Specifications

2.3 Current MP3 players with a network
interface.
As mentioned in the introduction the inspiration for the topic predominantly came from
the AudioTron [3] from Turtle Beach a PC sound card processor manufacturer. This
was the first non-PC based MP3 player that could play MP3’s being stored remotely
from the player. There are many MP3 players available at the moment, but they all
require the data to be stored locally on many different media formats; on hard disks with
the Creative Nomad and Apple iPod, while others use CD’s or Flash cards.
The review of current solutions will focused on MP3 players that can play the data
through a network interface. The AudioTron, shown in figure 2, is a device that outputs
analogue audio to a stereo from MP3 data it has retrieved from a LAN connection.
Figure 2 The AudioTron [3]
Internally, it runs Windows CE and has a Cirrus Logic Maverick EP7312 ARM720T
processor with a Turtle Beach audio chip decoding the audio.
To demonstrate the use of the Audiotron its’ webpage provides the diagram shown in
figure 3 to illustrate the functionality of the AudioTron
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