that some observers wondered if he'd lost his knack for spotting trends long before his competitors. Heck, Apple didn't even include CD burners as standard equipment on its computers until two years ago. But once Jobs focused on music, he was consumed by it. He saw people ripping CD tracks and loading them onto their hard drives. So in 2001 Apple introduced the iTunes jukebox software, which lets users make their own playlists or have the computer select songs randomly.
What else might Mac users wish to do with their MP3 files? Apple engineers were certain they'd want to load them into a pocket-sized portable player with a voluminous hard drive. So they created the iPod, a device that works seamlessly with iTunes. Apple has sold almost a million iPods, even though the least expensive one costs $300.
Then Steve had an epiphany: Wouldn't it be awesome if people could buy high-quality audio tracks via the Internet and load them directly into iTunes instead of going to the store to buy CDs to rip? It dawned on him that Apple had all the pieces in place to start such a business. For one thing, the company already had the Apple Store, an online operation selling more than $1 billion a year in computers and software, most of which can be purchased with a single mouse-click. It also runs the Internet's largest movie-trailer downloading site.
The only thing missing was music. Until recently it would have been impossible for a major tech company like Apple to license tunes from Warner, EMI, Universal, Sony, and BMG. Executives at those companies simply didn't trust their peers in the technology world. Many felt--not without some justification--that PC makers promoted piracy because it helped sell computers.
Apple, however, straddles the worlds of technology and entertainment like no other software or hardware maker. Along with running Apple, Jobs is CEO of Pixar, the digital-animation studio whose movies include Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. He also has plenty of admirers in the music world. Some of Apple's most zealous fans are rock stars who use Macs, both at home and in the recording studio. "Musicians have always adopted Macs," says Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. Jobs is enough of a rock star himself--is anybody in the technology world as cool?--that he's been able to get U2's Bono on the phone to discuss the iTunes Music Store. He's personally demonstrated it to Mick Jagger.
The iPod, too, has become a fetish item among musicians and notoriously technophobic music company executives. "I'm addicted to mine," says Interscope Geffen A&M records chairman Jimmy Iovine. It made sense to Iovine and a lot of other record-company big shots that if Apple could transform a geeky device like the portable MP3 player into a sexy product with mass-market appeal, it might be able to work similar wonders with online digital music sales. It's probably no coincidence that the most vocal boosters of the Apple store are Universal and Warner, whose debt-ridden parents--Vivendi and AOL Time Warner, respectively--are under pressure from investors to get out of the music business entirely.
The record companies were still leery enough of Apple that they would agree only to one-year deals with Jobs. Nevertheless, he was able to persuade Universal, EMI, Sony, BMG, and Warner to stop fixating on their subscription models and take a radically different approach to selling digital music. People want to own music, not rent it, Jobs says. "Nobody ever went out and asked users, 'Would you like to keep paying us every month for music that you thought you already bought?'" he scoffs. "The record companies got this crazy idea from some finance person looking at AOL, and then rubbing his hands together and saying, 'I'd sure like to get some of that recurring subscription revenue.' " He adds: "Just watch. We'll have more people using the iTunes Music Store in the first day than Pressplay or MusicNet have even signed up as subscribers--probably in the first hour." We'll let you know in a future issue if that bold prediction proves accurate.
Record-company executives aren't ready to dump the subscription model--yet. "I'm not sure subscriptions are going to work," says David Munns, CEO of North American Recorded Music for EMI. "A mixed model where you can rent some music and download what you really like could work. Let's keep an open mind." But what really grabs music executives about iTunes is its sheer simplicity. "It's a lot easier to get people to migrate from physical CDs to buying individual songs online than it is to jump-start a subscription service," says Warner's Ames.
Apple is trying to make that transition as easy as possible. With the iTunes Music Store, you can browse titles by artist, song title, or genre. Songs will be encoded in a new format called AAC, which offers sound quality superior to MP3s--even those "ripped" at a very high data rate. That means each AAC file takes up a lot less disc space, so you'll be able to squeeze better-quality music, and more of it, onto your computer and iPod. Moreover, each song will have a digital image of the album artwork from the CD on which the track was originally sold. Says Sony's Lack: "I don't think it was more than a 15-second decision in my mind [to license music to Apple] once Steve started talking."
Apple has also come up with a copy-protection scheme that satisfies the music industry but won't alienate paying customers. You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs. You can download them onto as many iPods as you might own. In other words, the music is pretty much yours to do with as you please. Casual music pirates, however, won't like it. The iTunes jukebox software will allow a specific playlist of songs or an album to be burned onto a CD ten times. You can burn more than that only if you manually change the order of the songs in the playlist.
And anybody who tries to upload iTunes Music Store songs onto KaZaA will be shocked. Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful.
The iTunes Music Store will initially offer 200,000 tunes, paying the record companies an average of 65 cents for each track it sells. Ultimately Jobs hopes to offer millions of songs, including older music that hasn't yet made it to CD. "This industry has been in such a funk," sighs singer Sheryl Crow. "It really needs something like this to get it going again."
If the iTunes Music Store or something like it takes off, that could change how new music is released, marketed, and promoted. Until recently the chief fear in the music industry about letting people buy individual songs via the Internet was that it would kill the album by enabling consumers to cherry-pick their favorite tracks. Music company executives now bravely say that a singles-based business might actually revive sales.
Steve is doing everything he can to stoke their optimism. "Nobody thinks of albums anymore, anyway," he argues, perhaps a little too blithely. "People think of playlists and mixes. We'll still sell albums as artists put them out, but for most consumers of popular music, we think they'll more likely buy single tracks that they like. And then they'll organize them into customized playlists in their computers and on their iPods."
The reality is that initially, at least, the record companies will probably sell less music if they shift to an Internet-based singles business model. For years they have been able to get away with releasing albums with two or three potential hits bundled with ho-hum filler cuts. That has been wonderful for the industry, but it has made a generation of consumers who pay $18.99 for CDs very cynical. "People are sick and tired of that," says singer-songwriter Seal. "That's why people are stealing music."
For some artists, the idea of a singles-driven business is anathema. "There's a flow to a good album," says Nine Inch Nails' Reznor. "The songs support each other. That's the way I like to make music." But Crow says it would be a relief to put out singles instead of producing an entire album every time she wants to reach fans. "It would be nice to have a mechanism to release a song or two or three or four on their own," she says.
A renewed emphasis on individual songs could well improve the quality of music and lead to a reordering of the entire industry. It won't happen overnight, but the record companies had better get used to this new model. Now that Apple has gotten the music industry to support its pay-per-download store, nearly all of its Wintel PC-based rivals say they will augment their subscription businesses with similar offerings. "Steve's pushing the ball forward here," concedes Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks, which owns nearly 40% of MusicNet and plans to purchase Listen.com's well-regarded Rhapsody subscription service.
But Glaser insists that Apple is ignoring a significant part of the digital music market by offering just downloading. He says Rhapsody users spend 72% of their time listening to streaming music. Only 13% pay $1 to burn cuts onto CDs. "If you make a really cool playlist of 200 songs on Rhapsody, you pay only $9.95 a month," he says. "If you use Apple, it's $200. Maybe guys like Steve and me can afford that, but I'm trying to run a service for everyone else too."
No matter what happens, Jobs will likely sell more Macs. But that's not all he's after with music. The Music Store is his latest effort to diversify Apple's sources of revenue beyond Macs. With Apple's share of the desktop computer market stuck at less than 5% in the U.S. and less than 3% worldwide for several years, the iPod is the most obvious new line of business, steering Apple onto the home turf of consumer-electronics giants like Sony and Matsushita. Now Apple makes almost as much operating profit on each iPod it sells as it does on each iMac, even though the iPod costs a fraction as much to manufacture. So it should come as no surprise that Jobs is releasing three new versions of the iPod in conjunction with the Music Store (for more on that, see Gifts for the Grad: Apple iPod.)
Jobs has been very shrewd about the way he moved the iPod into the PC universe. Anyone who has tried the iPod with both systems will tell you it's a lot more fun to use if you plug it into a Mac running Apple's OS X than into a Dell with Windows XP. "The Windows iPod sucks" is Seal's appraisal. "But what they are really doing is trying to get people to wonder, 'Hmm, should I switch over?'" Jobs is betting that the iTunes Music Store, like the iPod, could be just such a Trojan horse.
It's not as easy as it sounds. How many Windows iPod owners know what they're missing by not using OS X? Do any of them really care? Perhaps that's why Jobs is rolling out iTunes for Windows too. In fact, Warner's Roger Ames is trying to broker a deal in which AOL would adopt iTunes as its music-manage-ment software. "Steve was resistant at first," Ames says. "But now I understand that he's decided to go that way." AOL has been trying to develop its own music store to go along with its subscription service but hasn't figured out a billing system for individual tracks as Apple has. A deal with AOL would land the iTunes Music Store on the desktops of AOL's 26 million subscribers. That could quickly make Apple the dominant seller of digital music on the Internet. AOL would neither confirm nor deny a possible deal.
A big play for Windows users would be a huge shift for a man who has largely created a product--the Mac--that exists in a walled garden cut off from the much vaster PC world. Clearly, Apple will benefit enormously if it boosts its share of the computer market by even 1%--such a gain would lift its revenues by nearly a third and increase profits even more. In the meantime, if the iTunes Music Store takes off--and computer users of all stripes start buying millions of songs online each month--that will translate into tens of millions of dollars in new revenues per month for Apple.
His adventures in the music business have led to other changes in Jobs' thinking. During the photo shoot with Sheryl Crow for this article, he acknowledged to the singer that he had never really understood what rap music was all about. But while playing with a prototype of the iTunes Music Store on his Mac at home in recent weeks, he had started downloading some of Eminem's tracks.
"You know, he really is a great poet," Crow said.
To which Steve replied, "Yeah, he's starting to kind of grow on me."
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,447333,00.html?
One false claim in the new iPod promo:
"And iPod is the only portable digital music player that supports the AAC format."
(Compaq's PA-2 also supports AAC, as do the Silhouette, the SlimBOX 128 MB flash player, Panasonic's SV-SD70 SD player, and Philip's EXP 203 CD player.)
More re Apple:
Winning Over Music Industry, Apple Launches Online Service
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Two years after angering the recording industry with its "Rip. Mix. Burn" ad campaign, Apple Computer Inc. has won its cooperation in creating the Internet's least restrictive commercial music service yet.
The iTunes Music Store announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Monday draws from all five major labels in offering more than 200,000 songs at 99 cents a download - and includes some big name artists who previously shunned online distribution.
Unlike its competitors, the service has virtually no copy-protection - a major concession to consumer demand.
Apple lets customers keep songs indefinitely, share them on as many as three Macintosh computers and transfer them to any number of iPod portable music players. No subscriptions are necessary and buyers can burn unlimited copies of the songs onto CDs.
"There's no legal alternative that's worth beans," Jobs told reporters and industry analysts at San Francisco's convention center.
Jobs has intensely courted music industry executives, who have been leery of digital music downloads and have aggressively used lawsuits and lobbying to stem the illegal copying and distribution of copyright works. That wariness has hamstrung other online music distribution models, keeping most of the best new music offline.
In contrast, Music Store already includes music by Bob Dylan, U2, Eminem, Sheryl Crow, Sting and other artists previously wary about music downloads. Eventually, millions of songs will be for sale on the site, predicted Doug Morris, the chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group.
Morris, attending Monday's launch, called it "a defining moment in the music business."
By allowing people to do pretty much as they please with their digital copies, Apple and the music industry are acknowledging that, due to digital technology, online file-swapping can't be eradicated.
"You can't stop piracy, so you have to work with technology, and you have to get into the rhythm of it. That's what Apple has done here," said the musician Seal, who was at the announcement.
Even Hillary Rosen, who as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has led the fight against Napster and it's free online music-swapping successors, called Apple's new service "cool, cutting edge" in a statement.
"It's not stealing anymore. It's good karma," said Jobs, asserting that other industry-backed services' subscription-based models treat music fans as "criminals" with extra fees and restrictions. Apple also announced a new version of the iPod - thinner and lighter. It comes with 30 gigabytes, or about 7,500 songs, and costs $499.
Initially, Music Store only works on Macintosh computers, but by year's end, Apple plans to make it compatible with devices using the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Windows platform - as it did for they iPod. Then, the service could have mass appeal.
While the service remains limited to Macs, which comprise less than 3 percent of the desktop computing market, the segment is big enough to let the music industry test a new business model, said Phil Leigh, an analyst at the research firm Raymond James & Associates.
"I think it'll change the world a little bit," Leigh said. "It'll be the first legitimate online music service that will have major brand recognition, and it's focused on portability and ease of use."
Until now, most music found online lacked the blessing of the major labels - BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Millions of users are downloading free copies of songs through file-sharing services such as Kazaa - services that the recording industry have sued in an effort to stem what they deem as revenue-robbing piracy.
The RIAA has sued four college students who allegedly offered more than 1 million recordings over the Internet, demanding damages of $150,000 per song. Music companies also are lobbying corporations, urging them to crack down on the downloading of songs using company computers.
But their efforts suffered a major blow Friday when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., the companies that distribute Grokster and Morpheus, aren't to blame for any illegal copying that their customers do using their file-sharing software. They've vowed to appeal.
Apple enters a market that has yet to establish much traction. Other providers of online music to paid subscribers have drawn only about 650,000 users, analysts estimate.
Pressplay, a joint venture of Sony and Universal, charges a flat fee of $9.95 a month to listen using their computer to an unlimited number of songs from the major labels. Consumers who want to purchase songs to store on their hard drive or burn them onto a CD pay an extra fee of 98 cents per song.
Apple charges no such fees but does incorporate some minor restrictions - playlists can be stored on no more than three Macs and once a user burns 10 copies of a playlist onto CDs, they have to "modify" the list before copying again. This can be as simple as shuffling the order of the songs.
All Music Store songs are encoded in the AAC audio format, which allows for faster downloads and higher sound quality than MP3 files of the same size. The format was developed by Dolby to provide the sound for industry-standard MPEG-4 video files.
AP-ES-04-28-03 2040EDT
This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAWKZP53FD.html
If that's the case, PP probably needed to add extra on-board RAM to make room for the extra codec and DRM code. I'd bet they are still using the PP5002. As the following link illustrates, the codec and non-volatile memory are separate components within the chipset: http://www.amd.com/us-en/FlashMemory/FlashApplications/0,,37_1736_6577_8011,00.html
sdr, where have you seen mention of a new chipset?
sdr, the original iPod uses Portalplayer's PP5002 chip, which can handle AAC and is firmware-upgradeable. An upgrade for older iPods (Mac only) will allow them to function with AAC downloads. Owners of PC-compatible iPods won't be able to upgrade to AAC, at least for the time being. To me, that seems to point to a proprietary Apple DRM embedded in release 1.4 of iTunes (replaced by Musicmatch in PC iPods).
http://www.portalplayer.com/products/fact.htm
http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/
Even this one offers AAC:
http://www.wildwestelectronics.net/silhouette.html#
Why do you think it would be worthwhile to download from Apple's site? I never said that we would try to achieve compatibility with it; my only claim is that we have had prior experience with AAC and face no real obstacles as fas as incorporating it if required. Fer crissake, it's only a little code, not a thermonuclear device. And BTW, can you point me to some websites (other than Appple's) that currently offer downloadable content in AAC format? If there aren't any, where was the impetus to offer AAC in production devices?
IMHO, Apple will use a proprietary DRM. I base my opinion on this article: http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/02/20030220013554.shtml (AAC is a subset of the MPEG-4 codec.)
You can't get much more public than a press release. As far as upgrading codecs and DRM schemes via firmware upgrade, that's a no brainer. In fact, it was one of the principal reasons for EDIG's selection of TI programmable DSPs for their reference designs. If you want confirmation, peruse these links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=e.digital+AAC
Yes, we can support AAC and multiple DRM schemes:
"The portable MP2000 design supports multiple music compression formats including MP3, ePAC, AAC, Windows Media Audio, and QDX. It also supports multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and is compatible with SDMI security guidelines. The MP2000 design will be shown in two configurations accepting CompactFlashTM, MMC, or Secure DigitalTM Memory Card (SDTM Card) removable media."
http://www.edig.com/news/releases/pr010201.html
"e.Digital's MicroOS(TM)-based portable platform including AAC support can be incorporated into a variety of products including portable digital music players or jukeboxes, home and automotive stereos, and functionally-enhanced wireless phones.
Steve Ferguson, e.Digital's director of business development, said, ``AAC is one of the premiere music codecs and we consider it to be an important addition to our designs. We continue to focus on developing flexible, user-friendly portable Internet music player and jukebox designs for our OEM customers and licensees. With yesterday's announcement of music content coming from BMG and Universal in the AAC format, we are witnessing a major step forward in the new Internet music industry.'
``We are pleased to have e.Digital license AAC for inclusion in their portable music player designs,' said Ramzi Haidamus, Dolby Laboratories' technical/business strategist. ``e.Digital is well positioned to help hardware manufacturers deliver products that can play music from new and upcoming secure Internet music delivery services.'
In addition to higher-quality music reproduction, AAC is being used in conjunction with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, which control the unrestricted copying and unlawful distribution of songs. e.Digital's Internet music player and jukebox designs support multiple DRMs to protect music from piracy.
AAC is the latest audio codec standardized by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as part of the MPEG specification. AAC is a product of the combined efforts of several organizations including AT&T, Dolby Laboratories, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, and Sony Corp. Widely viewed as the successor to MP3, AAC technology is being adopted in applications ranging from electronic music distribution, digital radio in the United States and Japan, and digital television in Japan."
http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/press/pr1226.html
One should also note that the new iPod only supports AAC in Mac mode; it's not available for Windows/PC users.
The only albums I buy are those without "filler" cuts. The Beatles and the Beach Boys set the standard for quality recordings sans filler tracks (i.e. Revolver and Pet Sounds). These days if a group can't uphold those standards, they don't make my playlist.
hh, IMHO a quarter a song is unrealistic. It used to be a given that the cost of an album approximated the cost of a concert ticket. Nowadays,with the cost of concert tickets approaching $60, CDs are quite reasonable at $14-16. That'd put a single at $1-1.50. I seriously doubt that anything worth listening to would be priced cheaper.
A very astute purchase, IMHO.
JBocca, it's funny how some ignorant folks automatically assume they aren't. This statement also seems to have been ignored:
(b) Notwithstanding the provisions hereof, the Company shall have the right at any time after it shall have given written notice pursuant hereto (irrespective of whether a written request for inclusion of any such securities shall have been made) to elect not to file any such proposed registration statement, or to withdraw the same after the filing but prior to the effective date thereof.
Milplease, according to Hitachi's spec sheets, there is a negligible difference in power consumption between the 20 GB and 80 GB versions of the Travelstar. We're talking .1 to .3 watts difference. Both models require a 5 VDC supply and are rated at 2.0 - 2.3 watts for seek/read/write operation and 4.7 watts to spin up. Both have the same physical dimenions (9.5 x 70 x 100 mm); the Toshiba drive used in iPods is 8 x 54 x 78 mm.
"Kill the iPod to hell"....
http://www.fixup.net/talk/cooltalk/0000028a.htm
Want a 40 GB Odyssey 1000?
http://www.fixup.net/tips/mp3/
"...consumers can transfer tens of thousands of gigabytes to their iPod player in minutes" - hmmmmm - Apple must be getting close to releasing their new Hellfirewire interface. (Not sure what kind of storage media holds that much data, though.)
If EDIG were sitting on a bunch of Odyssey 300s, why aren't they featured on the edigital-store website? Last I heard, the O 300 had been discontinued in favor of the FL100. If DBL took the O 300s off our hands, so much the better.
OT: Also from Dealerscope, FWIW...
Unwired WhiteFire wireless headphones. Available now for $599. These new headphones use WhiteFire, an infrared (IR), 16-bit synchronous wireless delivery method. It delivers up to four stereo or eight monaural audio channels simultaneously. WhiteFire wireless headphones contain a channel-selector button that shifts from one audio source to another, and four LEDs that indicate which stereo channel is currently being used.
Call (631) 293-6900 or visit www.unwiredtechnology.com.
Unlikely, given the dearth of Odyssey 1000s available at the EDIG store - try a different spin.
Interestingly enough, Hango has a partially obscured photo of the Treo (the production version) on their website. http://www.remotesolution.co.kr/admin/products_digital.htm . Curious behaviour for someone allegedly at odds with EDIG.
OT but relevant: "What ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty" in a court of law? Where in our Constitution does it say that Freedom of Speech allows for people to go out on the Internet and pronounce a person or company guilty, try and hang them on a public forum by besmirching someone's character with lies and innuendos of wrongdoing?
Chat forums like Raging Bull, Yahoo, Silicon Investor and many others, began with a good premise for discussion of various topics, but because those forums are uncontrolled they tend to degenerate into a free-for-all mudslinging morass. This costs other people their real freedom of speech by preventing them from being able to communicate in a reasonable and reasoned manner. The premise of having an open forum for exchange of ideas is lost.
Self appointed vigilantes are as prevalent on unregulated forums as they were in the old west, but in the old west people who took the law into their own hands could be found guilty and hanged for the crime of vigilantism themselves.
Some of these self appointed vigilantes claim to be helping people by being "honest negative posters" yet is it honest to post only negative information and not try to see both sides of an issue or acknowledge that there is another side to a story? It is one thing to present negative information and a whole other thing to refuse to accept proof that refutes that information. They collect only negative information and use it to damage people and their investments. They never see or allow for the possibility of positive information. They bash anyone who presents positive information or refutes their negative information with facts.
Granted, some information, both positive and negative, is based upon solid facts , but there is too much posting that is either speculation, twisted facts, innuendo, or outright lies.
In the past few years a new element has crept into the mix that is further reducing the value of the unregulated forums. This new element has an insidious nature, out for its own ends, not caring about any damage caused to businesses or individuals, and it is every bit a form of terrorism as we are facing in this world and that we hear about in the news on a daily basis. This element is out to undermine our American way of life and society by destroying our faith in free enterprise and our capital markets. They frighten unsophisticated people out of the market and systematically target companies that require access to capital and funding to stay in business. These companies are frequently placed under attack by the very same entities that are supposedly funding and supporting them. These same entities attack companies with false and twisted postings on Internet message boards frightening away the small investors and shorting the stock down to nothing, thereby gaining wealth at the expense of the real investors who have placed their savings in these companies only to be frightened away or shorted out of existence. The so called "honest negative posters" flock to the boards of the victims and use the circumstances to bash and pretend to be there saving people from bad investments. Some of those companies may be bad investments, but the good hard working companies get the same treatment as the bad ones. People end up losing their jobs, homes and families due to this insidious activity and the activists doing the damage use this as a self fulfilling prophecy to say it is all the company's fault for taking the funding in the first place, etc. It is our contention that it is not the place of short sellers and so called "honest negative posters" to accuse, try and sentence companies and people they don't know. It is our contention that it is the job of the legal system and the judiciary to make those determinations through a proper court procedure. It is our contention that those forums who allow this activity to occur without any regulation at all should not be supported at all."
http://www.investortoinvestor.com/bull.html
My mental image of a >3 ppd Jail poster:
(Sorry, Matt... just had to put in my 3 cents worth.)
WW, I don't recall qualifying my criteria with a prefaced long or short (or self-appointed messiah) qualifier.
Matt, this board in its earlier days was an admirably free-wheeling forum for discussion of e.Digital, its technologies and activities, related developments, and its prospects. There were (and are) a few incurable optimists and snake oil sellers, but by and large the discussions were on-topic and free of personal aspersions. I personally hold Investorshub fully responsible for allowing the board to deteriorate to its present state of malicious anarchy. For two years or so, the moderators were allowed to delete posts by obvious bashers; once that power was taken away, the subsequent descent into chaos and irrelevance was guaranteed. No matter what stance you take on freedom of expression, the fact remains that there are cyber-entities whose sole purpose is to disrupt any attempts at free discussion, especially if those discussions trend towards positive opinions of the subject company. If you want to restore this board to a healthy forum for reasoned discussion of its topic, a broadsword approach will fail. The only successful remedy would be to excise from the board all of those posters unable to tolerate any opinions diverging from their own. How to discern such posters? That's the easy part - just blow away anyone who consistently trumpets the same position and heaps scorn on those who dare to dissent.
Hmmmm, Austonia seems to have changed his tune re the Odyssey... "I've owned this player for a month, it is still in like-new condition. Always handled with care and it works perfectly. e.Digital (www.eDig.com) has been sold out for a month now. This is one of the best digital audio players that money can buy. Compare everything that the Odyssey can do next to an iPod that costs hundreds of dollars more." http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11024&item=3013900548
LMAO !!!
FWIW, AAPL net sales for 2002 were $5,742,000,000. Of that figure, $1,208,000,000 came from software, service, etc, and the remaining $4,534,000,000 came from hardware sales. Net sales for the iPod amounted to $143,000,000, or less than 3.2% of net hardware sales and less than 2.5% of net overall sales. Hardly a pivotal factor, IMHO.
Austonia, I think that the real question boils down to this:
Why would a purported amateur MP3 jukebox reviewer hang around a stock discussion board just to slam the subject company's product? In case you haven't noticed, this board's active posters are comprised by and large of committed investors who believe in this company, buy and enjoy its products, and either rebut or ignore your opinions. There may be a handful of malcontents and muck rakers who wouldn't buy an e.Digital product if their life depended on it (or so they wish to appear), but they are far outnumbered by supporters of the company. Given the foregoing, I can't see any purpose in your posting here, as your opinions would carry far more weight at a venue like dmusic.com or epinions.com. Post anywhere you like (it's a free country), but don't be surprised if many here relegate you to the dustbin of irrelevance. Given your seeming lack of knowledge as to what constitutes a sophisticated file management system (as opposed to one that merely dumps all files into a single unorganized clump and mandates multiple search routines to overcome its basic ineptness), I have already done so.
Austonia, why is it that you speak more reverently of the Zen here than you do on your own website? In your review of the Zen, you said the following: "User Interface... The number of options also makes it cumbersome to get around. Learing [sic] curve... This is not an easy player to navigate and is best suited for the technically-inclined crowd." Yet here you claim that "navigating with the Zen is easy." Are you deliberately slanting what you post here to put e.Digital products in a bad light? If so, why?
You overlook a very important aspect of ID3v2 tagging. The tag info resides at the beginning rather than the end of the file. That had been the major flaw of ID3; to get at the info needed to ID a track, the entire file had to be read into memory. This can be rather time consuming and leads to slow scrolling and long seek times. (Never mind the fact that ID3 info on pirated tracks is often full of errors.)
My contention is that all the elaborate database search routines needed to find and play a track on most jukeboxes is actually a patch to resolve the problems created by having a branchless tree for a directory. And faulting e.Digital for going in a more sophisticated direction is like faulting Apple for going with Motorola chipsets or deriding Hewlett Packard for choosing RPN for their calculators. Being different isn't always a bad thing.
Is it a phone? Is it an audio player? It's...
10:11 Monday 10th March 2003
John Lui, CNET Asia
BenQ's latest device is a mobile phone that doubles as a digital audio-video player, using Microsoft's Media2Go operating system
A Taiwanese electronics maker plans this year to begin selling a portable device that's half digital audio-video player and half mobile phone.
"Movie playback is one of our major targets with this device," said Rick Lei, general manager of sales at BenQ, which spun off from computer giant Acer a year ago to concentrate on high-tech consumer products.
The device will sport Microsoft's as-yet-unreleased Media2Go operating system. The OS is designed for multimedia on mobile devices, said Lei, and is a good fit for BenQ's upcoming product.
He added that the company's engineers in Taiwan are working with Microsoft to ensure that the device can play stored music, photos and movies, compressed in formats such as MPEG-4.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Kazaa have been explosively popular in the past year, with millions of users downloading MP3 music, movies or TV shows into PCs. Each movie typically consumes around one gigabyte of hard drive space.
The as-yet-unnamed BenQ multimedia player/phone will sport a 10GB or 20GB hard disk of the 1.8-inch variety made by Toshiba or Hitachi -- the same type found in Apple Computer's iPod.
When launched in August or September, the device will cost $399 (about £250) for the 10GB version and $499 for the 20GB version.
Since BenQ spun off from Acer, it has had to compete with rivals such as Sony and Samsung, which like BenQ sell both IT and consumer products, with some of them blurring the line between the two worlds.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t287-s2131633,00.html
Meanwhile, hi-rez wireless video still seems a ways off...
Benq shows off digital hub
Thursday, 13 March 2003
You can't stream video over a Wi-Fi 802.11b wireless network, right? The technology's 11Mbps bandwidth isn't sufficient.
Wrong... At this year's CeBit computer show in Germany, Taiwanese technology giant Benq was doing just that: a prototype 'digital hub' that includes a TV tuner was beaming a TV signal to a notebook over an 802.11b wireless connection.
Picture quality is compromised — it's more like Mpeg-4 than DVD definition — and the distance has to be kept under five metres to keep the signal at the full 11Mbps, but it's still impressive.
The concept is very much experimental; Benq UK staff at CeBit had heard the digital hub talked about, but hadn't expected to see it at the show. "It will be at least three to six months before a finished product reaches the market," said Royce Lye, Benq UK marketing manager.
By that time, an new wireless LAN standard, 802.11g with a much higher bandwidth of 54Mbps — easily enough for high-quality video transmission — should have been ratified and the fast 802.11a standard (also offering 54Mbps) will be more widely available.
The hub is essentially a stripped-down version of the company's Joybook — a notebook-format 'media integration' device that looks like a run-of-the-mill laptop with a high-quality screen and a fancy trim, but which contains a suite of media integration software for audio and video creation and editing rather than office productivity tools.
The hub has no screen, keyboard, mouse or speakers, just a couple of ports, an aerial and a few LEDs. But it is likely to be the forerunner of a long line of products, emanating from Asian and Far Eastern countries, that seek to bring digital integration to the home, linking TV, audio, movie-making and web-based 'infotainment'.
"As a piece of hardware the hub is quite a dull product," said Lye, "but it's the potential for what it can integrate that's interesting."
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/index.cfm?go=news.view&news=3150
Ahhhh - the niceties of ID3 tags:
http://www.nomadness.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forums&file=viewtopic&topic=4507&am...
The anonymous poster who agreed with Cable Guy seems to be on the right track... set it up like an e.Digital player and things improve immensely. Unfortunately, Nomad's file nav system still requires a clunky search procedure just to get you to an album or artist, to wit:
1. Press SCROLL UP/DOWN buttons to select ALBUMS.
2. Press SEARCH to access the SEARCH FOR ALBUMS screen.
3. Press PLUS/MINUS to change the letter and then press the SCROLL UP/DOWN buttons to move the letter entry position (indicated by a ^). NOTE: As each letter is entered, the letters are compared with the ALBUMS list. The ALBUM with the nearest match is displayed.
4. Press GO! to jump to the nearest match. The album appears on the screen. To return to the LIBRARY CATEGORIES screen without searching, press the LIB button.
Sheesh! All that to do what takes me a maximum of 6 button pushes on my XP3. (One to turn it on, two more to step up to the Artists folder level, then a long or short push to scroll to the artist I want, a single push of the down button to go to the Album folder, and one last push to scroll to the album I want. I think EDIG will be taking a step backwards by adding ID3 tag searches. All the gyrations needed to navigate thru a Nomad are, IMHO, directly attributable to the fact that they seem to have only one level in their 'directory' structure. And while I'm on the subject, has anyone else noted the 30 character limit in ID3 v1.1 tag fields. If I recall correctly, the character limit for folder and file names in e.Digital's file system for Treos and XP3s is 64 characters.
Creative preps MS-based Nomad video player
By Tony Smith
Posted: 13/03/2003 at 13:12 GMT
When Apple failed to launch a video iPod earlier this year, as it had been rumoured to be planning, it disappointed many of its fans. And now it looks like Microsoft is going to get just such a device to market ahead of it.
The software giant today said it was partnerning with Creative Technology, developer of the Nomad range of MP3 players - and a company given a hefty kick up the pants by the launch of the iPod - to create a portable media playback device.
Creative will develop the device hardware, based on Microsoft 's Media2Go operating platform, developed by its embedded systems group, and built around Windows CE .NET. Media2Go was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, but Microsoft began shipping Intel Xscale-based reference hardware today. A built-in hard drive will hold music, video and photos, and presumably there'll be an integrated LCD panel.
The actual specifications of the device have yet to be revealed, but Creative said it would hold "more than 8,000 music files, 175 hours of digital quality video or up to 30,000 photographs". Media2Go uses compression to squeeze 40GB worth of data onto a 20GB hard drive.
Incidentally, we're not quite sure what "digital quality" means - it's a bit like saying something's as blue as a blue thing. We had assumed Creative meant something comparable to DVD playback, but a trip to the Microsoft Media2Go web site reveals the truth: 175 hours of VHS quality playback. Ho-hum.
"The players will provide continuous playback of video for up to six hours and continuous music playback for up to 12 hours," says Creative.
Samsung, ViewSonic, iRiver and Sanyo have already licensed the platform from Microsoft. Creative's product is due to ship "late 2003" - in time from Christmas, presumably. So Apple has a little while yet to get its vPod out of the lab.
In the meantime - and thanks to Reg readers for pointint out Archos' Jukebox Multimedia 20, a multimedia version of its old hard disk-based MP3 player. The 20's been around for a while, and is capable of DIVX and MPEG-4 video playback. The screen looks a mite small, mind, reminiscent of early 1980s' portable TVs. In its favour, as one reader writes, there's "no Microsoft DRM". ®
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/29741.html
Austonia, just for clarification, when you refer to ID3 tag support, are you referring to the original ID3, ID3v1.1, or ID3v2? Also, how common is ID3v2 support among the players you have tested?
I've had an Classic XP3 for almost 16 months now. The only problems I've had software-wise were related to the Musicmatch ripping s/w - a free upgrade to release 7.2 cured the problem. Only problem I have had with the player itself was a broken Stop button a few weeks back that I repaired myself. Now toying with the idea of replacing the 10 GB drive with a 20 GB Travelstar. However, the cost of the new drive ($120 incl. shipping) is about the same as buying a refurb'd XP3 at Amazon, so I might go that way instead.