Napster upgrade.Napster Inc.. is swinging for the fences again. The subscrption-based digital music firm has upgraded its service to an engine developed by its in-house engineers, called PowerSync. The company is breaking away from Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player Digital jukebox software for Windows from Microsoft that plays a variety of audio, video and streaming formats including MP3, WMA, CD audio and MIDI. Starting with Version 6.2 in 1999, the Windows Media Rights Manager was added for securing copyrighted content. . "Windows Media Microsoft's audio and video framework for Windows, which embraces playback, encoding and streaming. Windows Media Player is the digital jukebox and media player that comes with every version of Windows. is much more general purpose, and we wanted to build the sync engine directly into Napster," said Bill Pence, chief technology officer. The engine is designed for faster transferring and downloading downloading - download of music from a user's computer to his portable MP3 player A digital music player that supports the MP3 format, which was the audio format that started a revolution in online music downloads and distribution. All portable music players, the iPod being the most popular, support MP3 along with one or more other audio formats. . "The goal is to allow you to grab as much content as you want and get it on the device as quick as you can," he added. Napster is also unveiling its latest branded MP3 player, a one-gigabyte device designed by South Korean manufacturer DnC Tech Inc. The new player will cost $50 with a 12-month subscription to Napster. Napster also offers a free MP3 player with a 12-month subscription. At just 256 megabytes, however, the player is dwarfed by Apple Computer Inc.'s small iPod Shuffle The smallest and most basic iPod, and the only iPod without a display screen. Designed for people who just want to press start and play their tunes sequentially or at random, the shuffle holds up to 240 songs in 1GB of flash memory. with 512 megabytes of memory. The leader in the digital music space, iPod models are also available with 20 and 40 gigabytes of memory. "This is not necessarily designed to be our response to an iPod," Pence insisted. He sees the Napster MP3 players as introductory devices. "It's for someone who wants to get into a service and have a player provided to them at once. For a lot of those people, one gigabyte One billion bytes. Also GB, Gbyte and G-byte. See giga and space/time. (unit) gigabyte - 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1024 megabytes. Roughly the amount of data required to encode a human gene sequence (including all the redundant codons). See prefix. is plenty." Staff reporter Hilary Potkewitz can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 226, or by e-mail at hpotkewitz@labusinessjournal.com. |
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