Hi Jonathan,
First, I just want to be clear on what you are saying about alternative
format support on BrailleNote and VoiceNote products which are not the PK.
You are saying that the media player is essentially unchanged on the
BrailleNotes other than the PK, and that only the PK gains these file
format improvements, am I correct?
Secondly, regarding OGG Vorbis, I have to disagree that it is unpopular.
OGG compares favourably to both MP3 and WMA as well as other MPEG efforts
such as AAC/TwinVQ in almost every aspect except that of usability on
portable players, and this has not gone unnoticed by a significant number
of non-Microsoft software player users and music enthusiasts including
Windows users. This portable player issue was, until very recently,
specifically due to the problems of floating-point arithmetic and heavy-
duty processor requirements. However, Xiph (www.xiph.org) have recently
released a cross-platform, integer-only decoder named Tremor which is
distributed under a BSD-ish license (do what you will, only give us
credit) which I think may be of interest to you if you need Vorbis support
in your products. I use OGG Vorbis exclusively as my lossy audio format,
and my use of MP3 is limited only to playing monaural audio on the
BrailleNote (in some cases, the stereo OGG Vorbis file has been smaller
even than the converted, downmixed MP3 equivalent, even with channel
separation detection/differentiation and VBR encoding!). I should
certainly be grateful for direct OGG Vorbis support. You might also
consider FLAC support, especially for the PK, since this compares
favourably to Windows Media Audio's lossless encoding (FLAC is lossless
audio encoding, just in case you don't know - see Xiph for more).
Cheers,
Sabahattin
--
Thought for the day:
Communist (n): one who has given up all hope
of becoming a Capitalist.
Sabahattin Gucukoglu
Phone: +44 20 88008915
Mobile: +44 7986 053399
http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/
Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
