(COMTEX) B: Engineers Drive Craze For MP3 Audio Players
B: Engineers Drive Craze For MP3 Audio Players
Feb 08, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Every once in awhile, an
entirely new product category springs up while the industry isn't
watching. It's happening right now, riding the coattails of the MPEG-1,
Level 3 audio standard, or MP3.
This popular but contentious standard -- which has drawn fire from the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and groups in Europe
over issues of copyright protection and intellectual property -- is
spawning a grass-roots crop of Internet audio players some say heralds
a revolution in the technology for popular music players.
In large part, the gear is coming not from big corporations but from
engineers such as Hugo Fiennes, a 27-year-old Englishman who has turned
his Internet savvy and enthusiasm for listening to music in his Mazda
MX5 sports car into a start-up company that has customers queued up for
products that have not rolled off the assembly line yet.
Fiennes' "empeg-car" is just one of a clutch of portable, in-home and
in-car MP3 players being worked on around the world. The hardware guide
at the MP3 portal site lists 25 stand-alone MP3 portable players, 10
car players, and 23 computer-tethered players with model names such as
MPMan, yepp, and MPStation. Some are individual hobbyist projects and
others are players slated for volume production by consumer-electronics
companies such as Samsung Electronics.
Their emergence is sending shivers down the recording industry's spine.
The RIAA locked horns with Diamond Multimedia Systems when the San
Jose, Calif., company began shipping its Rio PMP300 portable MP3 player
last year. The Rio has since become a hot seller. Separately, concerns
over MP3's lack of security features prompted the RIAA to promulgate
its own standard for secure Internet music.
Fiennes has become technical director of Empeg Ltd., formed in Well,
England, last year as a result of underground Internet enthusiasm for
his in-car Linux computer running an MP3 digital-audio decoder in
software, which Fiennes built as a personal project. The player, now
reworked from its hobby origins and commercially branded empeg-car,
uses one or two 2.5-inch disk drives to store up to 500 hours of
CD-quality audio -- 7,000 singles or more than 500 albums -- in the
auto dashboard.
The unit, which replaces the standard car radio-cassette player, can
be taken out and linked to a PC to be loaded with audio files. Indeed,
Fiennes has modified the design so that the empeg-car can also be
played through a domestic stereo system.
Songs can be categorized with supplied PC-link software, to provide
selection options triggered by an infrared remote control. A
128-by-32-pixel vacuum fluorescent display indicates which song is
playing and helps with navigation through what is, in effect, a
database.
The initial production run of a few hundred units has just begun at
contract manufacturer Hansatech, in Kings Lynn, England, and models are
due to go on sale over the Internet in mid-March. But anybody getting
in touch with Empeg now to buy one will have to wait.
Fiennes said several thousand people from around the world have
registered their interest in empeg-car over the Internet, effectively
forming a first-come, first-served line. Fiennes said the Empeg player
would list for a little less than $1,000.
Empeg is also discussing selling or licensing the empeg-car design to
established manufacturers. "It's a great calling card. With something
out there, it shows we know what we're doing," Fiennes said. "We have
already spoken to several major electronics companies from Japan and
the United States."
All this is a far cry from how the player began. "When it started, it
wasn't a commercial thing at all," Fiennes said. "I was looking at CD
autochangers for my car, and I thought at the price, I might as well
have an MP3 player."
"Quite a few people did want to have a go, but lots more started
sending in orders or asking when they could buy one. Everyone who saw
the unit instantly wanted one." -- Hugo Fiennes Empeg Fiennes said he
could see the advantage of not having to shuttle CDs between house and
car and saw MP3 could put an entire music collection on a disk drive.
An experienced software and hardware developer who has worked under
contract to Psion and is still under contract to Symbian, he documented
his project on a website.
"Basically, I was just putting up plans and progress reports telling
people what I'd done in case they wanted to have a go," he said. "Quite
a few people did want to have a go, but lots more started sending in
orders or asking when they could buy one. Everyone who saw the unit
instantly wanted one."
Back in March 1998, Fiennes chose an off-the-shelf industrial
embedded-PC board from Advantech, in Taipei, Taiwan, and set out to
build what he then called his "mp3mobile." The board was rugged and
contained all that was needed, including flash memory and audio D/A
converter outputs, he said. It originally held a 150-MHz Cyrix
processor, now upgraded to a 166-MHz Pentium.
Using a standard microprocessor to run the Linux operating system and a
software decoder is not the most power-efficient solution. But it was
quick to develop, and changes can be made easily.
That's important in a fast-moving sector like Internet audio. Indeed,
Fiennes recognizes technical, commercial, or legal developments could
quickly make MP3 obsolete. In that case, a Linux dashboard-mounted
computer would be just as able to run MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding
(AAC) or almost any other emerging standard, he said.
"The main advantages of MP3 are it's good enough in terms of music
quality, it's out there, and it's popular," said Fiennes. But he also
said MP3's image "is clouded by the fact that pirates use it."
In fact, Fiennes is acutely aware that MP3 is a political hot potato.
First off is the potential problem of customers encoding their CD
collections into MP3 format. Fiennes said people already copy CDs onto
analog audio cassettes to play in their automobiles, and that is
usually regarded by the music industry as a legitimate personal use
rather than lost sales.
In any case, the empeg-car could be used entirely for legitimately
recorded MP3 files. But that touches on the second problem: uncertainty
about the MP3 legal situation.
Because MP3 does not protect against copying, the RIAA and five major
record companies late last year launched the Secure Digital Music
Initiative to create an umbrella standard for securely sending digital
music over the Internet.
The move is an attempt to beat back MP3's tidal wave of support. The
recording industry wants to protect artists' work from Internet piracy,
which occurs when MP3 files are downloaded for free and copied onto
users' computers.
The dispute over MP3 erupted into a legal battle between the RIAA and
Diamond Multimedia when that company released its Rio player last
October. The RIAA sought a preliminary injunction to prevent shipment
of the player, which it said violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act
by encouraging piracy of recorded music.
Diamond prevailed, and began shipping the playback-only device in
November. But now hackers have posted software on the Internet that
lets the Rio record digital music files and transfer them to other
devices.
Turmoil over intellectual property even roils the MP3 community itself.
In Europe, the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen, in
Erlangen, Germany, and Thomson Multimedia, in Paris, said they have
patents on technologies fundamental to MP3.
The two companies have decided to pool their patents and claim
royalties for any commercial decoders, all encoders (whether sold or
given away), and also files in MP3 format. The good news for Empeg is
for commercial MP3 players, the two companies are typically asking only
$1 per copy. Fraunhofer said on its website, it has not asserted its
claimed patent rights at numbers below about 10,000 units.
Royalty Scheme For MP3-format files, Fraunhofer suggests a royalty
scheme of a penny a song, or 1 percent of the value. But whether this
would apply to private encoding remains unclear, as does the
practicality of Fraunhofer and Thomson collecting such royalties.
For Fiennes and Empeg, MP3 isn't the whole story. "We can carry almost
any decoder," he said. "We may well expand empeg-car to support
multiple formats. We've been talking to Liquid Audio and Lucent
Technologies."
The Perpetual Audio Coding scheme developed at Lucent's Bell Labs is
being proposed as a U.S. digital radio standard; Liquid Audio, in
Redwood City, Calif., touts an Internet audio compression and
encryption algorithm of the same name.
In addition, Fiennes said, "We're also following progress in the
[RIAA's] Secure Digital Music Initiative."
At least initially, Empeg will avoid Fraunhofer's more stringent
position on encoder software where the suggested royalty is $25 a copy.
"We won't supply encoder software, because most of our early customers
will already have encoders," Fiennes said.
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Copyright (C) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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