Area Man Invents Small Player for Compressed Music Files
Martin Brennan isn’t really an “area man”: his company is based in the UK, and besides, I’m not aware that there’s a large community of “silicon-chip designers” here in the Inland Empire. I’ve just always liked the sound of that phrase. I’m sorry to have lured you in under false pretenses. (But then, false pretenses are what fake chinese rubber plant is all about.)
I’m neither a techie nor an audiophile, but I did initially wonder whether the full-page ad in the January 9, 2011 New York Times Magazine was a joke of some kind. “How many CDs do you own but never play?”, the headline reads. “Lots” was my unvoiced answer; so much music, so little time, as I’ve complained in other posts. Indeed, the ad’s pitch preys on American’s cultural anxieties: it echoes, unconsciously I assume, ads (like those for Books on Tape) that berate us for our cultural illiteracy. I bought the consensus album of the year for 2010, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the day it was released: November 22. I somehow haven’t managed to listen to it yet, almost two months later—though I have, at least, uploaded it to my iTunes library.
But back to the Brennan JB7: talk about a solution without a problem. Here’s the articulation of the problem the JB7 is meant to solve:
What’s the point of owning hundreds of CDs worth thousands of dollars if you never listen to them? The problem with CDs is that it’s quicker to make a cup of coffee than dip into a CD. Try timing how long it takes to pick a CD, load it in the CD player, plan a snippet from a track or two, eject it and put it back where it came from. Then there is the problem of finding music. The print on a CD spine is tiny. . . . CDs are a great way to listen to music but they are also inconvenient, inaccessible and a bit of a chore.
I don’t want to dwell on this text, but one might. To wit: Am I really living in a time when playing a CD is thought to be a huge time suck? What kind of coffee—apart from instant—is quicker to make than a CD is to play? And that last sentence—am I to understand that “inconvenient” and “a bit of a chore” are two separate problems?
The great fallacy of this ad though, it seems to me, isn’t in its articulation of the problem, flawed though that is: it’s in the solution. Because it’s already been solved, Martin. I’m sure you have it over there in the UK: it’s called (rather clumsily) an iPod? It’s the size of a pack of playing cards, has up to 160GB of storage space, and can hold up to 40,000 songs—not much shy of the 5,000 albums you claim for the JB7. It costs $249; the JB7, if I’m reading you right, “starts at” $539? And that’s for the identical, 160GB hard drive?
My iPod, Martin, fits easily in my shirt pocket and is battery powered, and so can accompany me on a walk to work, on errands, while exercising; it weighs 5 oz. It’s screen shows me the artist’s name, track title, album title, and a thumbnail of the album cover. Your JB7, Martin: you call it “small enough to pick up with one hand yet big enough for a lifetime of music,” but at 3 lbs. 8 oz.—or a quarter-stone, as you say in England—surely it’s going to be a bit clumsy to carry around? At least I have a hard time imaging strapping it to my arm while jogging. And then, there’s the question of extension cords.
No lesser light that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” But build a bigger, heavier, more expensive iPod and—yeah, I’m not optimistic, Martin.
You should listen to the new Kanye! I’d love to hear your response.
I am recovering from the flu and want to use this as an excuse for thinking that your iPod is named Martin. It made perfect sense until I read that the JB7 is also named Martin.
Perhaps the JB7 is for those who wish to work on their upper body strength and the iPod just doesn’t cut it.
Might want to stay away from FCRP a bit longer, until you’re really strong again? Not for the faint of heart. (Seriously, though: glad to hear you’re on the mend. Though I’ve loved the gallows-cum-hospital-bed humor of your recent FP updates!)
Thank you! I sneeze to please.
I like that it has seven playlist slots–so advanced! Never have there been more available playlists on an mp3 player.
That’s not the half of it: rumor has it the volume goes up to 11.