PortalPlayer Plans MP3 Platform
By Nate Zelnick
Sometimes it's better not to look too closely at a work in progress, such as the MP3 player, which mixes the insane pace of technology development with the cutthroat competition of the consumer electronics industry. In retrospect, we'll all wonder why it made sense to build a device tied to a file format when what people really wanted was to listen to music.
With MP3 players poised to flood the market, the loopholes that allowed Diamond to get its Rio into consumers' hands are growing into real problems. Diamond parried the litigious Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) attempt to kill its device by invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Bill. That bill specifically exempts making copies using a PC to a device that itself can't upload files. But that same loophole means that MP3 devices will continue to live in the land of computer peripherals.
Walking the legal and technical tightrope, PortalPlayer Inc. plans to announce next week a low-cost, low-power MP3 "system on a chip." It hopes the new product will do for digital music what Rockwell's single-chip modems did for communications: create a platform that allows electronics companies to focus on integration and packaging rather than on building a better version of a discrete product.
PortalPlayer's Tango line provides both playback and encoding, and it has some nifty extensibility features so manufacturers and consumers won't get stuck in a technological backwater as compression formats and approaches evolve. More than just making MP3 a part of any kind of music machine -- whether it's in a car, part of a stereo deck, or in a portable package -- the addition of on-device encoding is a direct play to the wide swathe of music consumers who want music, not another reason to sit in front of their computers.
This is precisely what the CE industry wants and what the RIAA is trying to curtail. PortalPlayer has provided the hooks for the stalled Secure Digital Music Initiative, which the RIAA threw together last summer in an attempt to get ahead of the digital distribution curve. Tango supports SDMI phase one and allows for a firmware upgrade to phase two.
In fact, flexibility is clearly going to be PortalPlayer's strength. Instead of trying to pick a winner in among the song-storage techniques, Tango supports all available options including flash RAM, Sony's Memory Stick, compact Flash, and hard drive interfaces, and it can be extended to support others. A codec-on-demand feature can be used to deliver a Windows Media decoder directly to a device that has only MP3 playback if a consumer tries to add a song in WMA format to his playlist for seamless playback. To complete the package, PortalPlayer throws in its own Windows music-management software for OEMs to customize.
PortalPlayer hasn't yet announced companies that will adopt Tango, but expect devices based on its integrated package in time for the winter holidays.
