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By Eliot Van Buskirk
For more than a year now, Apple's iPod has been our favorite portable MP3 player. It's more expensive than the competition, but well-designed products usually are. Even more astounding than the iPod's popularity in this country is the fact that the device still enjoys a 42 percent market share in Japan a year after its introduction. What's so odd about this? Well, as anyone who has been to Tokyo can tell you, the Japanese marketplace is usually about six months to a year ahead of its American counterpart. From video cell phones to e-mail-retrieving robots, the Far East gets the new stuff while it's just a glimmer in a U.S. importer's eye. So if the Japanese are still buying more iPods than any other MP3 player, then maybe Apple has lapped next year's competition as well.
Senior editor, CNET Reviews (2/12/03) This is a nice theory, but from what we saw at CES last month, it's simply not true. Apple is facing loads of competition from multiple sources, thanks in part to the availability of a new generation of Toshiba 1.8-inch hard drives, which cost less per megabyte than the Hitachi drives used in the first round of iPods. Here are a few of the products that will probably give Apple's player a run for its money. eDigital Odyssey 1000 The hard drive-based players that we've seen from eDigital--the Treo 10 and the Treo 15--seemed like the iPod's clumsy, awkward cousins, due to their large sizes and clunky interfaces. But the Odyssey 1000, as its model number suggests, is about 100 times better than eDigital's previous offerings. While the Odyssey's design clearly borrows from a certain all-white MP3 player from Cupertino, the 1000 has a few tricks up its sleeve that might cost Steve Jobs some sleep: Samsung YEPP 900 Samsung's YEPP line has been consistently decent, so when the company announced a hard drive-based player, we had a feeling that its offering would be something of a zinger. Sure enough, the YEPP 900 brings the goods on many fronts, with a wide range of recording- and FM-related features: Digital Innovations Neuros We've written extensively about this newcomer and will post a review soon. Besides holding 20GB of MP3 music, the Neuros takes FM-radio compatibility as far as possible; in fact, I can't think of any FM-related feature that it doesn't have. I haven't yet heard Samsung's YEPP 900 broadcast through a stereo system, but I've heard the Neuros do so with aplomb. Here are the player's main features--I think that the song-identification option is pretty mind-blowing: Deltron Cinema Disk We love the Archos Jukebox Multimedia 20, which lets you watch videos portably and listen to audio. The Deltron Cinema Disk takes a different approach, functioning as a dedicated video display and storage device that can be used only with a television. A remote control and an S-Video connection sweeten the deal. The Cinema Disk also has some pretty impressive digital-photo capabilities. If you regularly download movies from the Internet or need to provide portable video for professional reasons, you'll be all over this player. The Cinema Disk is not coming to a theater near you--it is a theater near you. Here are a few key reasons why movie fans might choose this gadget: Apple iPod (20GB, 30GB, 40GB): Faster file transfers and larger buffer (for better battery life) Ironically, the biggest iPod killer of them all could be Apple's next-generation models. Apple rumor sites have been abuzz with talk of new iPods shipping within the next month or so, containing Toshiba's new 1.8-inch drives in 20GB, 30GB, and 40GB flavors. Evidently, these drives will help prolong battery life while increasing file-transfer speeds. Rumor also has it that the new breed of iPods will look the same as the old models but will perform better. Here's why: New wish-list item A few months ago, I posted a column listing the features that my dream MP3 player would have, and you responded with your own ideas. The above products include some of my wish-list items, but while writing this article, I thought of one more. Since so many players have an external microphone for voice recording, how about building a noise-cancellation system into the device? If the microphone sampled the outside noise--such as sounds from a subway, a bus, a plane, or other consistent sources--the device's processor could attenuate those frequencies in the audio signal the same way that noise-canceling headphones do.  MP3 Nugget: Create a text list of your MP3s
If you're like me, you store every song that you've ever ripped--from legally purchased CDs of course--in one folder, which is in turn filled with subfolders containing specific songs from albums or artists. For all sorts of reasons, you might desire a list of these files, whether to post on your Web page, brag about in an e-mail, or print out for reference. I found the perfect utility for this, and it's called PrintFolders. Like all other MP3 Nugget software, it's 100 percent free to use. Point the app at a folder, and it creates a text file listing every folder and filename. ID3 tag support would help, but since most people include artist and song information in the filename, the program's approach works well enough. PrintFolders is almost impossibly fast: it generated a list of 3,077 MP3s in about four seconds on my 750MHz machine, which has 128MB of RAM.
 Download PrintFolders now
Senior Editor Eliot Van Buskirk covers portable audio and music-related issues for CNET Reviews. Have a question for him? Let him know!
  CNET Video: MP3 decision makerYou may have already seen this clip promoted elsewhere on our site, but I got together with CNET Radio host Brian Cooley for a discussion of the various types of MP3 players, as well as a look forward at upcoming devices. Watch the video Linux-running iPodIt's good news for fans of open architecture that someone managed to run parts of Linux on an iPod. CNET News.com's article  Spurious patent idiocyIf I told you that I'd patented air, would you stop breathing? No, of course not. Acacia Media Technology's claim that all Webcasters must render unto Caesar is equally ludicrous, but the company is part of a growing number of tech firms trying to enforce preposterous patents, such as the HTML frame. (SBC, we're talking to you.) CNET News.com's story
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