Years ago, each time I'd get in my car, I'd pull out from under the passenger seat a Buster Brown Shoes box that contained maybe 40 cassettes, which I'd then rummage through to find something to listen to, take the tape from its usually broken plastic cover, and swap it with the tape that was already in the car's tape player, find that tape's broken plastic cover and toss it back into the Buster Brown Shoes box, fast-forward to the song I wanted to hear -- oops, not on that side, flip the tape over, rewind -- and set off on my drive to work.
Much has changed since those mornings in my driveway. Audio cassette tapes have given way to compact disks, CD changers have replaced Buster Brown Shoes boxes and now computer hard drives are beginning to replace CD changers. I also no longer have a car. Despite this, I'm able to take my entire music collection -- some 150 or so CDs -- with me everywhere I go. It fits in my pocket.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MANUFACTURERS
Thanks to a digital compression standard called MP3 and a rapidly expanding array of portable MP3 players, music lovers can carry some or even all of their favorite tunes with them anywhere. MP3 greatly reduces the amount of space a music file occupies on a hard drive by removing all the sound which the human ear cannot hear. (Dogs probably don't enjoy the standard that much.) An MP3-compressed file is generally one-twelfth the size of an uncompressed song on your hard drive.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MANUFACTURERS
This has enable millions of music lovers to store their entire music libraries on their home computers. Many have gone a step further and bought a hard drive-based, portable MP3 player. These differ from CD-based players and flash memory-based players in that they do not play CDs and can hold up to 40 gigabytes of music or over 8,000 songs (the most common 64MB flash memory-based players hold maybe 15 songs)
Hard disk-based portable players range from slightly larger than a deck of cards to the size of a traditional portable CD player and have the added benefit of being able to hold more than just music. Because they are essentially hard drives, they can usually store any type of file, making it possible to transport or back up large amounts of data.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MANUFACTURERS
Among the companies producing hard drive-based MP3 players, three stand out. Creative's Nomad Jukebox offers 10GB of storage for over 2,500 songs on average (they used to make a 6GB player but have since stopped) and allows you easy navigation of your library by title, artist, album or genre. It also offers excellent sound control. You can speed up or slow down songs at a constant pitch, adjust sound using the equalizer settings, create wider stereo with spatialization and define environmental settings.
Another cool feature is the line-in jack, which lets you to attach a powered microphone and record live audio to WAV at various quality settings. The 10GB Nomad Jukebox retails for about US$250, or US$500 for up to 40GB and can support Windows and Mac operating systems.
The Archos Jukebox 6000 starts out at 6GB of capacity (but also comes in 10GB and 20GB models) at a slightly smaller size and weight than the Nomad and offers more battery time -- nearly 10 hours before having to recharge. Your music is just as easy to navigate using an LED screen, but sound control is considerably more limited than with the Nomad. Also missing is an input jack for direct recording (though this is available on the 10GB and 20GB models). The Archos Jukebox retails for about US$200 and supports Window or Mac.
The player that has found the greatest share of the market, though, is Apple's iPod, which has recently been made to support Windows. The smallest and lightest by far of these three models (it weighs nearly half as much as Archos' Jukebox), it starts out with 5GB of storage but is also available in 10GB and 20GB models. Its unique navigation wheel allows you to find your music much more quickly and intuitively than other models and it has a back-lit LED screen. Like the Archos product, it also has up to 10 hours of battery time.
Unlike most other models which connect to your computer through a USB connection, the iPod connects using Firewire, allowing you to transfer 5GB of music in about 10 minutes as opposed to 5 hours with USB. Its greatest drawbacks are an inability to record sound directly to the machine and its price tag of about US$300 for the 5GB model (US$500 for 20GB).
Each of these devices ships with software that synchronizes the library on your portable player with the library on your computer. Each can also be integrated into your home or car stereo systems or instantly removed to go to the gym.
A considerable drawback of hard disk-based systems is that, because they contain moving parts, they can easily skip. IPod, for one, has solved this problem by incorporating a 32MB solid-state memory cache so that the device effectively memorizes 20 minutes of music at a time, eliminating skips.
The second great liability is the price tag. Although these devices' cost-per-megabyte is considerably less than other types of players, they nonetheless are not cheap. Still, I'm a lot happier with mine than I ever was with my Buster Brown Shoes box.
The tropic of cancer bisects the city of Chiayi (嘉義). The morning heat is, predictably, intense. But the sky is blue and hued with promise. Travelers brave the heat to pose for photos outside the carriages lined up at the end of platform one. The pervasive excitement is understandable. HISTORIC RAILWAY The Alishan Forest Railway (阿里山森林鐵路) was engineered by the Japanese to carry timber from the interior to the coast. Construction began in 1906. In 1912, it opened to traffic, although the line has been lengthened several times since. As early as the 1930s, the line had developed a secondary function as
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) National Congress tomorrow will potentially be one of the most consequential in the party’s history. Since the founding of the DPP until the late 2000s or early 2010s, the party was riven with factional infighting, at times getting very ugly and very public. For readers curious to know more about the context of the factions and who they are, two previous columns explore them in depth: “The powerful political force that vanished from the English press,” April 23, 2024 and “Introducing the powerful DPP factions,” April 27, 2024. In 2008, a relatively unknown mid-level former
July 22 to July 28 The Love River’s (愛河) four-decade run as the host of Kaohsiung’s annual dragon boat races came to an abrupt end in 1971 — the once pristine waterway had become too polluted. The 1970 event was infamous for the putrid stench permeating the air, exacerbated by contestants splashing water and sludge onto the shore and even the onlookers. The relocation of the festivities officially marked the “death” of the river, whose condition had rapidly deteriorated during the previous decade. The myriad factories upstream were only partly to blame; as Kaohsiung’s population boomed in the 1960s, all household
In Taiwan there are two economies: the shiny high tech export economy epitomized by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and its outsized effect on global supply chains, and the domestic economy, driven by construction and powered by flows of gravel, sand and government contracts. The latter supports the former: we can have an economy without TSMC, but we can’t have one without construction. The labor shortage has heavily impacted public construction in Taiwan. For example, the first phase of the MRT Wanda Line in Taipei, originally slated for next year, has been pushed back to 2027. The government