NEW YORK -- Creative Labs, creator of the de facto sound standard on the PC, is entering the portable MP3 player market.
Creative held a press conference Saturday to unveil its new player at the New York Music & Internet Expo -- a conference hosting many Net businesses that use the MP3 format -- and left observers drooling.
No wonder. Audiophiles are already enamored with Diamond Multimedia's Rio player, a portable playback device about the size of a deck of cards that holds about an hour's worth of music.
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Admittedly, Creative's Nomad is pretty sexy looking. The player's lightweight silver plastic case sports an oval graphic display that shows the song title. The Nomad holds 64 MB, or about two hours of music downloaded from a PC in the MP3 format. It also acts as a dictaphone that can upload voice data into a PC.
MP3 is an audio format that compresses files at near-CD quality for sending over the Internet. Users love its convenience but the record labels haven't embraced the technology for fear of piracy, since the format can also be used to massively duplicate illegal files.
The device shown at the conference is a beta model. Hock Leow, vice president of Creative's multimedia division, said the nomad will be released as early as April 1999, and will cost under US$200.
But even the beta model sounded pretty sweet to some passersby. Most attendees who spotted a player at various booths couldn't get enough listening time or info about where to buy one.
Creative Labs, based in Singapore, already owns most of the market for sound technology on the PC. Creative estimates its Sound Blaster tech sits in 60 percent of PC audio systems today. Leow said the company has 500 distribution channels lined up including Best Buy and CompUSA to potentially make their player -- codenamed "nomad" -- a hit.
The player is the first in a line of portable devices, which will include more music and image-based products, said Leow. He declined to elaborate further.
The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, sued Diamond Multimedia in October over its own Rio MP3 playback device, claiming it was ruining the digital music marketplace. RIAA lost the fight for an injunction to stop the Rio's release, and Diamond countersued in December.
Leow said Creative is a participant in the RIAA's Secure Digital Music Initiative, a group of labels, technology companies and online music businesses working to create an open specification for selling downloadable music with additional security on the Internet. Another spokesman for Creative said the company will be looking into implementing any SDMI standard as soon as it is finished.
"The market doesn't wait for legal standards to be set," said Leow. "We have contacted the RIAA. They know our intentions. We hope to solve these differences."
Leow added that the company will look into adding proprietary technology from the likes of Liquid Audio and others, so that the nomad can play files in different formats.
Creative Labs announced a slew of Nomad partnerships with the likes of Audible, which sells downloadable spoken word audio content from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and bestselling books. Audible has its own proprietary system for sending audio files on the Net, and a spokesman said the company will work with Creative to make it compatible with this technology.
Creative also has partnered with MP3-related companies for their content and technology, including online record label GoodNoise, unsigned band hubs MP3.com and songs.com, MusicMatch, which makes MP3 encoding and player software, audiohighway.com, which offers free audio content in MP3 and other formats, and Audio Explosion, which offers tech to additionally secure downloadable music.
Creative said it will beef up its Web presence using its 400,000 registered users to include support for different digital audio formats and content.
The New York Music & Internet Expo was co-sponsored by MP3.com and MusicMatch, maker of a software package for MP3 users.
