OK, so Linux may not be used for compact flash applications; however, Linux will definitely be utilized in many of the platforms that will cater to digital music.
To drive the point home, here is an article that talks about how LUCENT has approached Hugo Fiennes (a Linux guru) to work on EPAC applications.
techweb.com
Engineers Drive Craze For MP3
Audio Players
(02/08/99, 11:07 a.m. ET)
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
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."
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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