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Rockbox mail archiveSubject: Re: New 30gb mp3 jukebox by polaroid.Re: New 30gb mp3 jukebox by polaroid.
From: Neon John <johngd_at_bellsouth.net>
Date: Sat, 03 Jul 2004 00:41:47 -0400 Marcus, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just an enthusiast that has been taken in by the DI hype and not a shill for them. I got taken in last year by their "real soon now" promises of doing what they said they'd do - release the sources - and bought a Gen I unit to evaluate as a potential RockBox host. This was maybe the worst piece of consumer electronics sh*t I've ever laid my hands on. And that's saying something. You don't actually have yours yet so let me describe things. I could not imagine a worse user interface. It is a rigidly structured database architecture that forces the user into doing things one way and one way only. That way MIGHT be OK if all one wants to do is linearly listen to albums. God help you if you want to build useful playlists, listen to audio books or any of the other stuff we take for granted with RockBox. One of the potentially best features, the built-in FM transmitter is useless in practice. The reason is that they turn off the carrier whenever something isn't actually playing. Press pause or stop and you get an ear blast of interstation hiss. Or more likely, several adjacent stations blaring at once. The deviation is low so one must crank up the volume on the FM receiver. That means the hiss literally blasts your ears and the stereo system. The thing they seem to advertise the most, HiSi is, for the most part worthless. Maybe if I lived in a closet and only listened to Top 40 music I might find it useful. I don't and don't. I really don't know how well it works because it never actually worked for me. I know the names and groups of the familiar music I listen to. The stuff I don't know is likely to be odd or obscure. I fired it off against some of the more eclectic stuff the local NPR/college station plays and got zero hits. The reason is obvious - for the function to work, someone must encode the songs and put them in the database. The only thing worse than the user interface is the desktop software. You know it's going to be a mess when it insists on installing that virus transport facility and spyware crap called microsoft .net. Once installed, it takes over your computer and brings it to its knees. My 2 gig laptop was barely useable whenever the software was running. That's just the start of the nightmare. Unlike the Archos where you simply copy audio files over and play them, the Neuros forces you to first install the music in the desktop database. For the approx 18 GB of material that duplicated what was on my FMR, it took just about 24 hours of crunching and gobs of disc space. It took about that long again to copy the stuff over to the Neuros. Only part of the problem was the USB 1.1 interface. But my Studio 10 could be loaded in just a few hours using the same interface. Neuros says that music files can be copied directly to the hard drive. That is true but they can't be played there until they're crunched into the database. That's a case of telling the technical truth while telling an actual lie. The desktop software is SO bad that someone wrote a Java replacement. Unlike most piggy software written in Java, this thing is a speed demon compared to the OEM stuff. The big problem with this software was (I haven't updated in several months so it may have changed) that it lost all playlists anytime a change was made to a database. Initially I loaded the thing up with background music and used it in my restaurant. It was so difficult to change the programming that I finally, mercifully laid it to rest, removed the hard drive and put it in my Studio 10, making it a Studio 20. I haven't yet figured out what to do with the only other useful thing inside the case, the LiIon battery. Maybe hook it to a Jesus cord and see if I can make it explode.... I'll leave open the door just a crack for there to be wholesale changes in the Vers II unit but if I was a betting man I'd bet against it. Another thing I should mention about the player is that it is huge. Significantly larger than the Archos. If the photos on the web site are accurate, they've only changed the color of the physical package and not the size. It completely fills a pocket of my work pants, the same pocket that my JBR gets lost in. See the pictures below for a side-by-side. One last thing. I bought the combo FLASH and HD player package. The web site leaves the impression that one can load up the FLASH player from the HD. I asked about this before I bought but did not notice that they neglected to answer that question. I now know why. this is not possible. The two players are completely independent. The battery and the storage is in the cradle. The player has no memory, at least none that is user-accessable. The cradle is useless without the player being inserted. I have put up some pictures of the units. Notice the very fragile and unsupported pins of the connector between the player and the saddles. I'd be afraid to mate and un-made these connectors very often, as great care is required to avoid bending the pins. http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/o/johngd/files/Neuros/ The next issue is the company and their outright lying. One can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've called someone or something a liar in public. This is one of them. I found the company and the product by googling for "open source jukebox". That was a year ago. They were gaining the benefits of wrapping themselves in the moniker of "open source" without actually doing it. Back then NOTHING had been released. We all know what "open source" means. What they're doing is NOT open source. It is lying about open source. Still believing their lies, I wrote the company and asked where to find the sources. Kathryn, their public relations flack, wrote back with a series of excuses, then came to this list to repeat them. She was nice enough but she was regurgitating only what she was fed. It was reasonable for her to expect change a year ago. It is not now. Kathryn, you've had plenty of time to find a job with a reputable company so there is no excuse for you still fronting for this outfit. (She's on this list.) We chatted back and forth in private email a few times until I realized that I was wasting my time, that they had no plans to EVER release the actual firmware sources. I see on the forum that JoeBorn is emitting the about the same stream of excuses he was using last year. I predict that a year from now, if the company is still around, he and Kathryn will be emitting even more excuses and the sources STILL will not be open. Joe and kathryn, just in case you don't know what Open Source means, I'll describe the process. You zip up the entire firmware source code tree along with any supporting files and the license of your choice (you could do worse than to GPL it). You put that zip file on your web site and you announce the URL. You let us worry about development tools. We're sharp guys, we can figure things out. One other thing before we leave the company. Anyone contemplating buying one of their products should realize that the company has embraced so-called digital rights management (DRM) with open arms. All the proprietary formats that allow someone else control what you can do with content on your own player are supported. I recall some spam I got awhile back offering me an Audible-enabled player at a discount if I'd sign up with Audible. At first blush, supporting all formats might seem a good thing to do. It's not. The more these cancerous formats gain hardware support the more they're likely to succeed in displacing MP3 and other open formats. If you believe that it is your right to do anything you wish with something you buy then you CANNOT support DRM. I should point out that DRM is the polar opposite of open source. The DRMers would keep all details secret if they could. A company that supports DRM cannot also fully support open source. Period. Let's suppose this company listened to its corporate conscience and tomorrow released everything. The future for a RockBox port would still not be very bright. I learned a few things in my chats with Kathryn. The most important is that this is basically a software player. All the compute-intensive stuff done in hardware (MAS chip, etc) in the Archos is done in software in the Neuros' DSP. This includes MP3 encode and decode and even the synthesis of the FM modulation. Rockbox, in contrast, is basically a user interface and a data shuffler. A RockBox "port" would most likely involve a rewrite from scratch, using the feature set of the Archos Rockbox. I should mention parenthetically that wanting to keep secret how they synthesize the FM signal is one excuse given for not releasing the sources. That's fine. Just take down the claims of being an Open Source company and everyone can be happy. I'm not sure I can fully understand how something as basic as generating a frequency modulated baseband signal with a DSP can be proprietary.... I'm far from a DSP whiz but I know that C isn't the language of choice for such applications. Maybe GCC could be forced to work but it wouldn't be fun. Marcus, I'll do you a big favor if you like. If you'll pay the postage I'll give you my driveless Neuros. Scrounge up a drive somewhere and you'll have a working unit. I even have the optional leather belt holster! You can cancel your order and save your money. The slower speed of the USB1.1 interface won't matter much - you'll hate the thing so much you won't use it enough to matter. If you're interested, contact me off-line. John On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 19:29:15 -0700, Marcus Bryner <marcus_at_docbryner.com> wrote: >Rockbox is great, but Archos isn't making "Rockbox friendly" machines anymore, >and more power to you guys developing it if you make Rockbox work w/ Archos' >new models (which appears to be quite a lot of work). :) > >Digital innovations (Neuros) is the only company that is even interested in >open source firmware, which is slowly happening. Looks like BlueChip beat >me to adding this link, but if you go to the last 1/3 of the posts or so, you >will see that things are starting to happen (hopefully): > >http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3655 > >Looks like they had trouble getting an open source assembler and C compiler to >work for the processor chip the Neuros has. But is seems they are making >progress in the past week or so (with help of Neuros engineers and even the >president Joe Born on their forum). > >I liked Rockbox and it does a lot of things that the Neuros firmware doesn't >do yet. One of the big reasons I'm buying a Neuros is that I hope you will >be able to port Rockbox to it, or by them having open firmware, my wishlist >will eventually be developed--which won't happen with the other >manufacturers!!! > >Marcus > >**** BlueChip wrote: **** >CrowTRobo deserves much respect for years of input into the dev scene. >http://www.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3655 >is an interesting read - pointing out that the source is not so open as DI >would like to imply >:( > >**** On Friday 02 July 2004 03:14 pm, Eric Linenberg wrote: **** >> I don't mean to rip on the Neuros, and I think they make a very nice >> product, but where is this "open" firmware? They advertise this, yet >> I don't think it is a reality. >> >> -eric >_______________________________________________ >http://cool.haxx.se/mailman/listinfo/rockbox --- John De Armond johngdDONTYOUDARE_at_bellsouth.net http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/o/johngd/ Cleveland, Occupied TN _______________________________________________ http://cool.haxx.se/mailman/listinfo/rockboxReceived on 2004-07-03 Page template was last modified "Tue Sep 7 00:00:02 2021" The Rockbox Crew -- Privacy Policy |