NEWS: Microsoft wants to put it in your ears, bud.

GEEK: Microsoft wants to put it in your ears, bud.

Further proving that the corporation won't stop until they've invaded every aspect of your life from the office to the orifice, Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is planning to release their own little iPod killer this Christmas.

Before you all scoff in that haughty, bemused fashion at this apparent iPod rehash, M$ is at least making an attempt to set their device apart from Apple's popular tiny music box.

The X-pod (that's what I'm going to call it) is supposedly being overseen by X-Box founder J Allard and supervised by Robert J. Bach, chief X-Box officer at Microsoft and 8th level intellect. The project has also apparently gained the interest and support of media companies that are tired of Apple's market dominance.

Will the mighty iPod fall or can Apple pull their asses out of the fire by finding a way to make their shit even smaller? Tune in this Kwanzaa to find out!

i love my ipod ... but the idea of a mp3 player that connected to the internet on its own (and then presumably could wireless swap songs between my laptop and the player) would be sooooo sweet. i won't fewer and fewer wires in my life.

If it runs some sort of portable windows then I am going to punch someone in the face. Fortunately with the guy behind the X-borx in charge they will use something different.

Although I don't know why I care, I'm not going to get one anyway...

It can connect to the internet to do what? That seems like a useless feature to me. It would be cool if the devices could connect to each other and transfer songs, but somehow i think microsoft wont go for that.

Wow, you mean a company who is heavily in the computer market is going to further diversify into other related segments? How bizarre.

I'm still waiting for an .mp3 player that will allow you to call the bands directly and bitch them out for bad song writing.

I hate Macintosh.
.
.
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but I hate Microsoft even more

seriously, though; i wouldn't go selling you're iPod just yet. Microsoft has the habit of jumping into an already mature market base and failing miserably. They do have a few ingenious products now and then but what they're selling sounds more like a cell phone than an mp3 player. It'll probably flop the the XBox 360.

The engineering rule of thumb: "You know something has reached perfection not when you've run out of things to add, but when you've run out of things to take away." I actually like the pure mp3 players. i cen see watching movies.. but not really. I don't really care for watching videos anywhere if they're on a 3" screen. I can find something else to ammuse myself with.

50 bucks says it will be so frustrating to use you'll just through at the guy infront of you at the bus stop !

My cell phone connects to the intertnet and I don't use that function either. Microsoft wishes to dabble in every aspect that other companies have proven better in. Gates stepping down I'm glad to see hasn't changed the stupidity level at MS.

And this report comes a month before Apple holds their WWDC, the event where Steve Jobs of Apple shares with us miserable cretins what's next in the product lineup... like maybe a new iPod???

i thought it would be a lot easier, for microsoft, to buy creative and put it's money behind the zen. zen already get's better reviews than comparable ipods, they just don't seem to have any marketing/power behind the name.

And if it's anything like the original X-box (as they're being overseen by the same guy), it will also weigh 4000 pounds.

I had an iPod. It only sounded okay, and the battery life blew goats. I have a Creative player now, and I love it. Mircosoft does not impress me. When my Zen Touch dies, I will buy another Creative, pure and simple.

They'll probably only make it compatible with the WMA file format which is far less efficient than MP3s as far as file size goes. *Sigh*

*sigh* i hate this perspective people have, where they seem to think that Apple invented hard drive mp3 players, that the iPod is an original and hard to beat package, and that everyone else is just trying to imitate the iPod.
God it's annoying.
the first iPod hit the market at the end of 2001. Compaq had a hard drive mp3 player in 1999. Creative had one in 2000. Apple didn't invent the concept, nor did they in my opinion even make the best one. Apple yuppies just got caught up in it and created a massive marketting force, and suddenly everyone wanted one.
Personally, I've owned an iPod. and I've owned 4 or 5 other hard drive players as well. And iPod annoyed the hell out of me.
For one thing, they don't play Windows Media files at all (iPod/iTunes users who think they do and are going to pipe up and fight me on this: don't bother, you're really ignorant), let alone WMA Janus DRM 10 protected content, which is what all of the decent flat-rate subscription services use and what I really think would be the way of the future if Joe User would stop thinking his shitty iPod is so cool.
Also, iPod screens have always been two steps behind what other players can do. That having been said, I would consider getting an iPod video for it's 60 GB storage capacity in the size it has, IF it would do WMA DRM as I am on a subscription service. But it never, ever will.
So I'm definitely interested in some sort of microsoft product if it'll give me wi-fi access to my all-you-can-download subscription.

Uhm, yeah no. Microsoft isn't interested in short-sightedly crippling its player if they want to compete with Apple. Of course they'll support WMA, but so does fucking everyone-who's-not-Apple. They'll also support MP3, absolutely guaranteed. It won't support Vorbis I'm sure, as Microsoft despises open source just on principle. It might or might not support AAC though; the format itself has nothing to do with Apple. But it probably wouldn't support the meta-data Apple proprietarily embeds in AAC via their specific wrapper, so music ripped with iTunes probably wouldn't display tags properly. And it obviously won't support FairPlay, but that's not really a relevant concern anyways, as FairPlay can be circumvented by anyone who would go through the bizarre effort to use iTunes with a non-iPod.
iTunes is a piece of poop by the way. (Windows Media Player is worse though, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it)
Anyways, I don't know where you're getting the "fact" that WMA is far less efficient than MP3. "File size" is determined by bitrate, and those two formats share similar available bitrate settings; the debate is which one sounds better or worse than the other at the same bitrate. and the jury is definitely still out on that one. We can be certain that AAC sounds better than both of them, and we can also be certain that Vorbis sounds better than all three. But MP3 and WMA are roughly equivalent.
You can't perform any kind of spectral comparison, as the very nature of psychoacoustic formats means they're screwing with the spectrum in ways you're not supposed to be able to hear. The only way to compare them is to do a blind listening test, and everyone has their own results for that test. Honestly, as an audio professional, I can tell you that under portable music listening conditions, at 192 kbps, or even 160 kbps in normal cases, you're not going to notice any difference whatsoever with either format. So I don't know why you're spouting this propaganda. Thanks though.

Granted, my Sprint/Audiovox PPC 6700 /w Windows Media 5 Edition plays MP3s, so another Microsoft player might do the same.

Can you explain why the file size for WMA file seems much larger than that of an MP3 file of the same music at the same bitrate? File size makes a big difference. It determines how many songs you can fit on your media.

It's simple:

mp3 is lossy.
.wma is not.

I'm assuming you don't know the difference between a lossy format and one that is lossless. A lossy format (such as .jpg) trashes data that it feels is unecessary and results in a smaller file size.

I still use .mp3s over the .wma format as my "untrained" ear cannot tell the difference. I doubt any of the experts at Microsoft can tell the difference without the use of testing instruments. Oddly enough, my hard drive can feel the difference.

Cheers.

If you'd stop wearing fur loincloths and learn to use artificial perspective and depth when painting ancestor spirits on your walls, it wouldn't be an issue.*







*If you DO actually make a habit of wearing fur loincloths, then please don't actually stop doing so. That's kinda sexay!

It's my experience that you can't afford to record MP3s at anything below 128 bit, while I'm no music purist, WMA seems equally fine at 64 bit. So my WMA files are half the size, getting me up to 6 albums on a dirt cheap 256Mb player.

iTunes doesn't connect to the Internet? News to me.

I tell you what, Microsoft. I might actually buy your device if it has at least 10-20 gigs of storage at around 100 dollars. It won't, I'm sure. But that's what it would take. (That is my pet peeve with both iPods and competing hard drive players. My mom owns an iPod, and it's very nice, but I could handle a competing player from Sony or whoever else if it had that kind of space for significantly less than iPods. But no, EVERYBLOODYONE goes for a 300 dollar price point that I just can't justify. Sure, they'll sell you a much smaller player for less, but I'm not interested in small at all, and even then it's usually vastly overpriced for the capacity.)

I would very much appreciate people ceasing to use any sort of Windows Media format. It's annoying and it doesn't work right on anything but Windows.

I really don't care whether my music player can support a subscription service as I'm not paying a monthly fee for music. Great, I can have unlimited downloads that I don't really own and will go away the moment I happen to need greater cash flow. Whoop-de-doo. Hell, I won't even shop with iTunes anymore because they don't have any sort of replacement policy, and I've had enough data-loss issues (and can't afford the kind of storage I'd need to be able to back up the massive drives I have) that that's not okay with me.

And, misguided...you are correct, Apple did not invent the basic format of the device that they call the iPod, but it *is* the product to beat, whether you like that or not. It's a combination of style, ease of use, and software integration that is very appealing to a lot of people. Obviously you are not one of those people, and that's fine, but it is nonetheless true that it's the market leader. Whether that suits you or not. Much as Windows, godawful though I believe it to be, is nonetheless dominating the OS market.

While I have extensive computer skills, computer music is not one of my strong points. I certainly know how to use it and make it work, but I simply have not studied the finer points of the technology--although I can tell you that DRM sucks from personal experience.

I guess that I would really have to put MP3 and WMA head-to-head myself as far as audio quality is concerned. It probably would help to know what to listen for to distinguish the quality sound. I'm no musician (although I played a little guitar and piano), so my ear is certainly not trained. I probably wouldn't be able to notice a difference, except for the file size.

Thanks for the explanation.

No problemo. I too am a musician (guitar, vocals and the occasional kazoo). I only read up on the format differences when I made the decision to go with "only hard drive-based music" libraries. Since I've only committed two 320 gig SATA2 drives for storage, hard drive space was a concern. I listened to both formats and at the bitrate for storage (my minimum is 192kbps), I could not tell any difference...but the file sizes for .wma were around 30-40% larger at the same bitrate.

All of my CDs have been ripped and are now in storage...OK, except for the Tool CD but I <heart> the artwork on it. Again, I'm sure some people may notice the difference, but through my 500-watt system, I cannot tell shit in audio quality. I'm not anti-Microsoft nor anti-Apple. Both have products that do quite well in their perspective markets. It all comes down to what you actually need (or want).

here's one tactic it looks like MS is going to employ to steal some current ipod users (plus, an extremely blurry preview of the hardware):

engadget article

Am I the only person left in the world who doesn't own an IPod?

a little more: from what i remember, what mp3's eliminate are frequencies that the human ear can't (or just shouldn't) be able to hear while another frequency is in use. i can't remember if it's highs or low (i'm sure it would be highs.) so it would eliminate a high frequency when a low one would just make in inaudible anyway.

No. I am not sufficiently in need of transportable music to spend 300 dollars on a portable music device of any sort, and I won't settle for less than a 20 gig MP3 player, so. I have neither iPod nor MP3 player nor portable CD player for that matter.