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Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

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Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#21

Post by raganwald »

jonursenbach wrote: post #15
leonroy wrote: post #14

For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requ…

So they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!

You're in a chair flying in the sky and you're bitching about not getting Internet Access!

Sorry, that was a poor attempt at a witty put-down. Let's start again.

There is a fixed amount of space. true, 4GB seems like plenty, but so did 640K once upon a time. But the question here is whether 4GB of music and voice cues in a very small form factor is more valuable than 4GB of music only in the small form factor or 4GB of music in a larger form factor with a screen to display visual cues.

It's all a question of turning the design knobs to produce the overall highest value/best experience.

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#22

Post by 10ren »

leonroy wrote: post #14

For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requ…

Generating speech from text is not very difficult (parsing speech to text is the hard one). You string phonemes together with some sequence rules. e.g. ET's "phone home" on Speak & Spell did it with 80's consumer technology.

The branding of PC vs. Mac voice could be done independently of whether generation is done on the iPod or in iTunes.

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#23

Post by electromagnetic »

jonursenbach wrote: post #15
leonroy wrote: post #14

For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requ…

So they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!

For a $80 device, they're not going to put in an entire text->voice program capable of on-the-fly translations. It's insane to think they'll stick a 500mhz processor into an $80 device that's smaller than my thumb and it still have enough power to actually be usable.

This is an amazing solution to a complex problem, and with the quality of voice from these programs it's likely understandable at a very low bitrate. Using AAC my 2gb Sony Walkman held more songs than my wifes 4gb iPod nano, now on my iPod I often use AAC simply to increase the storage capacity.

I have little doubt you could get a fully understandable output at maybe a hundred kb in AAC.

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#25

Post by electromagnetic »

jws wrote: post #19
jonursenbach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!

2 seconds of song title information in a 200 second song. Irrelevant!

Convert it to AAC and you'll double the storage space of the Shuffle. Their estimates are based on MP3 and I know from experience that AAC can store a song with equal quality (well the same output quality from an earphone).

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#26

Post by modoc »

jonursenbach wrote: post #16

When is Apple going to stop embedding Quicktime movies and move to streaming Flash like the rest of the world has?

Hopefully never. The embedded Quicktime player never seems to gobble up CPU like Flash players often do. And I'll be that a high % of their traffic has Quicktime installed.

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#28

Post by blackguardx »

leonroy wrote: post #14

For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requ…

If they used a custom chip, I bet they could fit a text-to-speech engine in less chip space than the flash required to store the prerecorded audio of the track information.

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#29

Post by jcl »

jonknee wrote: post #11

The first music player that talks to you? You don't even have to look outside of Apple's own product line up to see that's not true, the Nano has it. http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/specs.html "Spoken menus allow listeners to hear many of the names of menus, song titles, and artists without viewing the screen."

Well, technically, any player running Rockbox (iPod, iRiver, Archos, Sansa, etc.) can do it -- and probably did it earlier, too.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceHowto

Re: Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

#30

Post by cake »

there wrote: post #5
tptacek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you see that?

they moved the play controls to the headphone cable and removed them from the ipod itself. if you don't use their crappy earbuds, you have no way of skipping songs or pausing.

That's what is bothering me with this stuff.

You just can't put your own bigger headphones and use the Shuffle properly. Suppose you break the earbuds, you must buy some new ones to Apple to skip the tracks !

It's not the quality I expect from Apple products, just a "buy and dispose" thing.

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