Lately, my iRiver T30’s screen broke completely, and I was left with a player that is nearly impossible to navigate. Due to that, I switched to the family Walkman, and actually found that using an old-fashioned Walkman does carry some benefits. Namely, I can immediately choose any disc I want without needing to rip it and put it on my player.
On the flipside, I couldn’t switch immediately between songs from different discs or easily put Creative Commons licensed songs I found on the ‘net. In addition, discs seem to take their time before they start playing.
Due to that, I came up with the (almost) ultimate hybrid that would combine the ease of switching of the Walkman with the storage capability of your commonplace digital music player. I call it the Ripman.
The Ripman possesses the dimensions and general look of the Walkman, but has an LCD screen in its center and an iPod-esque clickwheel around it. It has a USB connection on its back, and a headphone jack on its side. Next to all the normal buttons you’d see that it also has two new ones: “Rip” and “Menu”.
The Rip button rips the songs on the disc and stores them as mid-range quality ogg files in the player’s 1GB flash memory. The menu button transfers you to an (again) iPod-like (or Creative-like, if you prefer) hierarchical menu (navigated by the clickwheel) that allows you to choose to play either the digital music stored on the Ripman or the disc you currently have in it.
Well, who wants to make that? Please?
p_q said,
Dec 7, 12:07 #
There’s a very good reason you aren’t payed to design these things.
This is it.
Noam Samuel said,
Dec 8, 05:27 #
Actually, I know quite well that it wouldn’t sell at all. It would still be awesome, though.