Re: [OT] Geezer Flame (was Re: [Pan-users] Re: Advice on other lists)

[Rob]

On Monday 24 August 2009 04:50 am, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > First of all, I had to wait until one shipped with something other
> > than the tiny SSDs they put in the Asus EEEs and as, it seems, the
> > primary option on the initial AA1s.  I'd been waiting /years/ for a
> > proper MP3 player with > 100 gigs of space, that ran a user
> > replaceable firmware,
> What *possible* use could *anyone* have for a player with
> 100*10^9/(5*10^6) = 20,000 songs (1,667 albums, if each song is 5MB
> and each album has 12 songs) in the palm of their hand?  The
> organizational task itself is enormous.

Here's a geezer flame right back at you:  How lame and low-bitrate must 
someone's collection be to *not* want a large hard disk based jukebox?  
I've been collecting CDs for about 25 years.  I have over a thousand of 
them.  My 160GB Archos that I bought a year and a half ago is full.  My MP3 
collection itself is just over a hundred gigs, and that's only the CDs I've 
physically ripped from my own collection.  Throw in things like live shows 
downloaded off of the net and a small fraction of the music videos I have 
(about 300GB), and 160GB rapidly becomes insufficient.  

The Archos was my first hard disk MP3 player (I bought a 40GB one for my 
partner when he was still alive, and that was enough for him because his 
collection was only 200 CDs and a lot of vinyl he never got around to 
digitizing) because it would at least cover the bare minimum of what I 
wanted, but I want a bigger one now that I don't have to jailbreak to put 
my own code on.  Plus, its hardware buttons are starting to die from heavy 
use, and I think the hard disk is already going too.  I wouldn't recommend 
Archos as a brand, btw.  They used to offer serviceable products with 
standard charging/sync ports and clunky but simple interfaces.  Now the 
interfaces are even clunkier with touchscreen but they have proprietary and 
fragile charging and data cables that cost 15 bucks apiece and once the 
company goes under, your Archos device will eventually become a brick.  
What's more, they've locked down their Linux-based players so I can't fix 
the bugs in their crappy interface, and there aren't enough users to have 
either widely available accessories or a vibrant jailbreaking community 
like the iPod has, ironically making Apple's products the most "open" of 
the jukeboxes currently available through no intention of their own.  
(Apple had no 160GB product when I bought the Archos and I don't know how 
thoroughly it's been jailbroken now that it's been out a year, but you can 
install your own Linux on the older ones.)

Organization is no problem: my albums are stored in directories in the 
format "Artist Name - Album Name" and within those, the songs are "Track 
Number - Artist Name - Track Name.mp3".  I have a homegrown tagging and 
rating system, which came to be when I discovered that there was no music 
management system that would let me rip albums on 6 or 8 CD drives spread 
over 4 computers simultaneously, that lets me make arbitrary playlists in a 
few seconds by running a script.  I started working on a GUI but then I 
realized GUIs just slow me down and I'd never be able to simplify the 
installation of my system enough for someone who'd need a GUI anyway.

I'm an avid music listener and collector as well as a musician, am active 
on the Linux Audio Users list (but not the Linux Audio Developers list), 
and I want to be able to take my collection everywhere without lugging 8 or 
9 large trunks of CDs weighing as much as I do.  These devices are called 
"jukeboxes" for a reason.  I don't know when the last time is that you saw 
a real jukebox, but they have a lot more than 160GB of storage.  Some of 
them actually connect to the Internet and download songs from some central 
repository if you pay extra.  Once I hack that feature into my Palm Pre 
(and I've already done this using the homebrew terminal app, scp'ing mp3 
files from one of my machines into its memory), I won't need a hard disk 
anymore.  Then again, once I hack that feature into my phone, I'll still 
essentially be using a big hard disk player; it's just that the hard disk 
will be a network drive on my server at home.

Do I need that?  Probably not.  But I've wanted it all my life (literally; 
somewhere out there is an essay I wrote in 1983 describing how we'd someday 
have all our music on little memory chips and get new albums over the air), 
and now I can have it.

> 16 "albums" on a 1GB player is more than anyone needs 

Yeah, and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.  Right, Bill?

> at any one
> time, giving you more than enough room for an eclectic selection of
> music, easily (if you've organized your PC's HDD well, and have some
> good scripts) replacing the music any time you're home.

16 albums isn't even a day's worth of listening when I'm on vacation.  I 
have about 10 albums worth of songs on my 8GB phone, but that's a single 
playlist covering only one genre.  One gig isn't even enough for my 14-
year-old niece and her friends, who listen to a song for a couple weeks and 
then forget they ever heard of it.  About the only use such a player would 
have for me would be as a disposable unit I brought to a party not caring 
if someone stole it, or as a podcast catcher if I still had time to listen 
to podcasts.

Your view of how people use digital music isn't reflective of age, just a 
bit parochial and short-sighted.

Rob