In response to “arw” — CDs are NOT lossless. Infact, in their very nature they can be nothing more than lossy if you consider the limitations of the technology. Look it up some time.

With lossless formats on SD you could virtually get exact, exact copies of the original music. That is the only way slotMusic should EVER work. Don’t try to swindle consumers out of this right.

and they have a whole gig of space, they can fit a 24/96 lossless album on each. or a lot of lossy albums. they might even add a decoder in the box with the included usb adaptor. and a battery,maybe a couple buttons here and there, and its an mp3 player by itself.

The fact is, they could have used a lossless format that’s better than CD and still done very well, if they felt compelled to kill the CD. Frankly, I think the reasons they’re doing this are as follows:

Shelf space: Probably a good thing
Proprietary control: If they start including encryption, you won’t be able to say it’s not really a CD (which is a White Book CD.)
Standardization: They’ll probably sell the same files electronically for cheaper.
Buzz: It’s “New.”

All that said, the music business is a bunch of retards. If they’d improved the music quality and actually lowered the prices to account for cost savings, they might have gotten away with the scheme they’re apparently up to, but…

Not to call shenanigans or anything, but I think your review is a bit harsh. First, if you buy slotMusic, what’s to keep you from transferring/encoding files for more compact and efficient access on an MP3 player or phone? You already have to do this with CDs, so why the penalty to the sM format for this?

Second, it’s not like CDs are perfect. Those thin discs can get warped, scratched and battered. When used in portable applications, they are prone to skip and pause–something solid state is immune to. And while your spaniel may swallow a slotMusic card, your kids might use CDs as frisbees. It’s deadly peril all around, I’m afraid.

Ultimately, I always, always favor solid state over spinning media, provided it: a) matches the performance/fidelity of the spinning stuff; b) costs the same or less; and c) isn’t encumbered by hateful DRM technology.

SlotMusic seems to nail two out of three of these. If they could get lossless music on there, I’d consider buying slotMusic right away. Heck, I would consider the format anyway, since I’ve long since moved ALL my music to MP3 and rarely, if ever, reach for the discs.

The obvious business issues of distribution and content availability aside, slotMusic to me is a packaging challenge. How do you ensure that people can quickly tell which album is which, and how do you ensure these things aren’t easily lost? If they’ve got the packaging and handling of the physical media solved, I’d be tempted to reconsider any allegiance I still have to CDs.

Thanks for contributing!

–Harry

Then there’s manufacturing costs. CDs cost pennies to mass-produce (well, quarters, anyway). Last I checked, you couldn’t buy a blank MicroSD card for less than $5. I could imagine these selling for the same price as CDs, but I couldn’t imagine the labels or retailers being happy about it.

One more thing: Has anyone announced how compressed the .mp3s will be. 320kbps can indeed rival CDs in quality; 186kbps–no.

Lincoln