CD^3

About CD^3

As you may already know, I am part of a senior group of students at DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona. My 'study group' consists of five individuals, including myself. We are Jay Jacobson, Brian Davis, Pamela Layton, Tony Bell and Ryan Peters. As part of our graduation requirements, we are developing a product, which we have named CD3.

At first glance, CD3 very closely resembles a portable CD player from the future. However, after closer inspection, one would realize it is quite different. The custom-made CD3 case has a color LCD touch screen mounted on its top. From the side is a motorized tray that ejects to load a compact disc, and around the sides and rear are headphone connections, a RJ-11 telco connector, an AC power connector, and a DB-9 serial connector. At the very rear of the case is a custom-molded battery compartment.

Although CD3 does play standard audio CD's (just like a regular CD player), its main focus is on the CD3 discs. The CD3 discs use the standard CD-R media, however with advanced encoding and compression techniques, the discs contain over 200 songs each with full CD quality audio (*all calculations based on 3.5 minute song). However, this 10X - 20X increased capacity is only the beginning of CD3's features. Using the integrated touch-screen color LCD, and a full custom-designed graphical user interface (GUI), the user will be able to sort and build playlists from the CD3 discs. The user could choose ongs for his/her custom playlist based on Artist Name, Song Name, Album Name, Song Year, Song Genre and other built-in sorting algorithms. The user can create a virtually limitless number of custom playlists for any CD3 disc, and then save them in CD3's built-in flash memory. The LCD screen will also display all of the above information about each song, as it is being played.

One of the finer points of CD^3 is its indexing functionality. Utilizing the color touch-screen interface, the user can effortlessly build playlists for the songs on the CD^3 disc. These playlists can be constructed using the same data that is already present for every song: song title, artist name, album name, year, genre, etc... For example, if you were listening to a CD^3 disc that contained a compilation of Top-40 music from the 80's, and only wanted to hear the Alternative Rock tracks from 1988, CD^3 would make that simple. As well, once you have created one or more playlists for a certain CD^3 disc, those playlists can be stored in CD^3's built-in flash memory for later retrival.

Still, CD3's benefits do not end at sheer quantity. Some of its other advantages are: the ability for CD3 discs to contain audio that is over 2.5 times the quality of a standard CD, online connectivity to download songs from the Internet directly to the CD3 player, with a standard PC and a CD-ROM burner users can create their own CD3 discs, CD3 discs will play on any standard PC, 96X maximum oversampling (12 times greater than a standard portable CD player) and physical solid-state buffering - CD3 will not skip. The list could go on, and on.

Compariason of Technologies:

Feature	CD^3 Player	Regular CD Player	Mini-Disc Player
Portable	Yes	Yes	Yes
Plays CD's	Yes	Yes	No
Maximum Tracks per Disc	200 +*	20*	20*
Audio Format	Digital	Digital	Digital
Maximum Sampling Rate/Bit-Stream	48kHz @ 320kbps	44.1kHz @ 176kbps	44.1kHz @ 292kbps
Upgradable	Yes	No	No
PC/Internet Connectivity	Yes	No	No
Playlist Support	Yes	No	No
Indexing Support	Yes	No	Extremely Limited
Audio Effects Support	Yes	No	No
Color Touch-Screen Interface	Yes	No	No
Support for Additional Applications	Yes	No	No
Cost of Media	$1.50	$12	$3
Make Your Own Discs	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free Software/Open Development	Yes	No	No

CD^3 Mailing List

There is an established mailing list for CD^3's software development. If you would like to join this list, send an email to majordomo@kinetic.org with "subscribe cd3-developer" in the BODY (not the SUBJECT) of the message.

The cd3-developer list is reserved for active software development ONLY. If you would like to have another mailing list for a different aspect of CD^3, just send me an email and (if it is reasonable) I will gladly create it.