Apple Announces New iPod shuffle | Hacker News Reader

Apple Announces New iPod shuffle

apple.com

23 pointsnickb41 comments

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 requests it.

Typical Apple - simple, clever solution to a seemingly complex problem.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, they could fit a crappy TTS engine on a chip, but Alex (what Apple is using) is 670MB. I suspect a 4GB Shuffle has significantly less than 670MB worth of voice clips in it.

http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/voices/ http://gannett-hscp.blogspot.com/2008/03/biggest-file-in-leo...

FYI, you need to sync from Leopard to get Alex on the shuffle, both Tiger and Windows use a lower quality voice (so says Daring Fireball).

yep, looks like the OP was right after all: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/11/ipod-shuffle-voi...

Alex takes up 18% of Leopard.

The voice from that link doesn't sound that much better than the text-to-speech engine that came with my 16-bit soundblaster sound card in 1992. It certainly didn't take up 670 Mb. Sure Alex is better, but it apparently takes orders of magnitude of complexity to get just a small improvement.

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

Yeah, I caught that too. I think it's safe to assume they mean "the first music player that talks to you as it's primary form of interaction".

So you have to use their earbuds? Hrm.

Where do you see that?

It's implied from the tour. I mean, if you don't use their headphone, you cannot control anything on it. I have their in-ear headphone and it sounds great so it's not a bad thing.

Except if you want to go jogging. I agree that their headphones are great, but they don't attach securely enough for a good workout.

Yeah. Especially when you consider that the shuffle is (was) probably the ipod best suited for workouts. Oh well, good thing my old shuffle works fine. :)

You're correct, the iPod earphones (all of them) aren't suited well for working out. Weight lifting? Yeah, you can get away with them there, as long as you don't mind the low-quality sound. Any in-ear type will stay put better, however.

Running or cycling? Not a chance. iPod headphones will fall out of your ears within the first 100 feet. I've never seen anyone running with iPod headphones; just walkers or commuters on the subway.

Exercise headphones are "disposable" too. I'll go through a pair every 4-6 months because the speakers eventually get clogged up with junk from sweat and eventually get muffled out. Speaker wire connections get frayed too since they're moving around a lot.

Sony MDR-J11G headphones work well for me running and cycling. They're $10-15 each depending if you buy them on eBay or in a store.

Apple wants $29 for replacement headphones. Even if they were designed for sports as well as the MDR-J11G's, they'd still be a rip off at that price.

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.

I would guess that 80% of shuffle owners (maybe even all iPod owners) use the default earbuds.

For the ones that don't, I'd also wager that the aftermarket community will offer an in-line adapter that adds the buttons capability to any set of standard headphones/earphones.

This was the string of logic I followed. The people who will be most upset by the need for a converter are the ones who are hardcore fans. Like for my workouts I use behind the head headphones rather than earbuds. But the majority of users stick with the standard earbuds.

No, there are earbuds from other companies compatible with Apple's remote stuff. There's also an extension cord with which you can make any earbuds remote-compatible (though you'll have to deal with the cable mess).

See this review for some examples: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/02/13/replacement-ipho...

So you have to buy specially-compatible earbuds or a remote extension cord? Hrm.

incredibly popular shuffle feature

I agree that the shuffle iPod itself is very popular but do many people actually use the shuffle feature?

I like the shuffle because it's small and light-weight - even my first generation one. Which has 512MB - my factor-of-ten improvement rule means it's approximately time to upgrade.

Yep, every day, for while I'm running.

Almost all the time I use my iPod (or iTunes), it is being used with shuffle…

This is pretty standard behaviour, from what I’ve seen. A lot of people use the shuffle feature.

Usability is a serious concern, because most navigation is done with one button, Click, Double-click, Triple-click. Click-and-hold. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3458 The one exception is stepping through playlists - with the volume controls. It's modal (modeful?), so you have to track of the state of the device to know the meaning of the controls.

This is terrible UI design, and very unlike Apple. A symptom of Steve's absence?

Apple Announces Incredible New iPod shuffle

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature

Pod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy to clip to almost anything

This all sounds pretty credible to me. Basically, now it can use playlists and it can use text-to-speech to tell you what song is playing.

If they could cram an accelerometer in there, then you could pick a song by tapping on it a la songtapper.com ...

having another active device is probably a large enough drain on the battery to reduce the play time significantly.

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

I wouldn't hold your breath.

I wouldn't hold your breath.

If you did, won't that be murder? :)

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.

Innovation at Apple never ends. Bravo!

Except... didn't the nano have text-to-speech? And I've been using this feature with rockbox for at least 2 years...

I think the comment was meant as sarcasm

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