Player Blog Category Archives: Site News

Lotsa MP3 Players Playing in the US

According to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 22 million Americans have an MP3 player. That's about 11% of the population, but the actual number is certainly higher since the survey did not take into account people under 18.

Any guess what the number will be this time next year after the 2005 holiday season?

Happy First Birthday PlayerBlog!

Today is PlayerBlog's first birthday! On January 24th, 2004 we made our first post.

One year and over 500 posts later, we're doing great. We've learned a lot and are cooking up new ways to make the site better and more useful, so please stay tuned.

Also, thanks to all our readers, commenters and tipsters who've stopped by over the last year. The number of visitors we get every month has truly astonished us and it continues to grow.

Finally, speaking of traffic, we've become the victim of our own success. We've recently had to upgrade our site hosting to accommodate all the bandwidth we use and it has broken the commenting system. We're working getting that fixed ASAP.

Thanks again from the PlayerBlog team!

PlayerBlog Newsfeed Improvements

We've just implemented a few improvements to our RSS and Atom newsfeeds that we'd like to make note of. First, our RSS should validate correctly. The Atom feed doesn't yet validate, but we're working on it.

Second, we fixed a problem where some feedreaders wouldn't display images in posts.

Finally, we added a comment link to each post in the feed.

We are by no means RSS or Atom experts, so if the new feeds blow up in your newsreader or you see any bugs, please let us known at feedback@playerblog.com

If you have no idea what we mean by RSS and Atom, take a look here. It will explain it a bit and maybe get you to try using RSS and a newsreader to stay up to date with websites you frequent.

The DAP Review Empire Expands

The ever-useful DAP Review crew are launching a trio of new sites. The first is DAPdB.com which breaks out DAP Review's audio player database into its own site. DABdb.com lets you compare specs of devices side-by-side.

Second is a Cowon iAudio product community site, iAudiophile.net. This is a very nice addition since a forum for iAudio owners hasn't existed before now.

Finally, and not yet ready from prime time, is PMPz.com which will cover portable media players. Best of luck with all the new sites.

We Made Slashdot!

In the tooting-your-own-horn department, our story on Rockbox starting an open-source firmware replacement for iRiver audio players got our first mention on Slashdot. *sniff*

Up From the Down Time

We apologize for the down time, but our hosting facility is in the process of a big hardware move. We think that we're back up for good, but, you know, YMMV.

Search Added (Finally)

Thanks to some nifty Google-fu, we've finally added a search feature to the site. It looks as if Google crawls the site at least once a day, so results should be quite current.

The search box should be at the top of every page. If you notice a page that doesn't have a search box or anything else on the site that is broken or behaving strangely, please let us know at feedback@playerblog.com.

DAPReview Introduces DAP.dB

Austin and Robert over at DAPReview have opened the doors a new comparision tool, DAP.dB. Essentially it's a giant database with details and specifications of a bunch of MP3 players. You choose two models and DAP.dB shows them side-by-side. Cool!

Thanks Gizmodo!

A big thank you to the Gizmodo gang for adding us to their Recommended site list. They've been on our list of Useful Links since day 1. If you want to find out what's happening in wide world of electronic gadgetry or (if you're like me) you never cease to be amazed by the wacky ideas that actually end up as real products, Gizmodo is the perfect place to start.

First Weekly MP3 Player Price Guide

This is the first of what we'd like to be a weekly roundup of prices for the most popular MP3 player models. For each player we'll also be tracking how prices are changing week to week.

What's in Store

As you can see, there's not much here (yet). Our immediate goals are to get a more usable site layout in place and to publish the first edition of "Which Player Should I Buy?".

"Which Player Should I Buy?" will be a continually-updated buyer's guide. With so many models on the market and so many features to get bogged down with, it's hard to find the right one. The guide will give an overview of several important MP3 player features (such as size/weight, capacity or ability to be used as a portable hard drive) and models that meet those criteria.

Following the initial release of the Guide, we'll start producing pages for individual player lines. Today there is no one place to get complete details on all the major products. Does the Nomad support WMA? Which is heavier, the iPod or the iRiver IHP-140? Player Blog will be that place.

Starting Up

This is the startup of Player Blog, a resource for information, news and reviews of MP3 players.

Buying an MP3 player today can be a pretty rough experience. There are so many models to choose from, a bewildering set of features and new models come out every day. Our goal is to make this site a one-stop destination to help people find the right MP3 player for them and to keep up to date with the state of the market.