September 1, 2000

Still champ
Digital audio players remain on top

The leader and still champion among portable appliances remains the digital music player. As one might suspect, the current trend in player development is smaller and, hopefully, cheaper.

However, as this month's feature on audio compression ("Codec capers") hints, the real challenge could be support for more audio formats. Silicon Motion's new BlueBird processor includes a DSP that can not only handle WMA (Windows Media Audio), AAC (Dolby Digital), and MP3 formats, but also perform baseband processing for Bluetooth or IEEE 802.11 wireless links.

Alas, flash memory remains expensive. Unless you're willing to shell out big bucks for spacious flash-memory cards or reprogram your player constantly, you won't have a wide variety of music to play regardless of format. Of course that's not a problem on the PC, and a software developer called J River claims to offer the program with the widest support for different codecs.
J River's Media Jukebox supports MP3, WMA, Quicktime, LiquidAudio, and RealAudio formats. Get it free at www.musicex.com.

—Maury Wright