Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Loaded with content from all five major labels, they’re offering songs in the WMA Lossless format (470-1100kbps) for $1.29 per track, or $15.29 per album. Before moving on with your purchases though, you should download their software and pay a $50 annual fee—which is waived with $250 worth of annual music purchases. The tracks they’re [...]
From: Hwang Chang-kyu, CEO of Samsung’s semiconductor division
To: All you Korean manufacturers
Subject: RE: No use complaining
It’s been a couple of weeks I’m reading your complaints in the press, that we’re helping Apple crush you by giving them our flash memory chips for their iPod nano for such low prices.
Look, business is business, there’s no need [...]
Indie band Harvey Danger is offering their third album “Little by Little…” as a free download. Their explanation for doing this is a reading worthy of your 2 minutes, and sure to boost your appreciation for these folks.
As Andy notes: why haven’t more indie artists done this?
You can get it via BitTorrent or directly from [...]
Like Samsung’s high-capacity flash chips that exist in the Nano, SanDisk hopes these will find their way into some microdrive-based portable devices. Capacities range from 256MB to 4GB, but the 4GB versions that’ll weigh a sleek 2 grams won’t come till March 2006, which means they’re more than six months behind from Samsung…
Anyway, SanDisk didn’t [...]
iTunes users who care for their music library and want 600×600 album covers, could find this iTunes Music Album Art form [via] handy. You just enter the iTunes album URL (right-click the album, choose “Copy iTunes Music Store URL”) in the form field.
For the rest of us who don’t practically live within, so I’m mainly [...]
Better iPod Management Through Journaling (Buzz uses playlists excessively—this screenshot is mind-bogling—and describes how he uses some of them to sync with his iPod mini; someday soon, I’ll try to post my own way of doing this)
Feinstein: Outlaw File-Sharing—or Something (there’s nothing funnier/scarier than a senator speaking about filesharing destroying the “intellectual property industries”, when [...]
We don’t usually devote full posts to PMPs here, but this one looks very interesting. PQI’s mPack P400 sports 40GB 2.5-inch hard drive and a 3.5-inch LCD that supports a maximum resolution of 800×576. That’s hi-def, and if it’s ture, it’s amazing. Add to that support for 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround sound, TV OUT and [...]
Update on WMA10 DRM support for iAudio X5 (Napster’s program has trouble uploading more than 100 tracks in a row to the device, that’s why the certification hasn’t come yet; the Napster guys are trying a new algorithm that apparently fixes things, so DRM10 support should be here soon)
WinMX Shuts Down After RIAA Threat (RIAA [...]
According to BusinessWeek:
How bad will it be for Apple’s rivals in the music-player business? A research report by WR Hambrecht says manufacturers of flash memory will be experiencing an uncomfortably tight supply environment this quarter and into the first quarter of 2006. Samsung and Toshiba both have their second- and third-tier customers on allocation—which means [...]
No Creative Zen Neeon for Europe (Creative says they want to focus on the Zen Micro and Zen Micro Photo, so you’ll only find this in Asia and in the US)
Samsung releases YP-T7F (a successor the mid-level flash-based YP-T7X; 1.2-inch color TFT to view your JPEG pics and MPEG-4 videos; audio support: MP3/WMA/OGG; FM tuner, [...]