Microsoft officially confirmed on Friday that it is working on adding Vorbis and FLAC support on its music and entertainment "project" dubbed Zune, which includes hardware and software products that offer users on-the-go access to music and entertainment.
"Under the Zune brand, we will deliver Vorbis and FLAC support on our family of hardware and software products, the first of which will be available this year through a Zune firmware update," said Chris Stephenson, general manager of marketing for Microsoft, in a prepared statement. "We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together, and we think offering support for better and popular formats is part of that goal." Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp said the company plans to issue the firmware update sometime in the middle of next month. Reindorp said the downloadable update will also offer other performance improvements, but no major feature updates to the player, which debuted in November. "In mid-May we will release a firmware update which will address Vorbis and FLAC support, improving overall software reliability and efficiency," he said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. Reindorp said the Zune held its No. 2 spot in hard drive-based digital music players in January, citing NPD numbers that give the company 9.9 percent of that market. The company still trails Apple's iPod in the hard drive-based music area and does not yet have a flash-based device to compete with the iPod Nano or Shuffle. ... ... ... ... ... Oh, by the way, April Fools! Did I mention that already? XIPH DOES NOT ENDORSE THE ZUNE IN ANY WAY. _______________________________________________ Flac mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac
