San­Disk has rolled out a new music player that plays music off of microSD cards. The cards come loaded with music in the same way that a CD is. The player will also play cards that you load your­self so that you may make your own mix tapes.

It seems to me that this is one step back­ward. I remem­ber being asked years ago what phys­i­cal media would replace disks, and I replied “Solid state”. You see, with the grow­ing capac­ity and plum­met­ing price of mem­ory chips I thought that in the future, you would put a car­tridge in a box to make the music go. I was so wrong. While, yes, some sort of phys­i­cal media is needed to store what­ever music and video infor­ma­tion you want to play, it has become anti­quated as a way of dis­trib­ut­ing that infor­ma­tion. It’s all done with wires and radio-waves these days.

The future of per­sonal player?

Slot­mu­sic sounds like any other mp3 player with the excep­tion that instead of plug­ging in the player to your com­puter to load it up, you have to plug in a microSD card to your com­puter… and then plug the card into the player. Some­how I don’t think adding in an inter­me­di­ary step to the proc­cess is a fea­ture. Sure, the whole point of hav­ing these cards is that you can buy them pre­loaded with music, or swap out the 1GB worth of music for another GB when you need a change of playlists. But let’s be hon­est here, say you have an aver­age file size of 5MB per song, a 1GB player would then hold approx­i­mately 200 songs. At 3 min­utes a song that’s 10 hours of music that you could lis­ten to straight with­out ever repeat­ing. If the player had a 10 hour bat­tery life I would be impressed. The idea that I would need to switch over 1GB cards is silly. It doesn’t work with how peo­ple use their play­ers; which is to cram it full of songs they like, lis­ten to it a few hours a day then change it up every cou­ple of days. For the true music junkies, who have buds grafted into their ears, it’s worth it to shell out for a few extra GB to meet their needs.

Here’s another point. MicroSD cards are tiny. They are appro­pri­ately sized for los­ing. I don’t want to keep track of some­thing that is less than the size of a postage stamp.  Then there is the issue of price. These pre­load cards are going for around $15. I remem­ber when CD’s first got a toe­hold in the con­sumer mar­ket. They went for around $14, which was about 50% more than what one used to pay for tapes and records. It was said that the jacked price would come down to the $9 level once CD’s became more ubiq­ui­tous. I think you all know how that story ended. Given that album lengths are roughly 10 songs, you would be pay­ing $1.50 a song. Of course you’re pay­ing over the $1 a song model that iTunes has going on, that extra 50 cents per song is going towards pay­ing for the card (or lin­ing the pock­ets of the fat cats).

Don’t get me started on the envi­ro­men­tal impact. Instead of buy­ing one stor­age device that lasts the life­time of the player, you are poten­tially buy­ing addi­tional stor­age devices through­out the life­time of the player. So much wasted energy and mate­ri­als in pro­duc­tion, trans­porta­tion, packaging.

The only thing they have right is the price of the player.  At $20 one might think of pick­ing it up, but if you wait 3 months I’ll bet you can pick up a typ­i­cal 1GB player for that price any­way. Save your money, slot­Mu­sic is going nowhere.

Tags: Filesharing, MP3, Music Technology, Record Companies

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 7:09 am and is filed under Of Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.