2GB iRiver Flash Player Rumour

[ManchesterUnited4Life]

Just read this over at Gizmodo;

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/rumo...yer-024283.php

Sounds pretty awesome - it shouldn't be long (end of 2005 perhaps?) before we start getting 5-10GB flash players, hopefully ...

Personally, after having a HDD player, I could not currently go back to the limited capacities of Flash ...

EDIT: Have just visited a BabelFished version of the page and it initially appears as though there will be no OGG Support, and WMA Support is still undecided (what is iRiver doing ??? - apart from commercial suicide )

[NPswimdude500]

looks like i was ahead of my time....

Any chance of a 2-5 GB iriver hdd player ?

[1121]

Yeah, it won't be long to witness flash players with 5~10 gigabytes.
Big brother Samsung has already created a 8 gb flash memory so we never know...
but it'll be heck of a lot expensive than harddrives, that's for sure.

[1121]

OH, and iAudio's G3 (one of their newer flash players)
has a 2 GB capacity. I think most of you would know this through websites like dapreview.

[Haku]

Are they ever going to integrate the two technologies? I know HD based players have a small amount of memory for storing the audio being played so the harddive doesn't spin all the time, but what if they increased that 32mb (or whatever) up to 1gb or 2gb of non-volatile flash memory?
The benefits would be great, the player could pre-load a shedload of tunes into the flash memory so the harddrive wouldn't have to spin for a long time unless you specifcally went and chose a track not in memory (ie randomly picking tracks yourself instead of letting the unit randomise tracks or read from a playlist or sequentially playing track), if you turned if off it would still retain the songs because of the non-volatile memory and there'd be virtually no bootup time, the other benefit would be higher robustness because playing playlists/built-in random tracks it could tell you how long before it would automatically start the drive to access music and enable you to go jogging etc. without fear of damaging the drive.
1gb of 192kbps audio gives you over 11 hours of playback without having to access the harddrive - preload your day's music in one go.

[1121]

wow... that's a good idea Haku! that'd be really nice

[TCK]

I'd be for it. Only issue I see would be the price of the thing, paying for a 100GB (for argument sakes) small hard drive AND a 1GB flash chippy thing.

[Haku]

Yeah right now the price of a 100gb HD/1gb Flash unit would be horrendus, but in a few years time...

With that much storage and the ability to store tracks in non-volatile memory it would be advisable to program the unit with statistics so that the tracks you play most get priority in being stored in the flash memory to reduce the amount of harddrive access. One of the drawbacks would be filling 1gb of flash from the harddrive, it wouldn't be a quick operation.

[sanjay]

but haku, along with our new iRiver H1100 models, the flash memory in it will be akin to sandisks new ULTRA EXTREME L33T 5000X 1GB SD card...

[musicfreak_1011]

uh....what language are you guys speaking in?