HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

How-to: adding album art to the Zen Vision:M retrospectively: using Zen Media Explorer and setting the view to “Album”.

As expected, the author’s rights law was approved 296-193 by the National Assembly, France’s lower house. It now remains to be debated and voted by the Senate in May. BusinessWeek ran an interesting article regarding the France vs. Apple saga two days ago.

Apple wasn’t excited with the news, as evidenced by their statements:

Apple Computer Inc. [...]

Hey-hey, Sony’s own version of the Hi-Fi: well not really, but they do look alike—other than that, we’re looking at a glorified speaker+FM tuner combo. “The Radio” features an FM/AM digital tuner, a headphone jack and comes with a cable to connect your portable music device. The black-textured cabinet gives home to a monaural base [...]

Bye-bye scrollwheel, hello quad-directional joystick—Creative decided to change things a bit in their MuVo line. Question though: how is a leftie supposed to use this?

Now, to more changes: the 96×36-pixel screen is now a PLED (similar to the more expensive OLED in terms of performance but worse when it comes to battery life). The device [...]

CNET says DRM drains battery, but wait a sec…: they’ve performed some tests claiming that DRM’ed files consume more battery than unlocked ones. The Zen Vision:M lasts for 16 hours with unlocked MP3s, 12 hours with locked WMA files. The iPod sees a similar (but smaller, at only 8%) drop when switching from unlocked MP3s [...]

Streaming media charts, based on unique users: iTunes to pass RealPlayer by mid-2006 with just under 30M users, while still being second to Microsoft’s Windows Media Player with 80M users. Also:

RealPlayer’s userbase has remained steady over the last three year with 28M unique users.
Thanks to the built-in podcasting support “iTunes users tune in for an [...]

We’ve got a thing for modestly-priced Hi-Fi gear, so we were in for a treat when we took notice of Outlaw Audio’s RR2150 stereo receiver over at SonicFlare. This is a two-channel 100W receiver that sounds good, looks good and has a multitude of features: USB and phono inputs, an FM/AM tuner and a subwoofer [...]

Free music download—EP#2 from Kleptones’ upcoming album now available: and it’s for a limited time (they mean it—EP#1 went offline before I got to tell you), so hurry up. In the unlikely case you don’t know who the Kleptones are, you owe it to yourself to grab the “Night at the Hip-Hopera” release. [via]

While in the US people who download music illegally are prosecuted in droves, in France they’re taking a more sensible and serious look at things. The author’s rights law, which is to be voted by the National Assembly today, basically says two things:

if you’re caught downloading copyrighted music illegaly you’re paying a harmless 38€ fine—if [...]

Samsung’s YP-F2: spotted at CeBIT, this microscopic, sleek-looking MP3 player (that also does Ogg Vorbis!) weighs in at just 21 grams with up to 2 gigs of flash memory and 12 hours of playback. According to Gizmodo, it’s expected in Europe next month for $105/140/227 for the 512MB/1GB/2GB versions respectively. A model with radio tuner [...]