Pandoras competition


It appears the only way to get "content" [Sony's catchall for games, movies, music] onto that thing is by buying it online from Sony or by transferring it with a horrible proprietary memory stick.

I'm not sure how I would even get my personal music on there.

With the Pandora, I've already worked out a few solutions, and they also cover music I don't own yet:

1. Write the music to an SD card using my laptop's card reader
2. Network share my music and have the Pandora write it to an SD card
3. Download the music from a completely legitimate 3rd-party using the Pandora's FULL, unrestricted Internet browser
4. Write my music to a USB 2.0 flash drive and have the Pandora read that
5. Put the music on an external hard drive and let the Pandora transfer it from there to an SD card

And the PSP might have ONE way I can transfer music I already own...
 
itll come with pc software (the psp) but as always itll be a dog to run and most likely will only support vista/xp
i would keep psp in the box of nintendo dsi
pandora is in a totally different class than both of them
 
something else I feel obliged to point out, Sony have their own fab plants, development team and buy components by the container full, yet they can`t ship a lower spec device to the Pandora for under £200, despite all those advantages and the fact they probably pay pennies for stuff Craigs paying almost full price for.

so will some people kindly STOP WHINGING about the price of the Pandora, if you want something cheaper, buy something inferior. :p
 
The PSPgo is just a PSP without a UMD and a 16gb flash drive built in. it's no different than it ever was, you put your music on it by USB cable same as you ever would.

and again the PSP isnt even competition because sony is just going to keep hammering it with firmware updates and other hobbling impediments to homebrew.
 
Download the music from a completely legitimate 3rd-party
I'd recommend jamendo for this http://www.jamendo.com. They offer lots CC licensed music, and even for my strange taste I found more than 20GB of mp3-music worth listening to.

Most expensive will be the SDHC-Card to store the music on :lol:

One question though: Is there software to handle 500+ Albums including displaying Cover-Graphics - no need for apple-like cover-flow though :)

Holger
 
Yes.
The Pandora has what they call a "file manager".

You can put each album into what's called a "directory", and then all your songs are organized by album.
 
Or, if you're in wireless range, fire up spotify, I'm sure they musta made a linux version.

You should check it out regardless anyway, great little free music program - paid for by short ads between tracks (which you can skip).


lulzfish said:
It appears the only way to get "content" [Sony's catchall for games, movies, music] onto that thing is by buying it online from Sony or by transferring it with a horrible proprietary memory stick.

I'm not sure how I would even get my personal music on there.

With the Pandora, I've already worked out a few solutions, and they also cover music I don't own yet:

1. Write the music to an SD card using my laptop's card reader
2. Network share my music and have the Pandora write it to an SD card
3. Download the music from a completely legitimate 3rd-party using the Pandora's FULL, unrestricted Internet browser
4. Write my music to a USB 2.0 flash drive and have the Pandora read that
5. Put the music on an external hard drive and let the Pandora transfer it from there to an SD card

And the PSP might have ONE way I can transfer music I already own...
 
ROFL :D

lulzfish said:
Yes.
The Pandora has what they call a "file manager".

You can put each album into what's called a "directory", and then all your songs are organized by album.
 
Great - Fantastic! This is something I was looking for for ages. How can I install this tool? Maybe it can also be used for organizing other files? It is always annoying to have all files on the desktop. Is this also available for windows? :oops:

Seriously, I was looking for something like songbird, amaroK, LSongs, banshee, Rhythmbox, ... Something that would allow to play music by album, random, title, sort by album, title, artist or preference and has playlists, and would be optimized/adapted for use on pandora. Display of album cover pages would also be great. :p
 
Actually, something like mpd for Pandora would work, and then a graphical client for controlling it would allow you to play songs on the Pandora, but also control an mpd server elsewhere. It's a good division of frontend/backend and mpd itself should compile without much trouble... and a backend shouldn't be too bad to write so that it nicely uses the Pandora (there are loads of backends out there now, so you could eg control your Pandora's music playback from your browser or emacs, or silly things like that).
 
talk about contradictory

Pandoras competition
inferior in every other way

anyway if the psp2 was just released the psp declared not a failure but a failed success, and a bloody analogue stick, with better resolution screen id buy it no problem, simply for some big games that are heading portable

pandora i found was and still is dirt cheap, id easily pay another £100, if a few slight modifications were made, skin sensitive buttons for extra shoulder buttons, and IR LEDs around the screen for the wiimote

btw is spotify on linux yet, last time i checked i believed it was still only windows/mac

seriously i was considering buying a beagle board and make a custom musicplayer using spotify, taking up and entire all of speakers anybody
 
What kills me is that PSP users have been wanting a second analog stick since the original to be consistent with the Dualshock line of controllers, and pretty much every controller to be made since the original Dual-Shock, the PSP-Go has the layout to place a second stick in the slide-out controller tray, but they put the start and select buttons there, rather than side-by-side above the circular depressions where the sticks would go.

Is Sony actually -trying- to be that dense???
 
The people demanding a second anolog dont seem to understand that they cant just simply "add one." You already have some 400 games that cant use it even if they add it so what's the point? if you add it to new games than the 40 million or so PSP owners that already have an old system are assed out, try telling THEM to drop another 200 bucks just for an extra analog stick.

It's simply not plausible until they actually create a true PSP2, which this is NOT.
 
The apple mentality is a very special case. Actually sony has been trying to emulate (as in "be like") them but I dont think the average consumer drinks the kool-aid as easily.
 
Sony could easily "add one", they just don`t have the nerve to, it wouldn`t break existing software, and newer software could use it to advantage, big firms (especially in the current climate) don`t like risks.

I would say, as a corporate mind, Sony really are that dense, they have good ideas and engineers, but the implementation and quality has been getting poorer by the year, I first noticed that in their stuff back in late 70`s, when they put a plastic "ratchet" on the volume control of their music systems to make em feel like high quality wirewound potentiometers when you turned the knob, or their plastic turntables with pressed alloy sleeves on them (turntables should be either massive cast metal to damp vibration or ultra light and mounted on air cushions so it cant affect them), theirs where no better than cheaper makes, I now have a Sony E-book, and the same issues show, bad quality case finish, poor button layout, bad software, unstable PDF reader, underpowered cpu wise, usefull functionality missing, much shorter than claimed battery life, poor ergonomics etc, etc, and this is the version 2 reader.

as for a music player, why not Amarock?, is it too large/system hungry?
 
Amarok has lots and lots of extraneous features, and I can't even get the latest version to work reliably.
There's a few alternatives like Audacious and XMMS that have their own weird problems [Can't use a normal GUI]
 
hobbyman III said:
Sony could easily "add one", they just don`t have the nerve to, it wouldn`t break existing software, and newer software could use it to advantage, big firms (especially in the current climate) don`t like risks.

Risks? they just announced a 250 dollar PSP with no UMD that downloads games from the internet!! What are you talking about?!

If just "adding one" was that simple you dont think they would have done it in the redesign of the system after 3 chances, seriously? To demand such at thing shows an incredible lack of understanding, especially after I already described why it WOULD NOT WORK. It's people with this shortsighted mentality that would cause the biggest headache for them even if they could add it by screaming bloody murder about how you have to trade up to another PSP because of the new hardware with a nub and then complaining further when you still can't play your old games because the 2nd nub dosent work.

Again: "adding one" means incompatibility between games that already exist, alienation of the users that already exist and functionality in games not being equal. It wouldnt take nerve to add a second one at this point it would take utter stupidity. Like I said it wont be until they bring out an actual PSP2 that a second nub is ever added.
 
Alpha2 said:
hobbyman III said:
Sony could easily "add one", they just don`t have the nerve to, it wouldn`t break existing software, and newer software could use it to advantage, big firms (especially in the current climate) don`t like risks.

Risks? they just announced a 250 dollar PSP with no UMD that downloads games from the internet!! What are you talking about?!

If just "adding one" was that simple you dont think they would have done it in the redesign of the system after 3 chances, seriously? To demand such at thing shows an incredible lack of understanding, especially after I already described why it WOULD NOT WORK. It's people with this shortsighted mentality that would cause the biggest headache for them even if they could add it by screaming bloody murder about how you have to trade up to another PSP because of the new hardware with a nub and then complaining further when you still can't play your old games because the 2nd nub dosent work.

Again: "adding one" means incompatibility between games that already exist, alienation of the users that already exist and functionality in games not being equal. It wouldnt take nerve to add a second one at this point it would take utter stupidity. Like I said it wont be until they bring out an actual PSP2 that a second nub is ever added.

Adding a new analog stick to the PSPg wouldn't make old software not work, the new analog stick wouldn't be used, that's all. They introduced the Dual-Shock on the old PSX, but it was still compatible with older games that were pre-analog controls.

As far as making sure older systems worked: Most every Dual Shock compatible game had settings that allowed for the use of older controllers. There was no insurmountable issue with backwards or forwards controller/program compatibility, it's been done before quite successfully and there's no reason such a tact couldn't be taken with the current PSP line.

The PSP Go is already becoming incompatible with the PSP X000 lines anyway with the change from UMB/download to exclusively downloaded content, integral 16gb memory that new programs can make use of faster than X000's slotted MSDuo (so an ambitious programmer working on a PSPg game will invalidate the old hardware anyway), and bluetooth device connections.

Adding another stick wouldn't be a death-knell for the line, and it's not an unbearable burden on the developers.

---

To take this back to the original point of the thread:

Pandora is still in good shape compared to everything else on the market. It's got the power to rival or beat Sony's and Nintendo's entries in the market, and also has the most modern full-sized console control schema of any handheld, with dual analog controls, and the potential to be modded with L2/R2 buttons, or remap them to the keyboard, along with L3/R3. The Pandora is intended as both a gaming device and as a compact internet browsing and general computing device, applications that most other gaming devices are tacking on as an afterthought. Pandora is going to be an impressive little beast of a pocket-sized computer.
 
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