Neuros
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Neuros Digital Audio Computers are portable audio units designed for playback and recording of audio in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and non-DRM WMA formats.
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Design
Neuros Digital Audio Computers feature a two-piece design, separating the unit into a player and a "backpack". The player unit is upgradeable by firmware upgrade from the website. The advantages of these design decisions are that you can upgrade your player/backpack without paying for an entirely new model. There are currently two types of backpacks. The smaller battery backpack contains a pair of NiMH batteries and use the player's internal flash memory of 128 MB or 256 MB (Neuros II) for storage. The larger HD backpacks contain a 2.5" hard drive (20 GB for Neuros I, 20-80 GB, the over-20 GB units being the newer USB2 models), a LiIon battery and a USB 2.0 connector on the USB2 models. The USB2 backpack can be used separately from the player as a stand-alone USB hard drive. The flash memory inside the player is used as cache when playing from HD.
They have a 1/8" headphone jack, line in (for recording from any audio source), standard USB connector (the first line used USB 1.1, now backpacks are available for USB 2.0), and power-in jack for recharging.
Features
HiSi
HiSi records a 30-second sample from radio or microphone, for later matching with an online database (service managed by Relatable (http://www.relatable.com/)) to identify the song. HiSi is currently being reconsidered, and may be removed in future units. The Relatable service has since ceased, and Digital Innovations is seeking a new provider for a similar service.
NeuroCast
NeuroCast (formerly known as MyFi) allows you to broadcast audio on the Neuros to FM radio, instead of playing it through the headphone (line-out) jack. The operating range for NeuroCast is up to 6 metres (20 feet).
Record
The Neuros can be used to record audio (using built-in mic, line-in, or radio) to WAV or MP3 format.
Removable Backpack
The Neuros player is flash-based, available in 128MB and 256MB capacities. It can dock with a hard-drive backpack for more storage when the larger size/weight is not a concern.
FM Radio
The Neuros can tune into FM radio.
Customizable menus
It is possible to customize the Neuros menus using the synchronization manager
Presets
Neuros offers five programmable preset buttons that can be set to FM stations, songs, play lists or recordings.
Play Queue
The Neuros offers the ability to "queue" up songs so that you can choose the next song while one song is still playing. You are able to move around the order just as you would do in a computer music player such as Winamp (http://winamp.com/).
Support
The Neuros is supported under Windows and there is unofficial support under Linux, Mac OS X and any possible OS which can run Java and is able to mount a USB-drive.
The manufacturer's support is considered very good by most customers, plus there is a very active user group filling the forum pages at the neurosaudio.com website and dedicating their time to help other users. There is even an unofficial FAQ-page (http://www.neurosfaq.com/), which tries to pull all important things out of the forums and make it easier to find answers to specific questions/problems.
The Neuros uses a database that is built by synchronization software to provide quick access to all the information stored in the tags of your songs.
There are currently 4 synchronization managers to choose from:
- Neuros Synchronization Manager (NSM) (http://www.neurosaudio.com/) is written for the Windows platform and .NET and is the official supported version from DI.
- Neuros Database Manipulator (NDBM) (http://neurosdbm.sourceforge.net/) is written in Java and requires JDK 1.4 or newer.
- Sorune (web) (http://www.sorune.com/) is written in Perl.
- Positron (http://www.xiph.org/positron/) which is written in Python and mainly intended for Linux users.
The creation of multiple synchronization managers was simplified by the release of the database format information as well as the source code to the original synchronization manager, NSM, available on http://open.neurosaudio.com/.
Open Source Firmware, Open Hardware
Both the .NET-based synchronization manager, NSM, and the firmware have been released as open source. Documentation and information about these projects can be found at open.neurosaudio.com. An unofficial IRC channel can be found at #neuros on irc.freenode.net (irc://irc.freenode.net/neuros). The open firmware development (http://neuros-firmware.sourceforge.net/) is hosted on Source Forge and has produced a firmware that has been verified to work on the Neuros. A version implementing some customizations is available via CVS.
Hardware schematics for the Neuros were released December 8, 2004 and are available at open.neurosaudio.com (http://open.neurosaudio.com/extra/NeurosSchematics.zip).
Company Information
The Neuros is manufactured by division of Digital Innovations called Neuros Audio, LLC. DI was founded in 1995 in Chicago, Illinois and achieved initial success by selling CD and DVD scratch repair kits. The CEO of Neuros Audio, LLC is Joe Born.
External link
- NeurosAudio.com (http://www.neurosaudio.com/)