HP has expanded its line of digital music players to include Apple's IPod Mini. The company said that the miniature player will be available from its Web site beginning Sunday, with the Apple IPod Mini from HP hitting major retailers shortly thereafter. HP's prices will be the same--$200 for a 4GB model, and $250 for a 6GB model.
HP's enormous retail distribution channel and emphasis on appealing to Windows-centric users may give the IPod Mini further penetration into the mass market. HP and Apple first
announced a partnership more than a year ago, to bring IPods to HP's customers and make the devices available through HP's considerable retail distribution channels. HP also includes Apple's ITunes software pre-installed on all its PCs.
News source:
PCWorld.com
Here are some key features of "Exact Audio Copy":
Usage of the Windows 95 and Windows NT ASPI Interface, so both SCSI and ATAPI CD-ROM drives are supported
Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
Secure, fast and burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
Read error and complete loss of sync detection and correction in secure modes, as far as possible
Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and listen to these positions
Copy of ranges of music data, not only tracks
Automatic Speed reduction on errors and fallback afterwards
Normalization of extracted audio
Usage of the Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression e.g. to MP3 waves
Support for the BladeEnc DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for online MP3 compression
Support of external MP3, VQF, RA and AAC encoders for automatic compression after extraction
Batch compression and decompression of/to WAV files
Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
Detection of pre-track gaps
Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
Automatic creation of CUE sheets for CDRWin, including all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC
CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
Sample Offsets for drives with no accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
Option for synchronizing tracks for non-accurate stream drives
Filename editing with local and remote CDDB database and cdplayer.ini support and more features like ID3 tagging
Browse and edit local database
Certified Escient CDDB(TM) Compatible
Local CDDB support
Record and Loop Record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
Automatic rename of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
Catalog extraction function
Multisession (CD-Extra) support
CD-Text support
CD-Write support for some drives
ID3 Tag editor with drag and drop possibility from track listing and database
Glitch removal after extraction
Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and more)
Program is Cardware, so feel free to copy
I don't understand why would people buy an iPod from HP and not Apple for the same price.
Why would someone prefer having that ugly HP logo on the back of his iPod.
Evan he package looks a lot less proffesional, just like any other HP product comparing to Apple.
Some say HP has better support, do you have any examples? I've heard most of the times about Apple's support being great.
The iPod+HP often gets discounts unlike the Apple ones which are lucky to see a few dollar reduction. Look around most sites, you will find it hard to see a discount on a standard iPod from Apple (except store wide offers) but the HP ones are often on offer.
When will PC World realize it's iPod, not IPod. Every PC World article referring to iPods I've ever seen has incorrect capitalization on iPod.
Not that its a big deal, but I remember when my friend let me play with his new iPod mini (yeah, brand new, i played with it before he did! haaha), I had to download some 30-35 MBytes program to format the iPod before I could use it with Winamp and the iPod plugin. This kinda' pissed me off cause i had to download a big-@$$ program and install some bull**** I wouldn't need again on my computer.
EDIT: <note to self: inverting two words changes meanings>
Last edited by 67385 on 04 Jun 2005 - 21:26
My 4th gen does ~12 hours of playback still (nearly 12 months old) per charge, but the new Minis and Photo models have 17 hours battery, IIRC.
Alas, the voice of reason at last. Take note label junkies.
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