Mp3 player accessory

The MP3 player market is swamped to the gunnels with me-too products, and it's gotten pretty tough for new arrivals to distinguish themselves. Some have gotten smaller (iPod), some have added capacity, such as Creative's Nomad Zen 60GB. Others have added video, the key example being the Archos AV320. With so many available products, you might think there's little room for innovation, but you'd be wrong.

A new company on the scene, Neuros Audio, took a long hard look at this market space and is now shipping what the company has dubbed an 'audio computer'. It features an FM tuner and transmitter (transceiver), support for the open source encoder Ogg Vorbis, and a Linux music management app. It can not only record FM radio, but can sample and save music playing on an FM station and find similar material via the Web when the player is connected to your PC.

The FM transmitter is designed to make it easy to use the Neuros in your car. Simply tune your radio to the frequency the Neuros is transmitting on, and listen to your digital music collection while driving.

With all this going for it, the Neuros Audio Computer makes for an innovative, intriguing product in the crowded the MP3 player market. There's a lot we liked about this player, but we found quite a few rough edges. We can't recommend it now, though, but the Neuros warrants a closer look.

Although flash-memory-based units are starting to give way to hard-disk-based players with two orders of magnitude more storage capacity, memory-based players are still much more compact and light.

Wouldn't it be cool to somehow have both units combined together? The designers of the Neuros thought so, too. Rather than make you choose between one or the other, the Neuros can be both.

Modular MP3: The "brains" of the player (audio processor, display, controls and connectors) are in a small module that can be plugged into two separate storage cradles. One contains 128MB of flash memory, while the other includes a portable 20GB hard-drive. Both storage cradles contain Li-ion rechargeable batteries, although only the flash-memory one has a belt-clip of any kind. The hard-disk unit is portable, but you'll need to devise your own method for carrying it around. And here's where we ran smack into our first design flaw.

When the flash memory-based cradle is clipped to your belt, the "brains" part of the player is oriented straight down. If it fell out, it would probably smack the ground pretty hard - possibly dooming the nerve center of the Neuros player. It's unlikely the unit would ever slip and fall from the memory cradle module, but still, it's not a very good design. We were also surprised that the player includes no ability to go mobile when the brains are connected to the hard-disk based storage cradle.

While a small fanny-pack might solve this problem, , it's a shortcoming Neuros needs to address to make its player more competitive. After all, the Nomad Zen and Apple iPod are both portable hard drive units. In addition, three different people I showed the Neuros to (while in the hard-disk storage cradle) dropped it. A combination of a lack of any grip ridges, and a slick plastic case surface were the main factors that caused the Neuros to tumble. To Neuros' credit, the player booted right up after each trip to the floor. On the other hand, the only reason we performed this unplanned test is because the damn thing is so easy to drop.

Also, the connector for the player has two rows of exposed pins like those found on a laptop hard-drive. Because these pins have nothing protecting them, they will inevitably get bent. Clearly the player wasn't meant to be frequently swapped between the memory and hard-disk storage cradles, which seems to be a glaring oversight. Getting the player in and out of each of the cradles was fairly easy, although every time we swapped was another opportunity for those pesky pins to get bent.

Despite those limitations, The Neuros is a versatile little beast, and it can: Play back MP3 files Tune in FM radio stations Record MP3s at five different bit rates (64, 96, 128 or 160Kbits/sec) using as its recording source the built-in FM tuner, a line-level source, or the player's built-in microphone "Nearcast" an FM signal of the player's output to any FM receiver, allowing the player to be played through any sound system via its FM tuner. Capture a "snippet" of audio from the radio and identify the song name/artist/album on the ensuing "hot-sync" with your PC. The player itself can play back Ogg Vorbis files, as well as uncompressed wave audio (via Linux-based Positron utility)

As it turns out, this feature set, while impressive, is something of a work in progress. Support for Ogg Vorbis, an impressive open-source audio compression format, is available only by using a beta version of the Neuros firmware, which we found somewhat unstable for even basic MP3 playback. Also the company's windows-based Neuros Synchronization Manager lacks Ogg Vorbis support. This means you can only load Ogg files from the Linux Positron application – another work in progress.

Let's walk through these features, and see how mature the Neuros really is.

One of the slicker features found on the Neuros is its ability to "nearcast" an FM signal to an FM tuner. This allows Neuros' output to be piped into another sound system (home or car stereo, or boombox). This feature should be especially useful in cars that lack a cassette player, and thus won't support an 1/8th inch cassette adapter.

The Neuros has a very slick feature that scans the FM band for a "quiet" spot on the dial. After the scan, the player picks the best frequency, and then displays that frequency on its LCD screen..

So how did it work in our tests? The results were mixed. We tested the Neuros in a Subaru Legacy wagon (with stock Subaru FM Tuner/Cassette player), in a 2001 Honda Passport (with premium Honda sound system) and, finally, in an older car with an after-market Kenwood radio. In general, the Neuros fared better delivering signal to the newer digital tuners, especially when running off the battery. When we tested with the included 12V power adapter, the signal seemed stronger. But even using this power supply, in the car with the Kenwood radio in it, we could not get the radio to successfully tune into the Neuros' output.

We then moved this testing indoors, evaluating its performance on an older Panasonic boombox with an analog tuner, a newer JVC boombox, and a Yamaha Natural Sound RX-485 stereo receiver/amplifier. Both the JVC and Kenwood units had digital tuners. In general, digital tuners seem to work better, and are certainly easier to setup, since you can dial in the exact desired frequency. The older Panasonic boombox worked -- but not especially well. We had to have the unit about three inches away from the boombox's extended antenna to pick up an adequate signal. On the newer JVC boombox and the Yamaha receiver, we saw considerably better signal integrity and playback performance, and we were able to position the Neuros three to four feet away from the FM receiver antenna with good results.

Neuros also does some interesting things with jack-sensing technologies to make smart guesses about what you want to do. For instance, if you're playing back music without headphones plugged in, the Neuros can be configured to automatically transmit FM signals.

One last handy feature: the Neuros uses a four-way joystick as the primary UI navigation control. When listening to the Neuros with headphones, the y-axis (up/down) acts as a volume control. But when in nearcasting over the FM band, the line-level output is fixed. The volume control now lets you change the nearcasting frequency if the auto-selected one picks up interference.

A plug on the bottom of the player allows you to plug in an RF antenna. However Neuros doesn't include an antenna wire in the product box, nor do they make one available as an accessory item on their web site. As it turns out, this connector's diameter accommodates the jack from a cell-phone headset, and we used one as a makeshift antenna during testing.

When receiving FM signals and playing them back, the Neuros uses the headphone cable as an antenna, as do most WalkMan FM receivers.