Tokyo-based gadget maker OTAS is selling sunglasses [JP] that feature, for some reason, a built-in video camera and MP3 player. The so-called aigo glasses come with a 1.3 megapixel camera, a music player that supports MP3 and WMA files, 4 GB of internal memory, and a USB 2.0 port.

OTAS says the internal memory is enough to store up to 10,000 songs. You can shoot pictures (in JPEG format) in 1,280×1,024 and videos (in AVI format) in 640×480 resolution and at 12fps. The sunglasses weigh 52 grams and support Windows XP/Vista/7.

You can get them over at import specialist Geek Stuff 4 U for $220.78 plus shipping.

MP3s and other “lossy” audio codecs work by getting rid of data that is considered unimportant. Basic audio theory: Higher frequency = smaller waveforms. Thus, higher pitches have much more waves, meaning more data, than lower pitches. Human hearing doesn’t go higher than 20kHz, and even then, there aren’t any instruments that go anywhere in that range. So the creators of MPEG-1, Layer 3 encoding had a stroke of genius. If you have a range of frequencies that adds tons of data, but people can’t even hear it, why keep it?

iDFX Audio Enhancer is an add-on to iTunes that serves to, “re-encode your current MP3 and AAC files using a patent-pending method that repairs the damage and lost harmonics that occurred during the original encoding process”. Sounds like doublespeak to me for a $40 EQ and extrapolative guesswork. And the demo of iDFX sounds like just that. if you want good sounding audio, stop buying MP3s. And if you want smaller file sizes, start compressing with FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, or any number of lossless codecs.

Summer is slowly, slowly wasting away. Perhaps you should go to a beach, just to see what all the fuss is about. Me, I don’t care for the beach. There’s too much sand and too many people who don’t share my concern for what sand does to electronic devices. And the sun! Get over yourself, Sun! We get it, you’re bright. I’m trying to play games on my iPod touch — now tone it down a little bit, you’re washing out the screen. Anyway, here’s a cooler that holds 16 cans and features an AM/FM radio with MP3 input for $25.

Now the product description doesn’t say how many batteries you’ll need to power this thing, so let’s just assume it’s 24 D batteries. That way, when it turns out to be just 8 D batteries, you’ll feel relieved. The dimensions are 12-inches by 12-inches by 30-inches and apparently it’s an “accordian” style bag, meaning it can be collapsed down when it’s empty.

Accordian Expandable Music Cooler with AM/FM Radio/ MP3 [Overstock.com via dealspl.us]

Truth be told, I actually like the looks of this old-timey speaker very much. And it’d go perfectly with my newfangled “digital” music collection. It’s only $29, too, which may or may not mean that the actual sound quality is poor to quite poor.

The “USB Retro Wooden Speaker + MP3 Player Cube” plays music files off of USB drives as well as SD and MMC memory cards. It also features a 3.5mm input for use with standalone MP3 players. It’s powered via USB and, as a bonus, has an internal lithium ion rechargeable battery so you can use it in the middle of a very large room that, let’s say, only has computers in the corners and no USB cord is long enough to stretch to the corners so you have to rely on battery power. Something like that.

There’s a remote control, too, so you could walk to one of the faraway corners of the big room and still control the music.

USB Retro Wooden Speaker + MP3 Player Cube [USB Geek via Engadget]

If you’re like me, you grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System and then spent your formative years listening to Weezer. Now the best of both worlds is available in true chiptune form with music label Pterodactyl Squad’s Weezer — The 8-bit Album.

Picture a greatest hits Weezer album done by various artists where all the sounds are somehow filtered through the music from Castlevania. About half the songs are instrumentals and half of them contain vocals. Very fun stuff indeed.

Oh, and it’s available as a free download. Free is good. Check out the Daft Punk chiptune stuff, too, if you’re into them.

Weezer — The 8-bit Album [ptesquad.com via Offworld]

Behold a USB flash drive that also doubles as a simple MP3 player. You supply your own microSD card, actually, so maybe think of this as a $16 memory-less MP3 player that doubles as a USB flash drive.

Whatever you do, DON’T compare this to the iPod Shuffle as this device does not appear to support random playback. It does, however, come in three whimsical colors and it plays both MP3 and WMA files on cards up to 32GB in size. The built-in rechargeable battery is good for two hours of playback. Two hours! Actually, the product description says “2 hours or above” so it could be anywhere from two hours to 17 days — no more, no less.

USB MP3 Player + micro SD(HC) Card Reader [Brando]

I doubt there are still many music cassettes around but if you happen to own some and want to save your childhood memories on your computer for eternity, you might like the MV-CM001U. The retro-style device was announced by a Japan-based company called Novac today [JP].

Also dubbed “CASSETTE to DIGITAL”, the device comes with a USB port that allows you to connect it to your PC and save music played on a cassette as MP3/WMA/WAV files. MP3 and WMA files can be stored in 32/64/128/192/320kbps. The software to transform your music into digital files (CASSETTE MATE) only works with Windows XP or Vista though.

The MV-CM001U also features a built-in speaker (1.5W) and is sized at 165×135×143mm (weight: 1.4kg).

It will hit Japanese stores April 24 with a price tag of $80. Ask the Japan Trend Shop, Gizmine, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya if you live outside Japan and are interested in getting the device.

Since being a lousy parent seems to be all the rage these days, here’s another weapon for your doing-the-bare-minimum arsenal. It’s a baby pillow—see how it contours to your child’s neck—that has a built-in MP3 player and speaker. Presumably you’d put your baby on the pillow (well, it’s merely a render, so you won’t be doing any of this, as a matter of fact) while you sleep, watch TV, gamble or whatever it is that parents today do when their baby is asleep for a few minutes. Anyway, you lie the baby on the pillow, and out comes either A) a pre-recorded voice that whimpers “please stay asleep for 30 minutes so mommy and daddy can rest” or B) soothing music that you’ve downloaded from The Pirate Bay. (Best not to use that I-Doser stuff!)

Again, it’s just a render, so don’t get too excited. In fact, all you’d need to replicate the functionality of the pillow is one of those dime-a-dozen iPod speaker docks that you can put next to the baby’s crib, and a standard pillow. Bam, you can now accomplish the same thing this gadget accomplishes, but it real life!

I don’t know, it looks neat, right? And who doesn’t love babies, and pirated MP3s?

According to a Stanford music professor, each school year more and more incoming students prefer the sound of MP3 music files when played against the same versions on CDs. Some speculate that this is because younger generations have grown comfortable with the MP3 sizzle, just as certain generations find comfort in the pops and crackles of vinyl records.

I’d offer that it might be because MP3 files sound “normal” to kids, while CDs sound “different” (even though the audio quality is arguably much higher). So kids might just identify with a version of a song that sounds like the rest of the songs on their iPod sound.

I myself have been listening primarily to MP3s for about ten years now, although I grew up on CDs. I found an old Metallica CD a few months ago and listened to it with noise-canceling headphones on and I remember thinking, “Holy crap, I forgot how good CDs sound.” Then I promptly returned to my collection of MP3s. The CD sounded great, but I’m not going to start toting a Discman around or only download lossless audio files from now on.

And I’m guessing that for generations who have never used CDs in the first place, the 128- to 256-kbit/s files they’ve been downloading from everywhere sound most natural to them.

[via CDFreaks]

You’d think that the music industry would be grateful for Apple, which, with the launch of the iTunes Store in 2003, pretty much saved its keister. Not so, according to the old gray lady! In the negotiations leading up to tiered pricing and the removal of DRM on iTunes, Steve Jobs and Sony’s music chairman, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, got into a little bit of an argument over the phone, which the paper described as “tense.” (Knowing the New York Times, “tense” probably means some pretty salty language, like in a Tarentino film.) It seems the Sony man wasn’t satisfied with the timing of the new pricing structure, and made his opinion known to Jobs on Christmas Eve. Jobs, as is his wont, had none of it, and thoroughly laid into Mr. Sony.

Needless to say, Jobs got his way, and Sony’s DRM-free music launched with the rest of the major labels’.

Now, why did Apple let the companies get away with their tiered pricing scheme? One word: iPhone. Apple, rightly, saw cellphones as the future for music distribution, and wanted to ensure that iTunes+iPhone had a good start. (You’ll also note Nokia’s Comes With Music.) Get enough people using their iPhone to download off iTunes, of which Apple gets approximately 20 cents per 99-cent song, and you’re golden. Then, for better or worse, the music labels have to deal with Apple everywhere they turn.

(That the music industry desperately wants something like Amazon MP3 to take off shouldn’t surprise anyone.)

It’s like, iTunes is pretty much up there with Q-Tip, Kleenex and Xerox as being synonymous with its product. Digital music = iTunes.

A Kiwi bought an MP3 player in Oklahoma. No, that’s not a setup to a bad joke, but the chilling, real life ordeal that currently is the long national nightmare of New Zealand.

The problem here is that the MP3 player contains military personnel data, and revealing that information—personal phone numbers, the identities of pregnant female soldiers, social security numbers, mission briefings, etc.—violates “federal law.” (How does that work? A man breaks an American law while in New Zealand.) No reason to worry, though, as the guy has no plans to, I don’t know, leak the information via his Twitter account. (He’ll hand the files over to American officials if they ask.) Besides, the information is four years old.

You’ll note that a similar thing happened in 2006, when a bunch of flash drives containing sensitive military information was stolen and later sold in Afghanistan.

Photo: Flickr

This is the portable radio that’s supposed to rescue HD Radio from obscurity. It was showed off at last week’s CES, but since its name wasn’t the Palm Pre no one gave a damn.

It’s the KRI Armband Portable HD Radio Player, and, as the name suggests, it’s a portable HD radio. (Remember, the “HD” in “HD Radio” doesn’t stand for “high definition,” but is merely a marketing device that aims to piggyback on the success of HDTV.) There’s also a built-in MicroSD slot, nominally making it an MP3 player, too.

Orbitcast, a fine, fine site, says that it also has some sort of over-the-air recording capability. Will the RIAA freak out like they did two years ago with the Samsung Helix and Pioneer Inno? Donna wants to know.

In other radio news, my household has been chosen to be a part of Nielsen radio’s stat-tracking thing. (I received the initial “you’ll be getting a giant packaged with official Nielsen materials shortly” yesterday.) The notebook will be filled out thusly: Opie and Anthony, Monday-Friday, 6am-9am, 92.3FM; every other entry will show that, nope, this household is not listening to that drivel known as terrestrial radio. Please plan your business accordingly.

Numbers from two online firms show that iPod touch usage “exploded” on Christmas day. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Apple must have sold a ton of the things during the holidays.

The two firms, Net Applications and AdMob, track things like online ad hits and general Web usage. No, they’re not the most accurate ways of measuring usage, but they’re all we’ve got for now; wait till Apple’s next quarterly report for concrete numbers.

Basically, once Christmas day hit, these two companies saw iPod touch use increase “like whoa.” From November to December alone ad requests went up by 3.4 times. Extending the time frame to July (before the new iPod touch debuted) is even more impressive: ad requests went up by 16 times, from 18 million to 292 million. Couple that with Apple’s own App Store numbers, why don’t ya?

So there: a lot more of you are listening to DRM-free music—one way or another—on the iPod touch. Also, Manchester United stinks.

The RIAA’s new scheme to fight music piracy doesn’t sit well with small ISPs. Under the plan, rather than file lawsuit after lawsuit against John and Jane Doe, who may not even exist, the RIAA wants ISPs to cooperate with it by, ultimately, cutting people off from the Internet. That’s not going to happen easily.

Take Bayou Internet and Communications, a small, Louisiana-based ISP. Let’s say one of its users download/upload an RIAA-protected song from Gnutella or BitTorrent. The RIAA will send it a letter, with scant evidence—do you know how easy it is to spoof an IP address?—demanding that the user be warned. There’s a few problems with this scenario. One, again, what actual proof does the RIAA (and those it contracts to find alleged offenders) that this guy downloaded anything? Maybe he downloaded a plain text file called “Beyonce – Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).mp3” just to be a nuisance. Now you want the small ISP to track this guy down, for free? Matching an IP address to a person takes time, which, if cartoons have taught us anything, equals money.

It’s like, why should the (small) ISP be the RIAA’s secret police force? Let the RIAA do its own dirty work (if it must). And the RIAA wants, as an ultimate punishment, for the ISP to kick the offending customers off the Internet? Ha! That’s money out of the ISP’s pocket, money it cannot afford to lose. Since the ISP is merely a road—what travels down its path is none of its business—why should it be penalized for the alleged misdeeds of its customers?

And then we’re back to square one: how do you effectively combat music piracy?

Paul McCartney’s previous album, Memory Almost Full, may have been, in so many words, complete garbage, but you have to give credit to the man for his latest endeavor, a new album from his electronic-ish band The Fireman. The album Electric Arguments is available as a DRM-free download from the band’s official site. It’s in a bunch of formats, too, including MP3, FLAC and Apple Lossless; for a few dollars more they’ll even throw in a CD. (Sounds a lot like what Nine Inch Nails did several months ago, right?) And, if you’re not too sure that you want to spend $9 of your hard earned dollars on Mr. McCartney’s side project, you can listen to the entire album on the site via a Flash player.

Above all, it shows that “mainstream” musicians are finally getting it, that digital downloads aren’t inherently evil. DRM-free is a welcome bonus, too. It also makes AC/DC’s decision to release its album exclusively at Wal-Mart seem all the more weird. They didn’t even so much as release it on iTunes.

via Slashdot

It’s an mp3 jukebox of a form factor that has never been tried: supremely awkward. Apparently composed of a rectangular prism intersecting with an oblique column, this gadget was not created with subtlety in mind. I believe the guts are found in the base, and the control interface uses only that silver disc and the buttons thereupon. Honestly, though, why would you get this? It’s ugly as sin and if you’re going to cough up for a nice central mp3 controller, why not go with a touchscreen, either wireless or embedded? No, this appears to be strictly for attention-seekers and interior designers making a “music room” or something. Feh!
[via Acquire]

Did you hear the news? MySpace is thinking about creating its own portable media player! Reuters seems to think that such a player would be in competition with the iPod, which we all know is a lie: there’s the iPod WAY UP HERE, then everything else WAY DOWN THERE. If anything, the MySpace player would be in competition with Zune and Sansa—you know, the “other” portable media players.

But that’s all speculation. In truth, the company’s CEO, Chris DeWolfe, only said that it’s “possible” that the company would create its own PMP. While it would go nicely with MySpace Music, I suppose, you question the wisdom of launching new hardware in this economic environment (read: run for your lives). It’s not like a MySpace-branded PMP would be so different from what’s already out there, right?

Even if this end up being true, that MySpace wants to create a PMP, don’t expect it anytime soon, what with DeWolfe cautioning, “Right now, we’re just focusing on the service.”

Amazon MP3 and iTunes—the only two online music stores that really matter—have another competitor to worry about now that Wal-Mart has re-launched its own music store. The “new and improved” (joke: how can something be both “new” and “improved”?) store sells DRM-free MP3s, most of which are encoded at 256kbps; some are only 192 kbps.

Individual songs start as low as 74 cents per song, which makes the new Wal-Mart store the least expensive one in town.

Wal-Mart is also giving away one free song per week. It’ll also toss in a free song for every CD you buy, either online or in the brick-and-mortar store. That little promotion starts next month.

Lastly, because the songs are merely MP3s they’ll work on any operating system—except, maybe, Red Hat 8!

My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a certain comfort in being able to drop a piece of media into a hardware player and have it just work.

Here’s the basic idea, according to SanDisk:

“The Sansa slotMusic Player (MSRP $19.99) was made to play slotMusic card albums or a self-loaded microSD™ card full of music. The effortless player doesn’t require a PC, Internet or any time spent managing music. Consumers simply choose their slotMusic or music-filled microSD card, pop it into the device and will be enjoying their favorite tunes in seconds.”

The super-intelligent and highly tech-savvy readers of CrunchGear.com may well scoff at the notion of such a simplistic device, but remember that outside in that cold, cold world lurk dangerous creatures known as regular consumers who might appreciate not having to spend an entire morning in front of their 486DX/2 computers trying to figure out how to get the music they’re pretty sure they downloaded correctly onto the iPod they’re pretty sure they’ve got hooked up properly.

Maybe I’m not giving people enough credit but I recently went home to Minnesota to visit family and, after one particular afternoon spent people-watching at the Mall of America, I’m pretty sure there’s still a sizable market for a simple hardware device that animals with opposable thumbs can load up by pushing a small card into a slot.

For these people, the SlotMusic initiative could be a hit. The regular players will sell for $19.99 and there will also be artist-branded players that come with a full album on a 1GB MicroSD card for $34.99. The cards will contain all the songs, plus liner notes, artwork, and other fluff. Regular albums will be sold standalone for an MSRP of $14.99 – so basically, the CD is moving to MicroSD format if SanDisk has anything to say about it. The next step would be to get MicroSD slots in car stereos. Some stereos are already available with standard SD slots, though, so you could use an adapter.

At any rate, I think the SlotMusic thing is a good idea. I’ll probably buy one, too. And although I can’t see shelling out $15 for “albums” anymore, I bet you I’ll actually do just that at least once or twice in an airport somewhere. Think of those iPod vending machines, if you will. You can buy an iPod in an airport, but you can’t use it unless you hook it up to a computer first. Now put these SlotMusic players in a vending machine at $20, sell $15 albums next to them, and watch what happens. If you’re feeling really adventurous, set up a kiosk that allows people to make their own mixes on MicroSD cards. There’s a huge market here for audiobooks as well.

Bonus points to SanDisk for making the music on the pre-loaded MicroSD cards DRM-free. In a pinch, you could go into a store (or find a vending machine) that sells an album you forgot or lost, buy the card, and then dump it onto your computer. It’d be nice to see a regular-sized SD card version of this player, too, as I believe MicroSD cards only top out at 16GB and I seem to have ten-times more SD cards lying around.

So I agree to disagree with Peter and the rest of the pundits out there who think this isn’t a good idea. It’s not for everyone – and maybe definitely not for people who are already tech-savvy – but it’s best not to neglect the regular consumers who crave simplicity. There are far more of them than there are of us.