Music to Your Ears
AudioReQuest Sets You Free From the CD

Daniel Graf and John Reine, ReQuest Inc.

Is your CD collection threatening to take over your living room? Perhaps you're thinking of ridding your Mom's basement of those Led Zeppelin LPs once and for all. What if you could take all of that music and pack it into one compact, home-stereo component?

With AudioReQuest you can. The QNX-based AudioReQuest Digital Music System is essentially three products in one: a CD player, a hard-drive enabled digital jukebox, and an Internet music player. It allows you to encode, store, organize, and play up to 300 hours of CD-quality digital music.

Laying down tracks

CDs, LPs, Internet music-they're all fodder for AudioReQuest. The integrated CD player allows users to record and store music with MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3) compression technology on an internal hard drive. A parallel connection allows users to download a variety of digital music directly from a PC (CD-R and CD-RW discs) or the Internet.

People with collections of older analog music formats such as audio cassette, LP, DAT, MD-even 8-track!-can digitally encode their favorite music through AudioReQuest"s analog line-in input. For those without an extensive music collection, AudioReQuest comes pre-loaded with an assortment of free MP3 music from such Internet music sites as emusic.com, songs.com, rapstation, and e-classical. A total of 6000 songs (or 300 hours) of music can be stored in the unit.

Listen up

Listeners can select a whole CD or LP for inclusion on AudioReQuest's hard drive or they can pick and choose just the songs they want from each music source. There are no more bulky CD collections to store.

Because all of their music resides in one convenient central server, users can search the entire collection by song title, artist, album, and genre in seconds and quickly create custom playlists. There's no need to manually change CDs while listening or decide what to play next.

Remote possibilities

AudioReQuest is housed in a sleek, black casing, weighs 11.4 kg, and measures just 17" x 3.5" x 13". The unit"s hardware features an Intel^® Celeron^® processor, a built-in 17.3G Quantum Quickview hard drive, and a 3D hardware accelerator.

Listeners operate the product with a simple IR remote control, while an optional wireless keyboard makes it easier to input song information. Familiar CD controls and features include: play, pause, scan, track search, repeat play, random play, and intro play.

There's a built-in LCD display but the unit also supports S-Video and composite video outputs, which allow the unit to connect to any NTSC or PAL television for an enhanced, more readable, graphical user interface. Once connected to a TV set, users can easily navigate the system, organize their music selections, and edit their playlists onscreen. A visual-effects mode features computer-generated graphics that move to the beat of the music. Five interface "themes" or skins are available that listeners can use to change or fully customize the look of the GUI. New themes will be released with software updates, or users can create their own by importing images and digital photos to AudioReQuest to customize the screen interface or create slide shows that play along with music selections.

Designed with connectivity in mind, AudioReQuest supports USB and Ethernet ports to enable high-speed transfers from PC to AudioReQuest, and to enable connectivity to MP3 portables and car players. The system can be linked to home entertainment systems and provides connectivity to Minidisc, DAT, and high-end amplifiers.

A sound decision

Choosing the QNX RTOS for AudioReQuest was a relatively easy decision. We had three main concerns: making sure we could release a stable product, cutting down our initial development costs, and, ultimately, getting our product to market as quickly as possible.

Our main challenge was reliability. Because AudioReQuest is a consumer device, and in particular, a home stereo component, people aren't too understanding if it crashes all of a sudden in mid-play. TVs, VCRs, stereo components-they're all just supposed to work, period. QNX has proven itself in mission-critical, embedded products over the last 20 years, so we figured it was a safe bet. If the QNX RTOS can be trusted to run medical devices, it can be counted on to run AudioReQuest without a problem.

Since AudioReQuest is a consumer product, we were obviously also concerned with the price point we would be able to offer our customers. Cost was a big factor in our decision to go with QNX. We were initially considering Windows CE, but the software was more expensive overall than QNX, and then there was the matter of cross development. We would have needed an NT machine to develop on if we had gone with CE, whereas the self-hosted QNX development environment meant not only that we could program and debug with the same processor, but that we didn't have the cost outlay of buying another machine just for development. You really have to take that sort of thing into account when you're getting a new company off the ground.

We were able to save money because QNX itself is modular and is licensed that way as well. We simply selected the OS modules we wanted to include in AudioReQuest and then paid for only what we used.

As with most development projects, time was another of our biggest challenges. Having started the company in March 1998, we were tasked with building both a company and a product simultaneously. QNX's POSIX compliance really helped us there. All of our programmers had Unix backgrounds, so they didn't have much of a learning curve before they were productive with QNX. With CE it seemed it would take a month just to get it running with all the proper drivers-a month out of our development cycle we couldn"t afford to spend. Linux, another OS we considered, was not guaranteed to have the drivers we needed. The bottom line with Linux was that we didn"t have the time or the resources to get it to do what we wanted.

Aside from our top three requirements, an embeddable GUI was also necessary for AudioReQuest. As it turned out, the flexibility of the Photon microGUI windowing system helped a lot when we were developing the user interface on the TV output. We found it quite easy to use. We selected some of the widget libraries provided with the Photon microGUI-customizing some and using some as is-and combined them with some widgets that we developed ourselves. We didn"t even have to use PhAB.

Breaking new ground

Being the first one to do something is never easy. And since AudioReQuest represents an entirely new type of product for consumers, the development process wasn't always smooth. There were a number of drivers that were available off the shelf, but since we needed to customize many sound and video drivers for our motherboard, we had to do a lot of custom work as well. During this process we were very well supported by QNX Software's developers. It was good to know that when we ran into difficulties because something had never been done before, we could get the support we needed. In the end, some of the drivers were written by us, the rest were done by QNX Software, and we worked together closely on driver design and testing. Overall, it was quite a productive relationship.

Success!

The first AudioReQuest units rolled out in April of this year, and we're very pleased with our initial sales. Since the release, we've had more orders than we can handle. While ramping up manufacturing to answer demand, we're simultaneously working on enhancements to AudioReQuest. For example, the product will soon support Windows Media Audio (WMA) and other popular Internet music formats.

With our first version now out the door, undoubtedly our next most difficult hurdle will be helping our customers decide what to do with their CD collections. Coasters maybe?

For more on AudioReQuest, including pricing and ordering information, visit www.request.com or call +1 518 237-5423.