Creative Labs' most recent iPod killer attempt

Wow... i wonder how many more iPod look-alikes we are going to have

Well it doesnt look that bad, and it has a nice battery life, but still cant play AAC.

 

Very few do actually support AAC. I wonder if any major electronics company will? I was surprised when it said 10,000 songs, and assumed that it was using a 40 GB HD, but, alas, it's using a 20! How low would the WMA encoding have to be to get that many songs on the HD? What would the quality be like? Probably horrible.
–Chase

 

Wow. Could they rip off the iPod any more?

Oh well. Who can blame them for trying to cash in on a good thing?

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

 

they must have loaded that thing with a huge amount of RAM, probably 128, maybe even 256 MB. otherwise, it's one big battery in it...

impressive battery life - that alone will make many people consider this thing.

i, for one, can't wait to see what apple will do in response, because i ain't buying this thing anyway.

 

wow, i bet apple are scared!

 

just realized that... it would mean you would have to have all your music at a rate even LOWER than 64kbps to even store that much songs. who would even do that, hence CONVERTING all those files to that format? im not an audiophile or sound freak or anything, but hell, i want my music to sound good.

 

it's pretty much a standard that windows mp3 players usually quote capacities using 128 kbps MP3 or 64 kbps WMA. i have no idea how good WMA is, but i don't have any plans to use it in the near future.

 

I'm taking that as sarcasm (I do hope ).

Sometimes I think about when this music movement will end, but I really can't see it ending, but only getting better. But I can't imagine any format coming out on top, just because of the amount of loyalists and ignorant people out there. This is to say, people like me will always use AAC (or whatever is best that is supported by Apple), but most consumers are just being introduced into the music on a computer field. Whatever works for them, that's what they'll do.

Anyhow, the battery life is great if it can really get that if you're careful about usage. I wonder how they are getting that good of a battery life, whether the battery itself or RAM.
–Chase

 

my guess is that it's the RAM. using the same battery as the iPod, i imagine you'd get roughly twice the battery life by using 64 kbps WMA from 32 MB RAM. (you can load twice as many songs -> half as many HD spin-ups.) that will push the battery life to 16 hours already. if they put in 64 MB, then that can double the battery life again. (all in theory.)

i think it's equipped with 64 MB RAM and tested using very low kbps format like WMA.

 

I wonder if that is where the iPod is headed (pushing the memory amounts up for better battery life).
–Chase

 

It doesn't really matter how many songs you can hold on the RAM, but rather how big, in terms of MBs, the song is. I could listen to 30 minutes of songs on my iPods RAM and not have to spin up the HD; but with audio books or something that has at a very low bite rate I could listent to 1.5 hours.

It all depends on bite rate.

ahahha, what was the bite rate on those WMA songs? 6? 14?
WMA is already a horrible format to rip your songs at.
I can't stand people who rip their tunes at 64 kbps WMA, and call it music.

 

i know, that's why i said the same amount of RAM will hold twice as many WMA songs at 64 kbps than AAC at 128 kbps. (128 kbps/AAC part was implied from my post before the last one.)

all of these specs about capacity and battery life use standard song lengths at specific bitrate. for iPod, it's 128 kbps AAC with 4 minutes per song, i believe. yes, in the end, it's the how big the songs are in terms of MB that matters but since most people don't care how many GB or MB their HD/RAM is on their iPod, they establish a standard song spec so you can convert those GB/MB into number of songs.