 | August 1, 2000 |
Stumbling over storage
Lack of cheap storage could send digital audio sprawling
The Achilles heel of portable digital music players remains the lack of a cheap removable storage medium. Even if you code songs at the lowest quality level, typical flash-memory cards hold only a few hours of music. And additional flash cards can cost more than $100.
The lead article in this section ("Card games") addresses the storage problem from the PDA perspective. As in that article, I advocate CompactFlash as the best choice for music applications. But the price remains too high, and music begs for a medium that might allow users to carry dozens of extra modules.
Two recent announcements claim to address the storage quandary in different ways. S3's Rio 600 player will use some type of modular device called a Backpack. The exact details remained sketchy at press time, but the device presumably allows the player to support any popular storage format.
Iomega, meanwhile, has for several years been promising cheap rotating media with its Clik! technology. Clik! disks sell for $10 and store 40 Mbytes—about a tenth the cost of flash memory on a per-megabyte basis. Now, Clik!-based portable audio players are finally ready to debut. Sensory Sciences promises to ship the $299 RaveMP 2300 this month, equipped with two Clik! disks. Iomega and several other partners plan to unleash Clik!-enabled players later this year.
—Maury Wright
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