Operation Manual

Page 19
Digital audio terms
Encoding, or Ripping (a CD)
Encoding, or “ripping”, refers to converting an audio file from an audio CD into a compressed digital
audio format, such as MP3 or WMA, that may be played on the Rio or on the computer.
Firmware
Firmware is software–programmes or data–that has been written onto read-only memory (ROM). Firm-
ware is a combination of software and hardware that is comparable to an operating system on a com-
puter. The Rio firmware controls the liquid crystal display, digital audio codec support, and other
functions the Rio supports.
To see your Rio’s firmware version:
1 Press the Menu button.
2 Press the
<<
or
>>
(Forward or Reverse) joypad buttons to navigate to About.
3 Press Select (centre joypad button). The firmware version the Rio is using (Vx.x.x.) displays.
How to upgrade the Rio firmware
MP3
MPEG-1, Layer 3 Audio (MP3) is a compressed digital audio file format. This format allows for near CD
quality sound, but at a fraction of the size of normal audio files. MP3 conversion of an audio track from
CD-ROM reduces the file size by approximately a 12:1 ratio with virtually no loss in quality. This digital
sound encoding and compression process was developed by the Fraunhofer Institut fur Integrierte
Schaltungen and Thomson Multimedia. MP3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic com-
pression to remove all superfluous information–more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of
a sound signal that the human ear doesn't hear. It also adds a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform
(MDCT) that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of
layer 2. MP3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD-ROM with a bitrate of 1411.2 kilobits per one
second of stereo music by a factor of 12 down to 112-128kbps, without sacrificing sound quality. The
MP3 encoding process is well suited for the transfer of high quality audio files with small file size over
telephone or ISDN lines, and over the Internet.
SDMI
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a forum of over 130 companies in the fields of recorded
audio content, computers, and consumer electronics, for the purpose of developing an integrated
method of copyright protection technology that can be used worldwide. SDMI is working to create a
framework for preventing improper usage of audio files and to promote legal music distribution ser-
vices.
Skins
Skins are the colour and window designs of desktop digital audio player software. You can customise
the look of your software by changing the skin. Created by graphic designers all over the world; skins
often omit certain playback controls for simplicity.