Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forAugust 30th, 2002 | back to home

30 August 2002
Filed under:Gadgets at8:58 am

I just stumbled across an article about the forthcoming DataPlay format – like a minidisc only much smaller – discs about the size of a 10p piece. Seems to me that the New York Times’ article is a little over-hostile. It is concentrating on the fact that when you copy MP3s onto the disc “your MP3s first need to be converted to the secure CK format (DataPlay’s proprietary content storage format) before being sent to the player. Files in these formats can’t be transferred off the DataPlay disks nor played with any other media players except the included iRiver FuturePlayer”

Interestingly, the format allows you to record MP3 music directly onto the discs (up to 11 hours worth on each disc) and/or just plug your computer into a player’s USB port and record up to 500Mb of data per disc directly into the player.

I don’t know why I never heard of this before but now that I have I really want to have a look at one. Details are surprisingly hard to come by, even on the format’s own website.

It is unclear to me, for example, whether the discs are write once or write many times – if they are the former I would be much less interested…loan settlement againstloans alabamahome 100 garanteed loanand loans 20 80 rateshome loans las vegas accessday america loan pay advance1st commerce loanalaska alaska loans truck auto insurance Map