Workshop #1  Technologies for Electronic Music Distribution

The compression of high quality audio:

    Basics
    MPEG standards and applications
        MP3, AAC and MPEG-4
 

Speaker  Dr Karlheinz Brandenburger

Date:  Wednesday 6th December 2000:  9.00 am - 1.00 pm

There seems to be general agreement that we should connect our consumer electronic devices and appliances to the Internet but there is little agreement on what that means. The idea of connecting devices is not new. In simple cases, such as component audio systems, we have successfully connected a tuner from one manufacturer to an amplifier from another to a speaker from yet another. But it has been difficult to do much more. Even among the systems from a single manufacturer, we've had little success.

Yet, during the last few years, the World Wide Web has into system with millions (and soon, billions?) of independent systems cooperating. In contrast, the consumer electronics industry is still proposing protocols such as CEBus which over define solutions and central points of control such as residential gateways or very smart appliances.

What lessons can we learn from the Web and the Internet and how can we apply these lessons to the design of consumer electronics products.

Speaker  Bob Frankston

Date:  Thursday 7th December 2000:   9.00 am - 1.00 pm