Personal Jukebox

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Two versions of the Personal Jukebox: Black (Music) Compressor (rebranded, by HyTek) and Titanium PJB-100 (original, by HanGo)
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Two versions of the Personal Jukebox: Black (Music) Compressor (rebranded, by HyTek) and Titanium PJB-100 (original, by HanGo)

The Personal Jukebox (also known as PJB-100 or Music Compressor) was the first commercially sold hard disk digital audio player. Introduced late in 1999, it preceded the Apple iPod and similar players. The original design was developed by Compaq Research (SRC and PAAD groups) starting in May 1998. Compaq did not release the player themselves, but licensed the design to HanGo Electronics Co., Ltd. of South Korea.

HanGo first presented the device at the COMDEX trade show on November 15, 1999. Several versions were produced in the following years, the original having 4.86 GB of hard disk space and a non-backlit LCD. Later versions sported a backlight and were fitted with larger disks up to 60 GB. The PJB can be upgraded with standard 2.5 in (64 mm) laptop drives with relative ease, although this operation was not intended to be carried out by the end user. Its 24 bit digital signal processor, stable firmware and intuitive, easy-to-use interface made it an immediate success with a (relatively small) group of users, who still consider it to be a top MP3 player today.

Compaq Research also published a software development kit for the unit, which enabled users to develop a variation of tools, drivers and applications for many different operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Contents


[edit] History

[edit] Development

The PJB was created as a personal audio appliance prototype by DEC Systems Research Center and Palo Alto Advanced Development group (PAAD). The Project started in May 1998, a month before the Digital Equipment Corporation merger into Compaq was completed, and a final product was brought to market in November 1999. The PJB was the first hard-disk-based MP3 player made available to the end user (other vendors had announced hard-disk players but failed to introduce them in time).

The "100" in the "PJB-100" name was chosen from the capacity of the original 4.86 GB hard drive in the first Personal Jukebox. With this drive, the unit was expected to hold about 100 popular (45 minute) music CDs encoded at 128 kbit/s. The name was kept for the later models with bigger hard drives, even though these could technically store a much larger number of albums.

The impact of the unit was significant as it changed the focus of future digital music player development. It was the first MP3 portable to garner a "Milestone" product designation from MP3 Newswire, which they defined in their January 2000 review of the PJB-100 as "any product whose breakthrough innovations are so significant, they influence the future course of its industry".

[edit] Licensing, marketing and distribution

Instead of manufacturing the player themselves, Compaq licensed the design to HanGo, who called it "Personal Jukebox - PJB-100". The license from Compaq to HanGo was worldwide exclusive; nobody else could license the technology from Compaq during the term of the HanGo license, although HanGo had a distribution agreement with the Korean company HyTek. HanGo rebranded the HyTek units as "Personal Jukebox - (Music) Compressor".

HanGo took the PJB-100 into mass production and introduced it to the public at the Las Vegas COMDEX in November 1999. The first units were sold in a special auction held by MP3.com, with bids exceeding US$1000. Some winners received their players before the end of 1999. The first auctioned units were hand-built by the Compaq engineers who designed it, and had single-digit serial numbers.

The campaign for the PJB was "Can I? Yes, you can!". It showed a large stack of CDs next to the small unit, representing the amount of music that the device could hold. The public relations agency in charge of press work and the product launch was Media Perspectives of Charlotte, North Carolina. Beyond the launch, the PJB apparently went without advertising or marketing.

Distributors included MP3FactoryDirect in the U.S., Swiss-based UHU Distribution (Portacomp AG) in Europe, and online retailer ThinkGeek. The Compressor was available from Hammacher Schlemmer for a limited period.

The firmware continued to be developed by Compaq through the life of the product.

[edit] Models

As development on 2.5 in (64 mm) hard disk drives progressed, various models of the PJB were commercially available. A major difference was that later versions had a backlit LCD.

The following hard disk sizes were used:

  • 4.86 GB
  • 6 GB (June 2000, replaced 4.86 GB model)
  • 10 GB (replaced 6 GB model)
  • 20 GB (February 2001, replaced 10 GB model)
  • 30 GB
  • 40 GB (April 2002)
  • 60 GB (August 2002)

The PJB was available in various colors (not all colors were available from all distributors):

  • black with black buttons
  • titanium with black buttons
  • translucent light blue with grey buttons
  • translucent dark blue with gold buttons
  • translucent red (very rare and only at the beginning of distribution)
  • translucent dark green with silver buttons (may not have actually been distributed)

[edit] Specifications

[edit] Physical specifications

Measurements: 150×26×80mm (5.9×1×3.15 inches) (W×H×D)

Weight: 280g (9.9 ounces), 304g (10.7 ounces) including battery


Note: Of course, this makes the PJB a rather bulky device by today's standards respectively in comparison to today's modern devices based on either 1.8" or 1.0" hard disk drives or flash memory. This is owed mostly due to the 2.5" hard disk drive used. On the upside, it allowed for a rather large (if only low-resolution) display and intuitive and easy-to-use concept of operation, still valued by many of today's users.

[edit] Audio specifications

Playback: MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) at bitrates of 8 to 320kbit/s and a sample rate of 44.1kHz (playback support for WAV is in the firmware, but is not enabled - it was used by the developers before the MP3 decoder was licensed from Fraunhofer IIS).

Audio signal-to-noise ratio (S/N): >90dB

Audio total harmonic distortion (THD): <0.1%

Frequency response: 20Hz to 20kHz

Audio output power: >50mW at 32 ohm impedance


Note: There seems to be a minor bug in the firmware and/or hardware design, causing a slight delay of the right audio channel.[1] A user broke it down to this:

"The specifics are that the right channel output is delayed 22.7 microseconds from the left channel output. This corresponds with the sample rate, 44.1kHz (1/44100 = 22.7 microseconds). The problem is in the order that the digital audio data is conveyed from the DSP to the DAC, and it could probably be corrected with a little bit of hardware. I verified these timings with an oscilliscope."[2]

The user who originally mentioned this has posted some theoretic fixes to this probem, requiring modifications to the hardware. Thus far, no working technical solution to this issue has been documented or been made available, though.

[edit] Hardware

[edit] Digital signal processor (DSP)

The "heart" of the PJB is its Digital Signal Processor. It controls the hard-drive, buttons, LCD, USB interface and handles MP3-decoding for playback. The PJB uses a 24 bit Motorola 56309 DSP running at 33 MHz. The MP3 codec (which is about 2 MB in assembly DSP code) was licensed from Thomson and Fraunhofer IIS.

[edit] Memory

The PJB has 12 MB of DRAM and 1 MB of flash memory.

The DRAM is used to buffer data (between 8 and 12 minutes of music, depending on the bitrate used for encoding) from the hard disk during playback. The buffer allows the disk to be run only intermittently, preserving battery life. When the hard-disk is stopped, battery life is preserved; the ramp-loaded heads also retract from the disk surface, helping to reduce the possibility of damage.

The flash memory houses the firmware as well as the bootstrap.

[edit] Communication interface

To up- and download data, the PJB is equipped with a USB 1.1 Type B connector. Inside is a Philips PDIUSBD12 USB peripheral controller, which averages a raw throughput of about 400 kB/s. Early prototypes used Ethernet instead of USB for data transmission, which was significantly faster than USB 1.1. USB was used in production models because it was more common than Ethernet on standard home computers in 1998.

[edit] Display

The PJB's LCD has a resolution of 128×64 pixels (2:1 ratio) at a diameter of 3 inches (7.62 mm). Later versions of the PJB also featured a backlit display (the backlight comes on when the unit is powered on, or a button is pressed and turns off automatically after a few seconds). The character set the PJB uses internally is Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), with some minor variations. One of the Compaq developers stated that "it's missing some of the symbols in the range 160 to 255 (because I got bored when I was creating them :-). Upper case accented characters are rendered unaccented, because that looks better within the font's 9 pixel height. There are some strange glyphs in the range 0 to 31, used for the various symbols on the screen."

[edit] Hard drive

The real innovation when the PJB was developed and first introduced was its 2.5" laptop hard drive for music storage, a break from the then-common flash-based storage that other mobile music players featured. While flash players could store between 32 and a maximum of 128 MB at the time, the first PJB could store 4.86 GB of music. While the PJB-100 was updated as bigger drives became available, it is also possible for end users to replace the hard drive (although voiding the warranty in that case). Not every 2.5" drive can be used in every PJB, while some others can be used but drain the battery very quickly.

A minor modification (a green or blue wire soldered to a specific place on the mainboard, see this picture) was made in later-model PJBs. The most important factor for models not having this modification is that the drive used must have separate logic and motor pins (pins 41 and 42, both are used for powering on the drive). While the logic pin is always supplied by the PJB, the power pin is only supplied when there is need to spin the drive up and buffer data into memory. If the pins are internally shorted together, the drive still consumes power when powered off, hence draining the battery very quickly. Models having the modification seem to have fewer problems with higher power consumption. The modification was HanGo's solution to the problem that fewer and fewer new drives were being designed with this split logic/motor pin-assignment. It is not easy to tell which units have the modification. It has been suggested that models that came with a 20 GB IBM/Hitachi drive have the modification, while earlier models do not.

Detailed instructions on how to modify the motherboard to enable using any of the hard drives listed below (and maybe a good number of others more) can be found here (PDF file at the pjb-100 Yahoo! group, free registration or a Yahoo! account necessary).

Physically, only drives with a height of 9.5 mm fit into the PJB (although the older 12.5 mm drives are not produced anymore today anyway). Finally, large cache sizes (above 2 MB) seem to consume more power as well. Drives with higher rotation-speeds (5,400 or 7,200 opposed to 4,200 RPM) consume more power, since the drive needs more power to spin up - this does not improve anything in the PJB and will just drain the battery faster. The manufacturer used drives by IBM (later Hitachi) and the Toshiba MK-GAx series.

The following drives are reported to work (although not all work on the units without the modification mentioned above):

  • IBM Travelstar DJSA-220 (20 GB)
  • Hitachi DK23CA-20 (20 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-2016GAP (20 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-2016MAP (20 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-3017GAP (30 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-4018GAP (40 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-4018GAS (40 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-6021GAS (60 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-8025GAS (80 GB)
  • Toshiba MK-1031GAS (100 GB) (one user reported having this hard-drive working in his unit on January 12, 2005)

[edit] Buttons/controls

The PJB has 6 buttons on the front:

  • left/previous/rewind
  • right/next/forward
  • up
  • down
  • play/pause
  • stop/power off

Volume is adjusted by a wheel on the unit's right side, using a digital mechanism (it can be turned indefinitely). It also is possible to click or push the wheel, which pauses playback and turns the unit off after about one minute. When the unit is powered off and the wheel is pressed for a few seconds, playback resumes. This also works when the buttons are locked, in case the main controls cannot be easily accessed.

On the same side is also a small switch, which locks the unit’s controls (except for the wheel).

Between the wheel and lock switch is a standard 3.5 mm jack for connecting headphones, speakers etc. Above the lock switch is the jack for the provided AC adapter. Above that is the USB-B-connector used for up- and downloading data onto the unit.

[edit] Battery and power supply

The PJB is not powered by regular dry cell batteries like most other players at the time of its development, but by a provided HanGo (probably rebaranded Sanyo, hence the same ID) UR-110 3.6 V/1350 mA Lithium ion battery. HanGo also sold a more powerful 1600 mA battery to be used in the PJB.

Some suitable replacements for the original battery (which is no longer being manufactured/distributed by HanGo or Sanyo) are the higher-capacity Sanyo UR-111 (3,7V/1700mAh) as well as the Sharp models AD-MS10BT (3,6V/1850mAh) and MD-MS200. Since li-ion batteries tend to lose the ability to hold full charge after some years, even buying a stocked version of the original battery is discouraged, since it will very likely not be able to perform very well to begin with, having been in stock for at least three years or more.

In the past, some users have repeatedly reported problems when using other-branded, higher-capacity batteries with some hard-drives having a cache of 8 MB or more, although a reason could not be determined and it apparently only happens with certain combinations of hardware revisions/hard-drives/batteries.

The PJB includes a 5V power supply which charges the battery and also enables playback without a battery in the unit at all. The charging control circuit for the battery is built into the PJB itself, not the power supply, so the use of a replacement power supply requires only the proper voltage (5V DC), polarity (center +) and sufficient current capacity (2.5A).

[edit] Accessories

[edit] Included accessories

Compared to other players, the PJB included a large number of useful high-quality accessories. Details varied from distributor to distributor, but UHU/Portacomp AG included:

  • Koss Porta Pro headphones
  • Leather case with belt clip
  • 5 V power supply with converters for European and American power outlets (except UK)
  • 1350 mW/3.6 V Li-Ion battery (see the battery section
  • USB 1.1 compliant A-B connector cable
  • Cinch-Audio cable 3.5 mm to RCA
  • Manual (in German and English)
  • CD with drivers and Jukebox Manager software (Windows, Mac OS/OS X, Linux)

[edit] Optional accessories

Various accessories were offered by different distributors (among them various headphones and speakers, also for use with other audio hardware than the PJB and replacements for the included accessories):

  • 1600 mAh Li-Ion Battery
  • Waterproof neoprene bag for use of the PJB on a beach or pool
  • Audio-cassette adapter for playback on car/home stereos
  • Swan-neck car-holder
  • Various magnetic mounts to attach the PJB within a car
  • Power-supply-adapters for car cigarette-lighters

[edit] Firmware

[edit] Features and version history

The latest firmware version, which surfaced in December 2003 is v2.3.3-alpha; the latest stable version is v2.3.2, introduced in mid-2001. Initially, the functions provided by the player were basic: when music was played back, selecting another track would immediately start this track and stop the current one; playlists had to be created on the computer; files could only be uploaded to the PJB, but not downloaded back to the computer. New firmware versions came out regularly, but were mostly bug fixes with very few new functions introduced.

Later firmware versions added some of the most requested features:

  • Files could be transferred from player to PC
  • The ability to browse without interrupting playback
  • Some (hidden) games were added (see easter eggs)
  • Temporary playlists can be created during playback with the 2.3.3-alpha firmware, a convenience for DJ'ing with the unit.

The following versions of the firmware were available:

[edit] Sets, discs, tracks

To understand navigation on the PJB one must know that its file system does not allow for variable folder-depths. Instead, all data on the PJB is organized hierarchically in three levels, called Sets, Disc and Tracks. There can be a number of Sets each including a number of Discs, each including a number of Tracks. What each represents is completely up to the user. A Set could be the name of the artist, a character, a genre, the title of a sampler or a soundtrack, etc. Following this example, a disc could be the name of the album/single or of the artist.

Here is an (abbreviated) example of how a PJB user could organize his music collection:

  • Atrocity
    • Werk 80
      • Tainted Love
      • Der Mussolini
      • Wild Boys
    • Gemini
    • Todessehnsucht
  • Black Sabbath
    • Paranoid
      • Paranoid
      • Iron man
  • All Artists - A
    • Abba
      • Money, Money, Money
    • Alice Cooper
    • Apocalyptica
  • Grunge
    • Nirvana
      • Floyd the Barber
    • Pearl Jam
  • Pulp Fiction Soundtrack
    • Kool & The Gang
      • Jungle Boogie
    • Dusty Springfield
      • Son of a Preacher Man
  • Audio Books
    • J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
      • A long awaited party

This method, of course, has some advantages and disadvantages. For most people, three levels of organization are sufficient, although occasionally a fourth level would be useful. If you think of a good system of organization in advance and keep to it, even very large collections can easily be managed, even though another person searching for a specific track may have difficulties finding what thy are looking for, if they do not know the chosen method of organization. Here players like the iPod have the search advantage, since all kinds of tags (artist, genre, album) can be searched dynamically.

[edit] User interface and navigation

The PJB's large display shows all the relevant information at the same time. It is divided into seven lines and looks like this:

The higlighted number is the bitrate (not shown when the file is encoded at 128 kbit/s). The symbol next to it indicates the current volume.
The higlighted number is the bitrate (not shown when the file is encoded at 128 kbit/s). The symbol next to it indicates the current volume.

The lines are selected with the up/down buttons while Sets, Discs, Tracks and various playback options are selected with the Left/Right buttons. The Play and Order options interact with each other. This Track/Repeat will play the current track indefinitely. Everything/Shuffle will randomly play every track on the unit, which is one of the favorite modes with many PJB owners. One of the lacking features of the PJB is a proper equalizer, instead it is just possible to increase the bass level in two steps.

Later versions of the firmware include Browse-while-Playing and creating Playlists-on-the-Fly. Both is achieved by pressing and holding down the Play button. This brings up a new line with following options: Play now, Add to playlist, Add to playlist and play, Play after current track, Play after current disc. Discs and Tracks can be added to playlists. If any of the playlist options is selected, a temporary Set "Online Playlists" is created as the last set, and any selected disc is added as Disc. Selected tracks are added to an "Online Playlists" Disc within this Set.

As mentioned before, volume can be adjusted in 21 levels by the wheel on the unit's side, which can also be used to pause a track or to power the unit on, when pressed and held down.

[edit] File system and table of contents (TOC)

The PJB's disk is not formatted as FAT or FAT32 as is the case with most of the players that were released later, and enables those to be mounted as another drive in an operating system. Instead, a unique file system is used, which, while losing the mounting ability, is optimized for the structure of MP3 files (having a cluster size of 128 kB, which equals about 8 seconds of 128-kBit-encoded MP3-music). Therefore managing actions like defragging become unnecessary.

Another option this sort of internal file management brings, is also one of the most interesting and useful of the PJB: Cue points and gapless playback. For instance, if the user rips and uploads a live CD, it sounds like one continuous stream if played on a CD-player. On the other hand. classic computer file systems and some of the design weaknesses of the MP3-format would now force a "gap" of silence to be heard between the single tracks. The PJB allows (if the right method of uploading is used) to store all of these tracks as one continuous stream. Single cue points are used to mark the beginnings and ends of what the PJB display as Tracks. Therefore, if the Disc is played back sequentially, the record will sound as intentioned - gapless.

Another interesting thing that the file system allows for, is the linking of Tracks into various Discs/Sets. Therefore, each track is ideally only stored once on the disc and recurring occurrences of it (for example in playlists or samplers) are just links to the original file. This may help to preserve a good amount of disk space and allows for more tracks to be stored on the disk.

All of this info is stored in the TOC (table of contents). The TOC is stored in a human-readable text-format and can be downloaded, changed with a text editor and re-uploaded to the PJB again. A copy of the TOC is always stored on the unit as well, so errors and damage to the original TOC can usually be fixed without the user having to worry about it (in most cases, users don't even notice anything having been wrong).

While the TOC is conceptually very well designed, it (or rather a design weakness in the firmware) is also the reason for one of the PJBs most annoying limitations: the TOC and additional memory used to set up data and navigation structures (the TOC in a parsed form) must not exceed 1436 kB. While this may sound a lot for a plain text-file, it really is not, when long (full) names for Discs and Tracks as well as a fair amount of linked tracks are used. While it is no problem to have an 80 or 100 GB disk in a PJB, not all of the available space might really be usable because of these TOC-size limitations. One of the original developers recently stated that changing the TOC-size at the expense of disk or buffer memory space would only require a trivial change in the firmware code, although certain reasons probably will prohibit this from ever happening (see the future firmware updates section). The space the TOC/parsed TOC take up can be displayed, along with the free space, by pressing a button combination on newer firmware versions.

[edit] Easter eggs/games

Later versions of the firmware (from 2.3.1 up) include an easter egg screen, when a certain combination of buttons is being pressed (the exact combination differs between versions). In this screen, the user can choose between three different options:

  • play the game Minesweeper
  • play the game Sokoban
  • display the credits (of the developer team at Compaq Corporate Research)

The user can also choose whether the music playback should continue, or if special sound effects should be used.

[edit] Software

[edit] Software development kit

Another unique feature the PJB offers is that the original developers at Compaq Research also designed an SDK (Software Development Kit) for the unit and published it under the Open Source GPL license in 2000. This means anybody with programming skills or interests can develop drivers, tools and software applications for virtually any operating system used today and can also further develop the actual SDK. Some great programs and ideas to be used for the PJB have surfaced since its introduction.

[edit] Drivers

As mentioned, the PJB does not integrate itself as a USB mass storage device into modern operating systems, like most of today's players do (and to be fair, there was no USB Mass Storage class specification available at the time of development). Therefore special drivers are required to make the operating system recognize an attached PJB. Drivers for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS were included, while drivers for Linux were developed by the open source community (including a driver for the current Kernel 2.6).

[edit] Jukebox Manager (Windows, Mac OS)

The included management tool for the PJB is the Jukebox Manager (the latest Windows version is v1.5.6). It is a pretty basic application which can create/delete/manage Sets, Discs and Tracks (when uploading, the user can choose which ID3-tag will represent which level). It can also encode CDs directly onto the PJB and query the CDDB for the proper disc/track information. Finally it can update the firmware. If manipulating some values in the Windows Registry, a hidden menu appears, which can be used to debug and in some cases repair a damaged TOC. The Jukebox Manager does not make use of some of the firmware’s later features, such as downloading tracks back to the computer and does not provide advanced features such as mass-uploading, synchronizing or creating playlists from M3U-playlists.

[edit] pjbExploder (Windows)

Development of the pjbExploder was started by Enea Mansutti in 2001 and later continued by Michael Hotchin. It is an open source project under the GPL, with its development page residing on SourceForge. It is one of the few projects for the PJB which still is actively developed. The latest version currently available is v1.0.46.

It is the tool to use for managing the PJB on a Windows-PC today. It has the same uploading capabilities of Sets/Discs/Tracks as the Jukebox Manager, but also provides additional features, such as mass-uploading, synchronizing, a playlist manager, creation of CUE-sheets, advanced search and sorting options, uploading of non-MP3 data files as well as the ability to re-download tracks to the PC or the playback of tracks on the PJB via the computer's audio hardware (mind you, through USB-interface only, not through an attached audio-cable) in real-time. Starting with version 1.0.42 it also optionally installs the correct PJB drivers for Windows 2000 or XP, eliminating the need for JBM or the drivers to be installed first. The pre-release of version 1.0.45 first introduced support for the download of podcasts.

[edit] MP3Loader (Windows, discontinued)

MP3Loader was a shareware project by Robert Valentino and was popular for its mass-uploading capabilities, either representing fixed directory structures as Set/Discs/Tracks, or using M3u-playlists to generate the structure on the PJB.

[edit] Jukemon (Mac OS X)

A tool for Mac OS X that was developed to replace the Jukebox Manager, which would only run on the classic Mac OS. It also implements the PJB's USB drivers, so when using Jukemon, no additional drivers for the PJB are required. It's a full Cocoa application using all of the APIs features. It can up- and download files to and from the PJB, interprets ID3-tags accordingly and also uses them to enable the creation of Sets or Discs named after more than one tag. It has a function to enable gapless playback (if the files are encoded to be gapless) and also features debug output to the console. It is also open source under the GPL.

[edit] OpenPJB/PJB Tools/pjbsdk and minor projects

The OpenPJB/pjbsdk Project on SourceForge tries to provide a base for all (open source) PJB applications, while also further developing the SDK. They also provide the PJB Tools, a collection of tools for the command line of various operating systems, published under the GPL (including documentations and a modified version of the SDK). While not as comfortable to use as applications with a GUI, they are a very useful and mighty bunch of tools providing basic up- and downloading options for both Sets/Discs/Tracks and the TOC. The PJB Tools include the following files:

  • pjb
  • pjbcom
    • pjbcom ActiveX Control: A subproject of pjbcom providing an ActiveX control for Windows
  • pjbdocs
  • pjbsdk
  • pjbwmu

At the files section of the pjb-100 Yahoo! group, users have also posted some very interesting projects created with the help of the SDK. These range from Perl scripts loading music onto the PJB via M3U playlists to Excel-sheets displaying the contents of the unit's TOC and even a fully functional web-browser interface to manage the PJB written in JavaScript. There are also some helpful code-snippets and SDK-related documentation located there.

[edit] Linux projects

There are also various Linux projects operating on SourceForge (some under the banner of the OpenPJB project). These range from Jukebox-Manager-like applications with a GUI for various window managers to projects making the PJB's file system mountable as a drive in Linux. Some of the projects include:

  • Jukebox Manager (KDE)
  • GNOME/GTK+ GUI Personal Jukebox Manager (GNOME)
  • Emacs PJB Manager
  • PJB File System for Linux (Kernel 2.3/4, 2.6)
  • PJB VFS module (for use with Nautilus)
  • pjmirror (written in Perl to synchronize the PJB with data on the PC)

[edit] Future outlook

[edit] (Open source) firmware updates?

With the introduction of Playlists-on-the-Fly in v2.3.3-alpha, a major step towards final user-happiness was achieved. The version seems pretty stable, which doesn't come surprising since the preceding version v2.3.2 is considered virtually rock solid by most of the user base. Some major problems make it unlikely though, that any future updates will be provided: The firmware was always written by people at Compaq and provided to HanGo (this was originally intended as a solution for the transitional phase of the licensing process, but it seems that HanGo never took up developing the firmware and the original developers kept doing it in their spare time from other projects, since most of them had enjoyed the PJB project so much). Most of the original developers do not work for Compaq/HP anymore (at least those who publicly talked about the PJB in the user group don't). HanGo has ceased producing the PJB - most distributors don't even sell it anymore. Compaq was bought by Hewlett-Packard and the two companies merged their product lines - what became of the PJB design and firmware source is unknown to the public. Compared to other players, there were never huge amounts of the PJB sold (which might also be because HanGo provided virtually no marketing for the product and it was almost exclusively sold by distributors, not retailers), therefore there is a relative small user base demanding any updates.

So if no one is willing to develop the firmware at HP and no one cares about it anyway, why not open source it and have some skilled programmers, who are in love with the unit, keep developing it? Unfortunately, there are some reasons that would prohibit that as well: The code used for decoding MP3 in the PJB is owned by Fraunhofer IIS (the encoding algorithms original developers) and is considered one of their "crown jewels" - they would not be happy seeing this part of the firmware become public domain.

Those fears were confirmed in March 2005, as one of the original developers was kind enough to provide necessary contact information for the person at HP research believed to be in charge of the original PJB resources these days. On request, about the possibility of HP improving the firmware, or licensing it under some sort of agreement to a (limited) circle of developers for a binary-only release to the public, the person stated that "[...] Unfortunately, for a variety of business reasons, HP has no plans to update the firmware for that product ourselves, nor are we planning to devise license conditions under which third parties could update the firmware. [...]". This pretty much killed any remaining hope for official improvements to the product in the future. Some time before this, some of the original developers still interested in the project tried similar approaches to employees of HP, but got rebuked in similar ways.

If an agreement with HP could have been reached, it might have been possible to remove some of the unit's current limitations such as the limited TOC-size, or implement some other interesting features, such additional games like Tetris (although one of the original developers stated that they had originally tried getting permission from the license-owners of the game and were denied permission to implement it).

Another option might be to try to create new firmware from scratch. One of the original developers shed some light on the issue and said that the MP3 encoder would have to be completely rewritten in DSP assembly code, which is not a trivial effort. The same goes for other formats that might be considered, like Ogg Vorbis. WAV or FLAC playback might be achievable, although this would also require some assembly code to be written for the specific DSP used in the PJB. It would also require some knowledge that is public domain, such as the DSP toolchain and documentation, as well as some debugging hardware, which is hard to come by these days.

[edit] New models based on the design

The design of the PJB (concerning both hardware and firmware) was revolutionary in its day, and still seems well thought-through about five years after its introduction to the market - still, there are some improvements to be made, using today's technologies.

Some years ago, HanGo announced a successor to the PJB, called the PJB-300, but would not comment on any further details. Since they never followed the announcement up with any more details or even a release date, it is largely considered vaporware these days. Whether the new model would have been based on the same design as the PJB-100, and would have had further improvements over it, or was just a naming convention for a completely different product will probably never be fully resolved.

In an e-mail to the person believed to be currently in charge of the PJB resources (see the above section on future firmware updates) at HP in March 2005 some further bad news (or at least, no big encouragements) concerning the possibility of any new units being developed off the original hardware design were given. The contacted person merely stated "[...] As for potential new products based on the design of the Personal Jukebox, I'm afraid that it is not my place to discuss HP's product plans [...]"

But maybe one day somebody at HP will remember the great design of the unit and will develop a worthy successor of the PJB for the mass-market.

[edit] PJB 2.0 - The original iPod?

Following release of the original PJB-100 product, in the 1999-2000 period, Compaq Research continued work on some follow-up ideas to the PJB according to their roadmap, which anticipated the use of smaller hard drives: 1.8" as in the original iPod and 1.0" as in the iPod Mini. Based on discussions with Toshiba about their upcoming 1.8" drives, the PJB team produced a largely complete design of a second-generation PJB, including industrial, mechanical and electronic design and a port of the firmware to the new hardware. The result bore an uncanny resemblance to the original iPod, and was offered to the Compaq product group in Houston in late 2000, but as with previous attempts, this was again rejected. The management of Compaq Research then stopped the project, since producing designs to be licensed to other companies was not the proper mission of the Research Division. Ironically, Hewlett-Packard later struck a deal with Apple to sell a rebranded iPod as their own hard-disk based MP3-player in 2004 (which they would eventually quit in late July 2005), even though they had a nearly complete design with all the necessary intellectual property (for example: US Patent 6,332,175, see the external links section) and know-how sitting on the shelf. This seems sad, but given the entire PJB team had gradually departured, it would have been very difficult to revive the project.

[edit] PocketDJ - The original idea of Podcasting?

On 6 July 2005 one of the original developers of the unit revealed some rather interesting trivia on what would have been an accompanying service for the (second-generation) PJB. The full post can be read here.

In short, the service, which was developed in 1999-2000, would have been called PocketDJ and closely resembled the idea of what would years later become known as Podcasting.

The large hard-drive of the PJB would have been used to "simulate continuous connectivity" (with the actual content being automatically transferred when the unit was connected to the PC). Using some sort of "recommending technology", a set of virtual radio stations would be created for every user, based on his mood or preferences. A monolithic model was planned, with the emergence of the idea to the open market in mind, which would enable the distribution of both content and playlists over the internet.

Unfortunately, when the idea was being presented to Compaq's CEO and senior VPs, they dismissed it, claiming since they "hadn't invented it, it couldn't be any good". The VP in whose department the idea would fall, pretty much claimed that it sounded like radio - and that nobody listened to radio anymore.

[edit] External links

[edit] General information, discussion and support

[edit] PJB-100 software projects, drivers, firmware and developer infos

[edit] Distributors (just support and accessories these days)

[edit] Articles/reviews about or including info on the PJB-100

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