Internal memory in Soundcore products

#1

Often, when I do physical work, I find it difficult to take my smartphone with me to listen to music on my earbuds.
Sometimes I also exceed the distance of 10m when using Bluetooth and the sound is interrupted then.
In these cases, I would really need any internal memory or the ability to use a micro SD card. Then I could save my favorite music, audiobooks in the internal memory of the earbuds or on a micro SD card inserted into the slot built into the headphones (or the speaker). It would be very convenient for me.
This would probably not significantly increase the cost of headphones and would give new opportunities to listen to music in places where there is no Internet (also uninhabited places, mountains, forest) or the Bluetooth connection is difficult.
We wouldn’t have to carry a smartphone with us when doing sports. Finally, to listen to music outside the home, we would not have to carry a smartphone with us everywhere.

What do you think about this idea? What would be better: internal memory or a slot for a micro SD memory card?
Are there any chances to implement it in future Soundcore products?

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#2

It did exist in this product

The issue with that specific implementation was you could not select which track to start from so it would start at the same track each time. It also had a radio you didn’t mention.

So the challenge for Soundcore is not storage, it is the user interface, for selecting music. They effectively outsource this to the phone currently.

You still can buy it, despite Mini 2 , Mini 3 made subsequently.

Sounds like you want to buy an iPod with Aux connection? That is precisely how people solve this problem for the last 20 years.

#3

@The_Professor I would like most: Liberty 2 Pro ++,
Q 35 ++, Motion Boom ++ with built-in internal memory for example 1Gb and be independent when playing music from smartphone, computer …

#4

Internal storage within in-ear buds has engineering challenges, space for storage or a SD slot.

For all the other platforms, it’s just a marketing decision.

Engineering determines if it’s possible, marketing determines if its profitable.

Issue is the UI, controls, so how do you select which music. Oh yes, use your phone obviously. Oh no, it’s too far away. You see the problem. UI = a display. Then add codec support issue, MP3, which bitrate you support.

You’re asking effectively for this to be created again.

image

Or this you see the need for a UI on the speaker to select which music.

image

Now then you could invent something new here, you could still use the phone for the UI, but the phone sends a playlist / instruction to the speaker which then follows that playlist independently. You’d then have only a SD slot in the speaker, and the Soundcore app, and the app would tell the speaker what to play next off the SD internal speaker memory - that saves the cost and complexity of a UI physically on the speaker. Would that be a happy compromise?

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#5

I appreciate the knowledge on the soundcore mini with the sd card in it, @The_Professor . I was trying to remember that like a few few days ago and was thinking it was the Flare mini. I knew I was not going crazy but just had the wrong device :rofl:

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#6

A display is not needed.
In this case, it would be enough for me to skip to the next track or go back to the previous track. There is also no display in small portable speakers.
Q35, Motion Boom
has a lot of space you can fit all the technology.
It would be the “Walkman or Discman on the head :joy:”.

#7

As far as smaller devices, it is probably not viable and you run into that 80 / 20 rule where the number of people want is not enough to create it. i think cost would be a lot in earbuds for sure

With that said, I potentially could see it in other speakers potentially. The issue we have is we do not know what soundcore or other companies have done on this research for viability and issues from it. They could have done it but say the vibrations was causing issues or they could not make the device waterproof and that was a bigger selling point than an sd card.

So if 80 percent are people using their phones then that 20 percent is not high enough to try to make it.

I think it it is a good idea overall.

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#8

@The_Professor: " Would that be a happy compromise?"

If this solution could be used in headphones, it would be great.
For example, plan your playlist in the Soundcore app before you leave home. The app sends a command to the headphones. The headphones implement the application’s command. And I can go jogging without a smartphone (without unnecessary burden.
For me it’s a revelation :+1:t2:!

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#9

Some Bluetooth speakers have already had slots for a thumb drive. Adding a memory card/internal memory to headphones should be doable. Soundcore lets you configure controls via the App on some models (iirc) so setting a back and forward track should also be doable. I think the hardest nut to crack would be adding it to Earbuds (because of the size constraint).

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#10

I understand your arguments.
Bluetooth connectivity is great, but don’t you sometimes feel like a “dog on a 10 meter chain” of Bluetooth?
I often feel like that. For example, when I listen to music and want to throw away the garbage - I have to take my smartphone with me, because when I exceed 10 meters then
there will be silence in the headphones instead of music.
Internal memory can break this “chain”. Thanks to this, we could have more freedom: music from the smartphone and music from the internal memory.

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#11

If that would be difficult to do in earbuds then it probably wouldn’t be hard to do in headphones. There is a lot of space.
And wouldn’t you want such a memory in Motion Boom :slightly_smiling_face:?

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#12

The following ideas are all technically viable. Professor (patent pending)

  • earbuds. A small amount of local storage of the order of a few hundred MB. The main storage is on the phone, and you can instruct the next few tracks to be cached on the buds, so the MP3 is transported via BT to the buds, and then played locally. You can then be remote from the phone and keep playing music, for of the order of a few hours. The buds can only pause/play and go forwards/backwards within the cached tracks. Some SoC have already 8MB which is roughly 8 minutes of music, so that would have to increase. You have this idea already with some smartwatches and Google Play, the watch has often 8GB storage but buds would struggle to be this large, but certainly a few hundred MB is viable.

  • headphones. There is significantly more headroom to easily put GB of storage internally. So you could have more locally store music and the app configures the source. No need to cache as above.

  • speakers. Even more headroom and you could probably add an SD slot.

Not viable is:

  • anything involving DRM where the app must unlock. e.g. Spotify. The media is encrypted over network and decrypted in hardware on non-rooted devices and then becomes a streaming decrypted media which can be transported over bluetooth. You cannot move this to anything lightweight or cheap as the SoC hardware is quite a bit bigger. So the above is restricted to decrypted media not needing DRM, e.g. MP3.
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#13

I think it depends on the device. I have seen some soundcore devices where the BT is not as great such as the Spirit Dots 2 but I have others where the BT signal is a lot better. I had a few where the signal did not get bad until after 40 meters away when I took my garbage up for pickup that is about 50 meters from my house and device location.

Well @The_Professor is already ahead of me on idea. I was thinking that the sd card in the earbuds would either make it bulkier.

His thought was similar to mine. Nowadays you can have a lot more mb/gb in such a small size device. I thought maybe expand the earbuds storage so that you had your dedicated storage for the earbuds and a partitioned area for you to save music on.

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#14

@Duane_Lester When I leave the house, 3 very thick walls are an obstacle for Bluetooth - the range is then reduced to approx. 7 meters :frowning:.
The charging case could also be the “main, large storage” of files, playlists. In the case of a small amount of memory in the earbuds, it would then be possible (via an app) to select and transfer only a specific playlist from the “storage” directly to the earbuds.

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#15

Well I am in a rural area. So I take it out onto my porch and was listening as I took up the garbage. I did this for a test and did it unobstructed. Normally they will say the distance is about 45 to 60 feet (15 to 20 meters) but wall are a different story. :slight_smile:

#16

You described it all very well :clap:.
My humorous association :grinning::

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#17

One external wall, insulated with styrofoam, is up to 0.65 meters thick.
And which earbuds had such a long Bluetooth range?

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#18

If you own a smart watch it does all of this already. You tell your phone to copy music to the watch, and your audio device connects to the watch.

I did try it once. It did work but the extra load on the watch made it drain battery ridiculously fast.

I also once tried a smart watch with LTE and forward calls to watch and leave phone behind. I got that to work pretty good.

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#19

@The_Professor Unfortunately, I do not have such a watch and I did not know about its possibilities.
I’m slowly starting to be a technological dinosaur … :joy:

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#20

That’s ok.

If you’re old enough in technology you’ll know about OS. Operating System. If you’re having too many functions (storage, battery, media, codecs, etc) together in one place it becomes unfeasibly complex to code in a SoC (System on Chip). You need a SoC to shorten the wires and the power losses (linear on wire length due to Ohm’s Law).

So if you make something too complicated then you need an OS.

Then the app runs on the OS. So you then need the app developers.

So the OS wars began.

Palm OS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, etc.

As the developers only will support the most popular, the OS wars killed anything not critically popular. This is why the Soundcore app exists - based on only supporting the two most popular OS - the technically superior Android and the technically weaker iOS.

If Soundcore seek to put too much intelligence into their audio products, so they act autonomously without being a client (sink) to a source (phone) then they have to pick an OS.

Currently the lightest OS is busybox, based on Linux (Android is similarly) and is used on routers and other complex devices which need OS. Routers with USB ports to host media to stream, is the exact same issue where it calls for an OS. Similar is OpenWRT.

There are some significant expensive corpses along the OS wars history.

The SoC that Soundcore seem to have used the last couple of years is BES 2300 and Qualcomm. For sure Qualcomm can run Android, not so sure for BES.

Soundcore is making their products progressively complex, and putting more complexity into their app (running on Android / iOS). If they try to make their audio products too complex they’ll get into the exact same conundrum in the early 1990s of needing a portable OS. They probably can do that if they used Qualcomm SoC in their buds / speakers. But at a cost. I’d be very cautious if I were within Soundcore to decide to that as then you’re building a platform, equivalent to launching a new phone.

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