SimplyBlog
Summary: How much smaller can an MP3 player get, and what’s the point? What do I do with a music player that can hold a bazillion songs when I have no screen to navigate to the ones I want? I propose voice announcements and presets as ways to improve the experience of a music player with loads of memory. To get smaller, I suggest eliminating the buttons on the music player by using voice commands instead, or eliminating the whole music player by integrating it into your headphones or other accessories. Last, I suggest following the Swatch example to experiment with a variety of fun alternatives, and maintaining the value of a commodity device by moving into the fashion arena.
I love the looks of a purple iPod Shuffle. The Shuffles are made about as small as you can get and still have buttons and some space to press to open the clip. Omitting the video from an MP3 player allows it to be about as small as you might want, and the lower limit seems to be the size of our fingers so that buttons are pressable.
As the technology evolves:
- Circuits will continue to get smaller.
- Manufacturing costs will continue to go down.
- Processor speed will go up, allowing more complex behaviors.
- Memory will increase in size.
With the current design approach, none of these trends really seem to help much, except that we’ll get our MP3 players at more affordable prices. A smaller device would be hard to use, and what would we possibly do with a faster processor or more memory? As it is, an iPod Shuffle holds about 240 songs, and there’s no way to easily navigate among all the songs, so playing them in random order is about as good as anything.
More memory — having more music and loving it
Memory is cheap, but without a screen on your music player, there’s little difference between 240 songs and 2000 songs. Either way, you won’t be able to select a song in any useful way, and you’re unlikely to hear all the songs before the next time you sync.
Voice announcements. One alternative to a screen is voice output: have the music player speak the name of the selected song. This makes it easier to know what you’re selecting. The voice synthesis techniques are available today to do a surprisingly-good implementation of this. I call these “voice announcements”. A simple preference could be set in iTunes to announce each song as it’s selected on the MP3 player, or as it begins to play. The music player could speak the song name, artist, album, genre, composer, or whatever information you like. In addition, I suggest one more button on your music player, the “Voice” button, that when pressed once, speaks the song name; twice, the artist; three times, the album. So you can check what’s playing at any time. Voice announcements make a large music library just a little more manageable on a device with no display.
Presets. On your car radio, you have the radio buttons, or presets, that automatically select a station. You know you love it. In fact, I don’t think most of us could stand using the radio without it. Imagine adding 5 buttons to your iPod Shuffle: an “All” button, and 4 preset playlists. In iTunes, you’d be able to choose a playlist for each of the presets. Then, by pressing any preset, you’d immediately start playing a song in the different playlists. So for example, I’d have my 4 presets set to play 1. my podcasts, 2. my exercise music, 3. my general mix list of mostly rock music, and 4. my classical and jazz for relaxation. This let’s the music player scale up to usefully hold a lot more music, since you can choose a meaningful subset of the music. Of course, I’d even like to have 10 presets. It would be nice if each “station” associated with a preset remembered exactly where in the playlist and where in the song you left off, so that next time you hit the preset you’d continue where you left off — this way, you could move back and forth between presets without the cost of losing your place.
If your music player has radio stations, the presets can be set to those as well, and if it has a wireless connection, the presets can be set to play from an internet radio station. For music players with screens, the presets can be even more flexible: when using your iPod, you can set the preset by pressing and holding the preset button. The iPod then displays a set of choices for what the preset might correspond to: 1. the menu that is currently being browsed (such as the Audiobooks menu), 2. the playlist that is currently being played, 3. the currently playing song, 4. the current artist, 5. the current album, 6. the genre of the currently playing song.
Minimalism. Some would object to adding a bunch of buttons to a nice clean design; in fact, it definitely seems to go against Apple’s current aesthetic. I would argue that it’s worth it, and the design of car radios is proof that presets are a time-tested part of a minimal solution. One way to reduce buttons is to use a single button for all the presets: each time you push the button, it switches to the next playlist in the sequence. One advantage is that this allows for an unlimited number of presets. This is adequate but a bit more tedious to use than dedicated buttons, and more trouble to tell which playlist you’re listening to (though the playlist could be spoken with a voice announcement).
Disappearing into the peripherals
You could make a smaller MP3 player by making it just 5 small buttons on a little stick the size of a tiepin, and that’s about the limit. Until you decide to have no MP3 player at all.
One possible future is where the MP3 players are simply built into the accessories. Headphones simply have the MP3 playing circuitry built right into them, and a few small buttons on your earpiece. Anything could hold an MP3 player: your jacket, your jeans, your books, your backpack, your bike.
Two factors might limit this: 1. It could be a pain to have to recharge and sync all the different devices that want to be MP3 players, as opposed to plugging in a single MP3 player where you need it (though solar recharging and wireless syncing might well address these problems); 2. it’s nice to be able to upgrade your MP3 player independent of upgrading your jacket. In fact, I think one strong case for cars to have an iPod dock is that car manufacturers can stop worrying about integrating all the latest consumer electronics. Who wants a car with a 5 year old GPS and audio system, when you could plug in the latest iPod and get a fully up-to-date experience?
Voice commands
We can also reduce the size of the music player by removing the buttons altogether. If a microphone is available, such as on the earplugs, then voice commands could be used to navigate the music. “Play”, “Pause”, “Next”, “Louder”, etc. This enables more flexibility to access a large music library. For instance, “Play the playlist: My Exercise Music” or “Play Beethoven”.
Voice commands allow more general instructions to be given, and since your little MP3 player has the computational power to do many other things, voice commands enable it to be used as a more general-purpose device.
The technology is available today to do a fairly good job of this, though imperfectly. Fortunately, playing the wrong song doesn’t generally do much harm, so it hardly needs to be perfect. Unfortunately, voice recognition is not incredibly robust across all the different accents, dialects, and languages used around the world, so this may not be viable near-term for a company hoping to sell their music player globally.
Also, voice commands don’t work for all circumstances. The audio may be inscrutable in noisy environments, like parties, and speaking your instructions may be inappropriate in quiet environments, like workplaces and libraries.
Fashion statements — Swatch style
As the price comes down on MP3 players, it makes progressively less business sense to manufacture and sell them, as the profit margins disappear. This was a problem with digital watches, and Swatch showed a smart approach to address this: they created watches as fashion statements. Thus, consumers pay for the fashion as much as the functionality.
Fashion music players give people reasons to buy more than one and to match the device to their mood, personality, season, and ensemble.
Swatch also has watches with functional variations. For instance, I had a Swatch that would spin the clock hands to randomly choose an “answer” to a question that appeared on the clock face, much like using a Magic 8 Ball. Making limited-edition music players with various special features enables consumers to keep exploring and enjoying them. It also gives the manufacturer a chance to explore features to see which may be popular and worth continuing in their primary models.
The future of the minimalist MP3 player
(or Conversing with my purple Shuffle)
(or Conversing with my purple Shuffle)
Sunday, September 16, 2007
