QDesign and TI Announces Portable Audio Technology

Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) and QDesign Corporation today announced an agreement to pair TI's world-leading programmable digital signal processors (DSPs) with QDesign's advanced Music Codec. The design will give consumers the ability to create and store up to five times more music on portable audio players while maintaining high audio fidelity.

TI, the world leader in DSP and analog, will deliver a hardware design using the industry-leading programmable, low-power TMS320C5000 DSP, which QDesign will use to support the recording, storage and playback of QDesign Music files. QDesign's music application will allow users to encode their favorite music from audio CDs to both MP3 and QDesign Music files. Users also may convert MP3 audio files to smaller QDesign Music files for longer playback time on both desktop computers and TI DSP-based portable audio devices.

QDesign developed the QDesign Music Codec to deliver the highest quality audio at the lowest possible data rates. Apple Computer, Inc. has adopted the new generation audio coding technology as the audio compression solution for QuickTime 4, the industry standard for web-based audio and video streaming.

Apple's QuickTime 4 is integral to the TI - QDesign reference design. With this new platform, QuickTime is used as the architecture to download music files from the Internet, store them and play them back.

"QuickTime is fast becoming the favorite way to stream video and audio over the web, with more than eight million downloads since its introduction in April," said Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of worldwide product marketing. "Together with TI and QDesign, QuickTime is helping to create the next platform for portable digital music."

"TI and QDesign offer a solution to manufacturers that want to provide their customers superior sound with more playback time," said Gary Johnson, TI's DSP portable audio business manager. "TI provides the ideal chip solution to the Internet audio market because our programmable DSPs allow manufacturers to make universal players that are adaptable to any compression format; they enable 50 percent longer battery life in the players; and we have the most complete library of decompression software and security."

"TI is the leader in digital hardware in the consumer Internet audio market," said Richard J. Beaton, president and chief technology officer of QDesign. "With this TI DSP-based solution, QDesign gives manufacturers automatic access to QDesign Music playback, and consumers can produce high quality sound in the QDesign Music format at a fraction the size of typical MP3 files. To offer the most complete solution, manufacturers will also have the option to include QDesign MP3 encoding functionality in the music application."

The TI - QDesign solution will follow Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) guidelines, which seek to protect content owners' rights by building security measures such as watermarking, encryption and decryption into compact discs, electronic music distribution (EMD), personal computer hosts and portable players. TI is a founding member of SDMI and helped define the inter-industry guidelines, which will support all audio compression formats that offer secure download measures.

The QDesign Music Codec is an audio coding and decoding technology that allows music enthusiasts and audio professionals to obtain significantly higher audio compression than the more common technologies such as MP3. Over a 28.8K modem, the QDesign Music Codec streams full-bandwidth stereo audio at unsurpassed quality. The QDesign Music Codec technology scales up to 128kbits to deliver better than MP3-quality at the same bitrate.

The TI reference design, which includes the QDesign Music Codec, will be available in late third quarter of 1999 so manufacturers will have time to develop players in time for Christmas 1999 sales.