Texas Instruments Inc has struck up an agreement with QDesign Corp and is working on a reference design for portable music players, said to offer five times the storage capacity of current players. Using a TMS320C5000 digital signal processor and QDesign’s Music Codec software, the design will store and play back QDesign music files, with the option to encode music from audio CDs to both MP3 formats and to QDesign music files, which it says are both smaller and better quality than MP3. TI says it hopes to get the design out late in the third quarter, so manufacturers have time to get products out in time for the Christmas 1999 sales rush.
QDesign, the Vancouver-based company behind the music format used within Apple Compute Inc’s Quicktime versions 3 and 4, only entered the MP3 market a few weeks ago, launching its first MP3 software development kit. But despite including the MP3 encoding option, TI and QDesign are banking on Quicktime as the next platform for portable digital music. Apple claims that there have been eight million downloads of QuickTime 4 since its introduction in April. QDesign says it developed its own Music Codec to deliver high quality audio at low data rates, with the ability to stream full bandwidth stereo audio at high quality over 28.8K modem lines.
TI says its DSPs enable manufacturers to make universal players adaptable to any compression format, and says the players will typically enable 50% longer battery life and a wider range of decompression software and security than competitive designs. The reference design will follow Secure Digital Music Initiative guidelines.
