Announcement

Posted by: peter Oct 26, 2005 @ 07:36 AM
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Once your reference design is shown around... do gapless and parametric EQ features need to be "chosen" by an hardware manufacturer or they are an inextricable part of the design.

I know it sound silly that somebody would want to remove them but... we've seen sillier things happening in consumer electronics.

I believe that the idea is that the manufacturers get the whole thing including parametric EQ and gapless support for the one price, giving them no real reason to remove them from their products, but there's nothing to stop them removing them if they really want to (for instance, if they're short of time when implementing their EQ UI, or if it's a deliberately simplified and dumbed-down product).

QUOTE
Is this chip powerful enough to handle the features we want (Vorbis, FLAC, gapless, crossfade, crossfeed, parametric EQ)?

Yes, we already have the entire Karma feature set, plus USB mass-storage and more, working on the STMP3600.

Peter

Posted by: peter Oct 28, 2005 @ 05:56 AM
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Though, I can't imagine that the current iPods aren't even capable of doing gapless.

Current Ipods, indeed all Ipods except the Shuffle, have essentially the same CPU as Karma.

Peter

Posted by: peter Jan 11, 2006 @ 09:42 AM
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That' article is good and all...but what I was mainly interested in was stuff pertaining to the hard drive...size, capacity, manufacturer, etc.

Well, those things aren't up to Sigmatel, they're up to the licensees who buy the Sigmatel chips and make players out of them. The chip and the software can be used with all varieties and capacities of 1in and 1.8in drives, and even with flash-memory; the choice rests with the actual device manufacturer. We (Sigmatel) wouldn't even necessarily be told about those choices before actual public announcement of the devices, and if we were we couldn't tell you lot.

Peter

Posted by: peter Feb 14, 2006 @ 12:18 PM
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Note that the original quote did not say "Samsung" but "a Samsung". This may be a typo, or it may be a reference to "a very large, but for the time being, nameless company".

Further up the interview Ron says "Well, Samsung introduced its first 3600-based design at CES"... I don't want to second-guess his meaning, but it appears to me that by "a Samsung" he probably meant "a customer the size of Samsung" and is talking about how it gives a good impression to other potential customers, that such a major company has already decided to use the chip.

Peter

Posted by: peter Mar 28, 2006 @ 02:55 PM
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PlaysForSure 2.0

One aspect of Plays-for-sure 2.0 which might appeal to denizens of this board, by the way, is that it mandates gapless playback. Some of Microsoft's marketing gimmicks can fairly be described as just gimmicks, but this time they do seem to be, however sledgehammerously, genuinely trying to drive up the quality of digital audio players.

Peter