I've always said that before too long you'd be able to carry around every piece of music ever written and every movie ever made on a piece of gear not much bigger than a thumb drive. I didn't really expect it before the big quantum computing breakthrough, however. I wonder how this new chip works.
So ka. So it is a quantum mechanics application, more or less. What we really need is the CPU's that run on quantum chips.
Sci-Tech has some of the laziest reporting out there. We basically get a press release for a product that isn't a decade within going to the market ("500,000 songs" is a rather meaningless storage capacity too).
True, they cold be two minute diddies or 20 minute techno tracks. One way is cool, the other not so much.
They say a 160GB iPod can "store 40,000 songs" which puts it close to the two minute mark on a 320kbps VBR MP3.
Original iPod (5GB) that advertised 1,000 songs used a 3 minute average song size at 128kbps. I think they have changed the estimation method though.
If only the shuffle worked right. I have a few coworkers with over 30k songs on their iPods, and another with 45k on a Zune, and NONE of them has a proper shuffle feature. They all get song repeats within the same hour on a regular basis. And yes, I realize it is possible to play the same song a few times in a row no matter how big the song set is. However, with it being a regularly occurring event, there is just something wrong with the randomized algorithms.
I have 6000 songs on my Creative Zen and I've left it on for hours without getting a repeat... I don't know if it is coincidence but sometimes I will get one song, and then the next song will be from somewhere else on that same album. Happens once in a while. I'm rockin' out to some Iron Maiden right now.
I dunno, that doesn't seem much better. You could bottom out your MP3 quality to that of AM radio and get around 12,000 hours worth of music on an existing iPod.
The system they use is not usually just random... they factor in stuff like song rating and genre vs what genre is playing, etc. Bottom line is, it doesn't work great for large song counts.
Ah. Maybe I don't have a problem because of the way I have my files tagged. I don't use the 'genre' field at all... just leave it blank for everything and I don't have any songs tagged with a 'song rating' Just title, artist, album, and track (where appropriate).
