Called racetrack memory, the new storage medium could allow personal music players to store up to 500,000 songs, according to a study published in Science magazine.
The racetrack memory stores data in the boundaries, known as domain walls, between magnetic regions in nanowires.
The medium gets its name because the data races around the wire, or track, as it is read or written.
The technology could take up to four years to produce and a further three or four to refine for commercial use.
Leading the charge are phone makers Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, all eager to seize on the booming popularity of multimedia phones which double up as MP3 players.
Nokia will open an online store here in the next three months, while Sony Ericsson plans to do so by the end of the year.
Motorola, which bought homegrown music store Soundbuzz in January, will release a phone next month that will let a user browse its entire music collection. He can then choose which songs to download to his phone.
Until now, music lovers here have only had Soundbuzz and SingTel's MusicVibes service, which catered only to its subscribers.
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October: At a press-only event at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus, Apple unveils the iPod, a 5GB hard-drive-based music player that will sell for $399. "To have your whole CD library with you at all times is a quantum leap when it comes to music," Steve Jobs tells the press. "You can fit your whole music library in your pocket."
November: The iPod officially hits retail shelves on November 10.
- Bloomberg News .
The solution: Accessorize their digital music player with a gift from Altec Lansing's (www.alteclansing.com) expansive line of speaker systems for MP3 players, Bluetooth(R) music-enabled phones and PCs.
Speakers are always a popular holiday gift and this year will be no exception. Since developing some of the first speaker docks for the iPod, Altec Lansing has made great strides in quality, design and acoustic performance.
Yahoo is in early discussions with major record labels over offering unprotected MP3s either for sale or for free as part of an ad-supported service, two record company executives familiar with the talks said Wednesday.
The talks, held as recently as last month, were preliminary because Yahoo is still working out the details, said the executives, who requested anonymity because of the discussions were confidential.
Yahoo hopes to launch the service this year, they said.
Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp., and EMI Group PLC have in recent months begun licensing their music for sale as MP3 files online through retailers like Amazon.com.
Representatives for the labels declined to comment.
This makes the Amazon store a more significant rival for Apple iTunes which has long had a commanding lead over rivals in the downloadable music market.
All the 3.1 million tracks in the Amazon store are free of DRM software. In contrast, only songs from EMI and some independent labels are available via Apple's iTunes without copy controls.
In February 2007, Apple boss Steve Jobs called on record labels to stop using DRM in a bid to boost the popularity of downloadable music.
The Amazon MP3 store, which launched in September 2007, is only available in the US. There have been no announcements about when or whether the service will be expanded overseas.
Songs prepared in the MP3 format can be played on any portable music player.
HD-AAC is based on the MPEG-4 SLS (Scalable to Lossless) standard, an extension to the MPEG-4 audio standard jointly developed by Fraunhofer and Infocomm Research. The encoding process HD-AAC preserves every bit of information in the uncompressed original music track, providing lossless compression of 24-bit music content. That's compared to the 16-bit, 44.1 kHz quality found on CDs - hence, Fraunhofer's "better than CD" claim.
.The solution: Accessorize their digital music player with a gift from Altec Lansing's (www.alteclansing.com) expansive line of speaker systems for MP3 players, Bluetooth(R) music-enabled phones and PCs.
Speakers are always a popular holiday gift and this year will be no exception. Since developing some of the first speaker docks for the iPod, Altec Lansing has made great strides in quality, design and acoustic performance.
It looks good with a completely new interface, and comes with fairly comprehensive file support. Audio support includes CDA, MIDI, MP1/2/3/4, AAC, OGG, WAV, AIF, WMA and more.
Support for video is added in version 5.52, and currently this stretches to MPG, M2V, AVI and ASF formats.
It packs a good deal into a fairly slim package, with the player incorporating everything you would expect and more: loop, repeat, ID3 tag support, cross-fading between tracks, 2x CD burning/ripping, internet TV and radio support etc.
It has a media manager, 10-band graphic equaliser, visualisations and a playlist editor.
The move could render tunes purchased by many iPod owners unplayable on their music players. For the last four months, RealNetworks has marketed its music store as the only Apple rival compatible with the iPod, following the company's discovery of a way to let its customers play their downloaded tunes on Apple's MP3 player.
Apple criticised RealNetworks' workaround, dubbed Harmony, as the "tactics... of a hacker", and warned in July that RealNetworks-purchased songs would probably "cease to work with current and future iPods". Apple offered no further statement on Tuesday, but confirmed that the software released with its iPod Photo will not play music purchased from RealNetworks' music store.
