another million dollar idea

Last September, my brother John sent me a birthday present. He didn't know it, but he sent me an MP3 player that I had invented years earlier (obviously unbeknownst to the creators of the above device). I called him right away and told him the story:

MP3 players are great, but having to use one of those stupid cassette adapters in the car is really lame. What they need to do is take all of that tiny mp3 technology and put it into something the exact size and shape of a cassette. One that you could insert directly into your car's cassette deck. No cords, no adapters, no nothing. Press "play" and you're good to go.

So imagine my surprise when I opened up the Digisette AR-100. AWESOME! It's almost like God heard my little wish and put in an order for the little technology elves to make me my mp3 player.

Just one catch, though (aside from my missing patent). God forgot that I'm a mac user.

No mac drivers anywhere. I searched all over. Designed for those unfortunate souls trapped in a Windows world. So I sighed a great big sigh, and put the AR-100 back in its box and buried it somewhere, hoping to find some kind of hack later on with which I could rig it up to work with my mac.

This morning I came across the box in my closet and thought I would look for drivers one more time. And I found one! The company apparently made them as an afterthought. And they load right into iTunes, as well. I plugged the battery into its charger and started reading the manual.

Functionally, it works beautifully. I plug it into my Powerbook with a USB cord, then open iTunes. Underneath my main library on the left, I see a new drive. To add songs to it, I just drag and drop. It copies the song, then tells me how much space I have left.

Which brings me to one of the drawbacks. It comes with 32mb of onboard memory. Now, that's pretty good for when I was a kid and had less than one megabyte of memory on my little PCjr. And that's even pretty good for a palm pilot. I think mine has 8mb, and I do fine. But music takes up a lot of space, so 32mb means about 30 minutes of music. About five average songs. (To put this in perspective, the Apple ipod mini holds about a thousand songs, and the big 40gb ipod holds more songs than I would probably listen to in my life.)

But I could use more than 30 minutes. Luckily, it has a slot for a multimedia card, which means that I could buy more memory cards (just like a digital camera) and fit many more songs on there.

So I tried it with the headphones first. Fantastic! Great digital sound quality. Nice and loud. The controls on the device are a little hard to get at, but they work fine. It's very small and very light and it will never skip. Just like carrying around a tiny little walkman. Cool.

Then I tried it in the car. Sound quality was not nearly as good as it was through the headphones, but if I turned on Dolby Noise Reduction, it was bearable. Skipping tracks is accomplished by pressing fast-forward on the tape deck in my car once per track. Nice. And when you eject the cassette and turn it off, it "bookmarks" the spot for you, so it starts in exactly the same spot next time.

I'm really excited about using this. I've been craving a better way to listen to my music in the car. I used to burn songs to CDs, but my CD-burner doesn't work with iTunes anymore, so I've been listening to the same songs over and over and over and over and over. This isn't quite an ipod, but it will do nicely for the time being . . .

Posted: Sat - April 3, 2004 at 09:15 PM

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another million dollar idea

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