I'll readily admit that I'm not in the target audience for the new SlotRadio MP3 player from SanDisk, which became available last week.
The $99 device comes with a microSD card containing 1,000 songs, selected by Billboard editors from top-charting radio hits of the last 40 years or so, arranged in seven playlists--rock, country, hip-hop, and four others.
You can't edit or rearrange the playlists, you can't move the songs to your computer or any other device, and the only way to get new songs is by buying new 1,000-song cards for $39.99 apiece.
For a music control freak like me--I used to be the jerk at parties who'd secretly rifle through the host's CD collection looking for something I liked more than what was playing--turning my audio programming over to somebody else isn't easy.
There's a wee tiny rock band in there, and they're playing my favorite Steely Dan song.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)But I got a chance to play with the SlotRadio today, and there's something refreshing about its simplicity. I took it out of the box while sitting on the bus and was listening to music in less than 30 seconds.
There's no software to install, no USB cable to plug in, no CDs to rip, and no need for the instruction booklet. It's an MP3 player for people who don't know what MP3s are--and don't really care--but just want to rock out to some good tunes without carrying their entire CD collection around in their car.
While I agree with CNET's Jasmine France that the sound quality is only mediocre, the bigger problem is the mainstream, middle-of-the-road selections chosen by Billboard.
SanDisk had to start somewhere, and Billboard is one of the biggest names in the biz, but each playlist sounded like a heavily audience-tested radio station programmed by some anonymous machine in a building in New York. That is fine...but if I wanted the risk-averse sensation of radio, I'd just turn on the player's built-in radio. I ended up using the skip button quite a bit.
As I said when I first heard about SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy, the format will succeed only if SanDisk quickly signs up some more eclectic curators. I'd gladly pay $40 for 1,000 blues songs curated by Buddy Guy, or 1,000 reggae and dub tunes collected by KEXP's Kid Hops, or the top 1,000 songs of the year as chosen by the editors of Pitchfork.
Better yet, what if SanDisk teamed up with Pandora? The target audiences seem almost identical: music lovers who can't find a radio station that matches their taste, and don't have the time or motivation to hunt down and buy (or steal) a lot of music themselves.
Users could order customized cards based on their musical profiles or Pandora stations. They'd have to be created on demand, which would be more costly than mass-producing the same card thousands of times, but Pandora already has the algorithms and infrastructure to create customized radio stations on the fly, so how much more expensive could it be to rip 1,000 songs onto a microSD card?
Anyway, SlotRadio is an odd but interesting little device, and I hope that SanDisk gives it the chance it deserves by branching out into the niche markets in which music lives today.
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Like many other commentators, I greeted last month's SlotMusic announcement from SanDisk with befuddlement. I don't understand why a consumer would pay $14.99, which is almost the same price as a CD, for a tiny MicroSD card preloaded with digitally compressed audio. Yes, the attached USB dongle gives you compatibility with any computer with a USB connector. But still, a CD gives you higher sound quality, compatibility with billions of devices, and much less chance of misplacement between the couch cushions.
This Robin Thicke-branded SlotMusic player will cost $34.99 and come preloaded with songs from the artist. The regular players will cost only $19.99.
(Credit: SanDisk)Today's announcement that SanDisk will also release a SlotMusic player for $19.99 changes my opinion a little bit. If you're just getting into digital music--and new teenagers and ex-Luddites are created every day--and want the cheapest way to take large quantities of music with you anywhere, a SlotMusic player could fit the bill. It's tiny--less than 3 inches along its longest side. Earphones and battery are included. I'm getting a unit to test out, so I'll let you know if the sound's any good.
The idea is that you'd buy a player and one of these preloaded albums, which comes on a 1GB card. Even with a full album of songs, artwork, and a couple videos, you'd have plenty of extra space to fill the card with other MP3s or unprotected WMAs. I'm not sure how many people have a bunch of MP3s and no MP3 player, but I suppose they exist--perhaps your older brother (or college-aged son) just left for college with his MP3 player and a new laptop, leaving a bunch of music files stranded on the home PC.
There's still a lot of potential for confusion: you'll have to remember which files you burned to which card before you put it in your SlotMusic player. But SanDisk also sells cards up to 16GB in capacity, and I suspect this is the real long-term play for the company. Once users get fed up with buying preloaded cards, they'll just move everything to a bigger card and never swap it out again. Not a great story for the record labels, but fine for SanDisk.
SanDisk also announced today that more than 30 artists from the four major labels are releasing albums on SlotMusic cards, including old faves like Jimi Hendrix and Kiss and new stars like Coldplay and Nickelback, with more artists to come by the end of the year. There will also be artist-branded SlotMusic players from Abba and Robin Thicke for $34.99. All are on sale at Wal-Mart and Best Buy, so mainstream American consumers are going to see these things.
If the format takes off, perhaps we'll begin to see curated collections. For example, maybe a radio station like Seattle's KEXP could sell a SlotMusic card with the top 90.3 songs of the year, instead of simply listing them on its Web site. Or Billboard could issue monthly cards with a selection of hits from its various charts. Rights clearance would be a chore, but not so much harder than putting together a compilation like the Now That's What I Call Music series. Other possibilities include higher-definition uncompressed audio files--imagine the 96kHz/24-bit masters of your favorite albums--or complete collections from single artists--no more bulky box sets.
Finally, one more sure-to-be-useless plea to SanDisk and marketers everywhere: can we please end the creative use of capital and lowercase letters in product names? The actual terms are "slotMusic" and "microSD," but I never remember to type them that way. Product names are proper nouns. Apple gets a pass because the iPod's been so ubiquitous in the media and advertising for the last five years that if I typed "IPod" or "IPhone" it would draw attention to itself, breaking the first rule of clean writing. But apart from Apple, forget it. Sorry.
CNET Reviews posted a great article last week on the best MP3 players for people who like to record audio directly to a device without the aid of a computer. (The article referred to these people as "pirates," rather than "lawful archivers of personally owned content." Argh, mateys!) I second their strong approval of Toshiba's Gigabeat U, and generally think the Gigabeats were sorely underrated.
The iRecord Pro gives you an easy way to import audio or video from almost any source to your iPod, without a computer.
(Credit: Streaming Networks)But what if you've already got an iPod, as sales statistics suggest more than 70 percent of you do? Streaming Networks' iRecord is the answer. Connect any device with an S-video or composite video (or audio-only) output to the iRecord, connect the iRecord's USB output to your iPod or other MP3 player, hit the record button, and you're on.
The original was released two years ago, and the iRecord Pro came out earlier this year, adding support for more devices (including the iPhone and iPod Touch), a timer that lets you set recording times, and the ability to transcode MPEG-2 video files stored on a computer to the device's preferred H.264 video format. Today, the company announced support for the iPhone 3G as well.
It's a bit expensive for an accessory--the Pro costs $259.95--but worth it if you like to grab content from a wide variety of audio and video sources for your iPhone or MP3 player, and don't want to muck around with a computer and recording software in the middle.
Dell gave up on MP3 players in 2006, after three years of fighting the iPod juggernaut. Initially, Dell's players relied on Musicmatch software for library organization, content syncing, and online music purchases, although they synced with the Windows Media Player as well in case of problems with Musicmatch (which CNET reviewer John Frederick Moore encountered back in 2005 with the flash-based Dell DJ Ditty). The reviews were middling at best, and the players never got much above 3 percent market share.
According to a report in today's Wall Street Journal, Dell is considering re-entering the MP3 player market later this year. This time, the company is considering building its own software based on technology it gained in its acquisition of Zing, as well as a modified version of somebody else's subscription music service, most likely Rhapsody's.
Let's leave aside the question of whether the world needs yet another end-to-end hardware-software-services play in the MP3 player space. (Ask Microsoft how that's going with Zune.)
This is about something much bigger and more interesting: the shift of power in the PC market away from Microsoft and toward the hardware manufacturers. The process has been going on since the Department of Justice's antitrust settlement with Microsoft back in 2001--a lot of onlookers derided that settlement as toothless, but it actually made a difference with regard to Microsoft's relationships with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers--Microsoft parlance for the big PC makers like Dell and HP). Instead of being allowed to push them to include whatever software Microsoft bundled with Windows, the OEMs were free to choose their own bundling strategies. If Microsoft wanted placement, it would have to pay like everybody else.
Fast forward a few years. Vista launches to mostly bad reviews. Apple launches a series of brilliant advertisements slamming Vista. These advertisements, combined with the popularity of the iPod and a generally smoother experience on the Mac (even Ballmer admitted it last week) create a big spike in Macintosh sales. That hurts Microsoft a little bit, as Windows still has more than 90 percent of the market for personal computing operating systems. But it hurts the PC makers more: even the biggest ones, Dell and HP, have only about 30 percent share.
Instead of relying on Microsoft to fight back against Apple, Dell's taking matters into its own hands. The company's been focusing on better design for some time now--that's phase one, since Apple consistently wins praise for its hardware design. Phase two: create a differentiated consumer experience for digital media and entertainment, and make it available only on a Dell. The MP3 player's just a side note.
Which raises the question: how much marketing should Microsoft do for Windows anyway? Rumors have been flying about a $300 million rehabilitation campaign for Vista. Why bother if OEMs like Dell are going their own way anyway? Instead, Microsoft should focus on building the most reliable, secure, multipurpose operating system it can, one that the OEMs will be happy to put on their PCs and that end users will be happy to adopt. Forget the user interface bells and whistles. Scale back on the included apps, which Microsoft now has to pay OEMs to place anyway. Just build a great OS, let the OEMs figure out how to use it, then leave the sales, marketing, and user experience details to them.
CNET's MP3 Insider blog posted a fascinating entry the other day on how CNET Labs tests the audio response of different MP3 players. They load several files of the type that are used to test traditional stereo equipment, such as white noise and pure sine waves, then plays them back into an audio analyzer, which reports numbers for qualities such as signal-to-noise ratio and total harmonic distortion. Two Creative players come out on top, the iPod Classic in the middle, and Microsoft's Zune in seventh place due to fairly mediocre harmonic distortion scores.
As Donald Bell correctly points out, numbers lie: some of the best sounding MP3 players actually boost or depress certain frequencies to make up for the fact that you're probably listening to a digitally compressed file through a middling audio processor and cheap earbuds, with lots of ambient noise around you. (Good audio engineers tell you the same thing: level meters, for example, aren't the final arbiter of whether there's unacceptable distortion on a recording--your ears are.)
But putting aside the subjectivity of hearing, I'm curious about the effect of different codecs--the specific technology used to create a compressed digital sound file. Presumably, CNET Labs uses uncompressed WAV files to check the hardware. But I wonder if they've ever done tests--subjective or objective--of different types of compressed files against one another, like SoundExpert has done. I've long read that MP3 offers the lossiest compression, but is there a noticeable difference between AAC and Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Ogg at the same bitrate? And one step beyond that: does one player sound better with a particular codec than others?
Subjectively, I prefer WMA files over AAC files on my Zune. My iPods (a new Shuffle and fourth-generation 20GB unit) can't play WMA files, but when I convert those files to AAC using iTunes, they don't sound as good as the AAC files I rip from scratch, even though the converted files have a higher bitrate. MP3s don't sound as good as either AAC or fixed-bitrate WMA, but actually seem to sound better than variable-bitrate WMA. And MP3s seem to sound best on my fourth-generation iPod. Go figure.
There are plenty of options for connecting an iPod to a car stereo--increasingly, car makers themselves are offering full iPod control as an aftermarket add-on. But if you're like me and own multiple MP3 players, most of which won't work with the specialized iPod connectors, the solution's different: get an aftermarket stereo with a built-in auxiliary input or (better yet) a USB connection.
(Credit:
Apple)
Subaru must have thought its customers didn't care about audio. The 2005 and 2006 Outbacks and Forresters came with decent-sounding stock stereo systems, complete with 6 CD changer. But for some unfathomable reason (probably cost-cutting and lock-in, as this poster suggests), the company connected these factory systems to the climate control panel, meaning it's insanely difficult to swap them out for a new stereo. So difficult that your typical McStereo installation place probably won't do it for you.
After making this unwelcome discovery, I've spent the last year or so messing around with various FM transmitters. You connect these devices to your MP3 player, and they broadcast the signal over an "unused" FM wavelength so you can pick it up on your radio. Only one problem: I've never seen one work very well. If you live in an urban area with lots of radio stations and telephone lines, you'll get interference, fade-outs, and random bursts of static. Unless you're willing and able to hack your transmitter, you're pretty much stuck with a frustrating listening experience.
This weekend, I'm going back to the drawing board and trying what this blogger suggested: an FM modulator. Similar to an FM transmitter, these devices let you connect an auxiliary output from an MP3 player (or any other device) directly to the stereo's internal FM receiver. Because there's no over-the-air transmission, you can apparently avoid the interference problems. It's only FM-quality--but most my digital files are compressed anyway. It'll probably run me around $200 installed, which is a fine price to avoid terrestrial radio and the frustration of an FM transmitter.
UPDATE: Apparently, the 2007 Outbacks do have an aux-in option, not just an iPod connector option. Apologies for my prior error, but that still doesn't fix the problem for us '05 and '06 owners.
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