Japanese company to boost Ogg Vorbis hardware popularity, Ogg on a chip

July 17, 2003

A
Japanese company has developed an Ogg Vorbis chip solution for portable music players. The companies solution is based on a 12 Mhz CPU, a memory card interface, an external memory interface, a LCD controller, and a key input function. Companies that would like to release an Ogg Vorbis capable music player only need to add external memory and an audio D/A converter.

Ogg Vorbis is attracting much attention to the digital music world as a "license and royalty free" compression format. Ogg Vorbis is also known as its higher quality, higher compression ratio compared to MP3, current standard of the compression music format. Encoding and decoding process of Ogg Vorbis is more CPU intensive task than those of MP3. Hardware implementation of Ogg Vorbis has been scarce. FineArch.Inc fully noted the potential of the Ogg Vorbis, developed the Ogg Vorbis playback System.

Altough Ogg
Vorbis is license free, the format still needs to become popular in the main
stream. Altough more and more users are switching from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, the
masses still use MP3. Also the wide availability of MP3 players and the lack of
Ogg Vorbis players is a clear difference, this new Ogg Vorbis chip could pave
the way for more Ogg Vorbis hardware. Discuss this in our Audio Forum .

Source: CD Freaks.com