Opinions: Do we need >60Gig Music players?

[MSIC]

I have had lots of debates with friends and collegues on this subject, and now thought i'd ask you rabble: Do we need now or in the near future (ie not 100 years) a Portable Music Player (iPod, Zen etc etc) with greater capacity than 60 Gigabytes?

I say yes as I have a particularly large music collection and could fill 60 Gig with music left over, but my friends argue that a) i'm in the minority and b) alot of that is rubbish music anyway - you cant fill 60 Gig with good music you'd want to listen to.

I know that technology (perpendicular drives etc) will play a part in it becoming feasible, but at the moment i wonder how much of a niche market there is.

Thoughts and opinions anyone?

[Steve B]

standard users would never fill 60 gigs worth of music, as they encode at slightly inferior bitrates. fair enough, 192 ks is all they would need, but theres a niche who can tell the difference between 320 and 192. I encode all my music at 320, that way i can pump it up without any loss of tonal quality. There are other people out there who use Ogg and that other one that i cant remember the name of, and these files, if the rates are high enough take up a larger amount of space than your standard mp3.

[Lee H]

Yes we do and then need to support FLAC as well while they are at it

The beauty of these is you can drag and drop other files as well as music and have them as a portable storage device as well as a music player.

As for the 60 Gb for most users I think I've gone well past that with FLAC files alone

[Trippledence]

I'm starting to use FLAC and OGG high bitrate rips more, you can tell the difrence more than you think at first, my 40gb iRiver is easyily filled, 60GB players - I would need two

[Yohji]

I could easily fill a 60GB player with music I love.. And like Tripple said, OGG rips are better quality and take up more space.

[unreal]

I've continuously cleared out the music I call boring and i still manage to have around 17 gb of music that I really on my 20gb ipod. If I didn't have to delete I may reach 40, but for me, I don't need 60+ as of yet But introduce players like the video iPod, I may need 100+ (not portable media players but mp3 players with video functionality - i see them different)

[Howard]

I have about 50GB of music, so yes I'd say we will inevitably need them

[htid]

The thing is if you are encoding at really high bitrates, even if you can notice the difference on a good speaker setup, when you're listening via headphones surely you would need really good quality headphones to make use of the quality? The good headphones are generally bigger and people dont tend to wear big headphones when they are out and about. Im just guessing though, I dont know enough about the quality differences and headphones to say this is true for a fact, im just guessing.

Also, say you're encoding in FLAC at the highest bitrate (whatever it may be), what kind of file sizes do you get for an average 4minute song?

Cheers,
Chris.

[toolsong]

Also, say you're encoding in FLAC at the highest bitrate (whatever it may be), what kind of file sizes do you get for an average 4minute song?

FLAC is lossless compression and does not have a bit rate. The file size is about 60% of the original 44.1/16 wav file.

I have about 80GB of FLAC on my PC and rotate 25GB of it through my iAudio X5L, leaving room to download photos off my camera onto it when on holidays.

Regarding your second point, very good headphones can be tiny eg inner ear designs.

[pak000]

I would say yes, it is necessary to have larger than 60GB, I already have more than that in my CD collection. I use --aps in lame for mp3 encoding but would consider flac if i had a faster computer and more time to waste.

As for putting flac on a portable player, i can't really see much point, the quality gains of lossless compression would be lost through inferior playback on the device

[arthurleung]

Get a better headphone

[XA04]

I struggle to fill 1gb (I could easily if I tried to though) with good music that I don't want to keep skipping the tracks..

[pak000]

Get a better headphone

It was my understanding that the electronics inside are the problem (feel free to correct me)- I'm not saying that they are awful, but not up to scratch and the level needed to appreciate loseless music, really good headphones would be pointless if this is the case...garbage in garbage out. That being said, if the headphones are really bad, then some average ones would see an improvement

[toolsong]

As for putting flac on a portable player, i can't really see much point, the quality gains of lossless compression would be lost through inferior playback on the device

No inferior playback over here

I use my X5L as a line level source for a RSA SR-71 head amp and Grado HF-1 headphones and it isn't much worse than an E-mu 1212m soundcard into the amp & phones. I've even run my Naim amp from the X5L.

[Howard]

My Zen Xtra, although doing a very good job, isn't quite as good as a Squeezebox, through Sennheiser HD600s and a Creek OBH-21 headphone amp

[SilentDeath]

For portable mp3 players I would not use flac, simply becuase of battery life would go from 15 hours to 3 hours, the hdd would constantly be spinning as the datarate is so high. Infact many players would struggle to play flac datarates without being designed for it. Also theres the possibilty of the hdd overheating the li-ion battery. The first player capable of it was the karma, I belive..?

There is a differnce in quality, but its over rated. If i bought cd's I would rip them to flac, but then most cd's are not recorded live, and are edited, and so dont sound as good anyway.

I have about 15gb n my rio karma, but if i find i need more, I can swap the hdd for a much bigger one

No inferior playback over here

I use my X5L as a line level source for a RSA SR-71 head amp and Grado HF-1 headphones and it isn't much worse than an E-mu 1212m soundcard into the amp & phones. I've even run my Naim amp from the X5L.

Lies.
Every time you amplify a source, you add distortion.
"Line level" is acctually very near the loudest mp3 players are designed for, as they are usually used with in-ear headphones which require much less power (hence you need an amp for your headphones). Running it this high (I would say loud, but its not... yours simply need more power to be as loud) adds plenty of distortion. Line level on my rio karma, is 28-29 out of 30.

I doubt the X5L is partiacually amazing either, and whats with names like iaudio, ipod and aygo????????????????????????????????