WO2002065238A2

WO2002065238A2 - Wireless digital music management console

Info

Publication number: WO2002065238A2
Application number: PCT/US2002/003718
Authority: WO
Inventors: Matt Hsia
Original assignee: Direct411.Com, Inc.
Priority date: 2001-02-09
Filing date: 2002-02-08
Publication date: 2002-08-22

Abstract

The presetn invention discloses a portable digital music system. The system includes a portable playback device that has a wireless communication driver, a storage device for storing music to be played on the device, and a playback device driver for retrieving and maintaining music informatoin in the storage device. The system further includes a control device that has keyboard and a display, said control device further including a control device wireless communicaiton driver, a consle management driver for retrieving music infomraiton from the playback device and controllingoperations of the playback device through wireless communication.

Description

Specification WIRELESS DIGITAL MUSIC MANAGEMENT CONSOLE

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION Reference is made to and priority claimed from U.S. Provisional Application Serial

Number 60/267,785, filed February 9, 2001, entitled "Wireless Digital Music Management Console."

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Field of Invention This invention relates generally to devices for playing digital music and more particularly to a portable device for playing digital music having the management capabilities of sorting, searching, or categorizing music stored in a media to be played by the portable device.

Description of the Prior Art

Since the introduction of digital music formats, such as MP3, WMA, AAC, Audio DVD, etc., they have overwhelmed the music industry as well as the demand for music to be released in digital format. The digital music format provides the benefit of fitting more music into one compact disc due to its smaller size of the audio file, approximately one-tenth of the uncompressed audio file, it further provides the flexibility for managing such files. All digital music formats contain information such as title of the song, artist, title of the album, genre, tempo, etc. Users can easily sort, search, categorize each song by its type and arrange their favorite playlist with assistance of computer software programs. The sorting, searching, and programming capability is only available through the usage of a personal computer device.

The introduction of memory-based portable MP3 player, portable MP3 CD player (a portable compact disc player that encodes digital music format), and other portable MP3 player that utilizes various portable storage devices such as hard disk drive, removable optical disc player, or magnetic media has enhanced the portability of digital music. Due to the availability of these portable digital music players, users may download the music of their choice from computer systems and store them into a portable storage device and listen to the music elsewhere. These portable devices are conventionally compact and small, but equipped with a media with gigantic storage capability, such as 128MB for a memory-based MP3 player, 650MB for a CD, or gigabytes for a hard disk drive. Such storage devices can store up to hundreds of digital music files for a user to take with to be played at a portable device. It is, therefore, essential that the portable player provide management features such as sorting, searching, categorizing, and navigating a piece of music among hundreds of them stored in the storage media. However, due to the compact and small size of the portable player, the conventional portable player are strictly for music playback without the capability of handling the management functions described above provided in a computer system.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

It is a goal of the present invention to provide a system that gives a user flexibility in playing digital music in a portable device. Briefly, one exemplary embodiment of the present invention comprises a portable digital music system. The system includes a portable playback device that has a wireless communication driver, a storage device for storing music to be played on the device, and a playback device driver for retrieving and maintaining music information in the storage device. The system further includes a control device that has a keyboard and a display, said control device further including a control device wireless communication driver, a console management driver for retrieving music information from the playback device and controlling operations of the playback device through wireless communication.

It is, therefore, one advantage of the present invention that a user may control the music playback in a remote portable device.

IN THE DRAWINGS Fig. 1 is a block diagram illustrating the portable digital music system having management capabilities for organizing a large volume of music stored in a digital media; Fig. 2 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation process of the playback device for transmitting contents to the control device;

Fig. 3 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation process of the playback device for receiving control commands or signals from the control device; and Fig. 4 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation process of the control device of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS The present invention describes a portable device for playing digital music having the management capabilities of sorting, searching, or categorizing music stored in a media to be played by the portable device.

Fig. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a portable digital music system having management capabilities for organizing a large volume of music stored in a digital media for playback by the portable device. The portable digital music system 10 includes a portable playback device 12 and a control device 14. The portable playback device 12 and the control device 14 communicates to each other through a wireless communication 16 channel, such as infrared 18, 20 or radio frequency 22, 24 equipped in the playback device 12 and control device 14 respectively. The playback device 12 also includes a storage device 26, such as a hard disk drive, a compact disc player having a compact disc installed therein, one or a plurality of semiconductor memory chips, or other media, wherein digital music may be stored for future playback. The playback device 12 further includes a server firmware 28 that controls the operation of the playback device 12 as well as the communication on the playback device 12 with the control device 14. The server firmware 28 may be in the forms of software stored in the storage device 26 that can be retrieved to be stored in random access memory (RAM) in the device or may be in the form of semiconductor memory such as a read only memory (ROM), programmable read only memory (PROM), or flash memory. The server firmware 28 retrieves the content of the music and related information stored in the storage device 26 and sends out the information to the control device 14 for display. The information includes the table of contents (TOC) of the music stored in the media as well as the album, title, artist, genre, etc.

The control device 14 has wireless communication capability such as via infrared 20 or radio frequency 24. It could be a personal digital assistance (PDA), a person computer (PC), or a cellular or mobile phone. The control device 14 further includes a processor 30, a memory 32, a display 34, and an input device 36. The processor 30 could be any microprocessor, proprietary or off-the-shelf. The memory 32 typically contains semiconductor memory such as read only memory (ROM) and random access memory (RAM), or flash memory. The display 34 is typically a liquid crystal display (LCD), it may also be a display monitor or a light emitted diode (LED) display. The input device 36 may be a keyboard or a writing pad, or a pointing device such as a mouse or a trackball. The control device 34 further includes a client management console software 38 and a client device operating system 40. The operating system 40 is a standard operating system used in a PDA or a cellular or mobile phone, such as Windows, Windows CE, etc. The management console software 38 controls the communications with the playback device 12 and receives and stores the contents of digital music from the playback device 12.

The control device 14 controls signals 42 to the playback device 12 and the playback device 12 in response to the control signals sends its contents 44 to the control device 14. Through this wireless communication channel, the control device 14 sends commands to the playback device 12 and retrieves information stored on the media therein. Users are able to conduct management related tasks such as sorting, categorizing, searching, programming and editing play list, browsing, renaming the contents, or even controlling the volume of the playback.

The server firmware 28 of the playback device 12 can be separated into two major routines, a transmission handling routine and a receiver handling routine. The operation of transmission handling routine is illustrated in Fig. 2, which is a flow diagram illustrating the process flow of the transmission handling routine. The main task of the transmission routine is to read the table of contents of the media containing the digital music, and search for and collect ID3 information into a temporary file for transmission to the control device 14. The playback device 12 first reads the table of contents (step 46) stored in the media placed in the playback device. It searches for the end of table of contents (step 48) and continue to read the ID3 information (step 50) and save the ID3 information and table of contents in a temporary file (step 52) and continue to read the table of contents (step 54) and loop back to search for the end of the table of contents if it does not find the end of table of contents. However, if it finds the end of table of contents, it then seeks to establish communication (step 56) with the control device to transmit the information it retrieved from the media to the control device. It retries to establish the communication channel if it cannot be established. Once the communication channel is established, it transmits the table of contents and ID3 information to the control device (step 58). Once all the information has been transmitted to the control device, it checks the checksum (ste 60) to make certain that the information was successfully transmitted without error. Other verification method, such as cyclic redundancy check (CRC) may also be used for this purpose. The communication with the control device is terminated (step 62) upon completion of the communication successfully.

Fig. 3 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation process of the playback device 12 for receiving control commands or signals from the control device 14. The process starts when the playback device 12 receives an interrupt from the control device 14. The interrupt triggers the interrupt driver to start executing the interrupt handling routine (step 64). Next, it checks to see if the communication channel is available (step 66) and continues to check for the availability of the communication channel until it becomes available. Once the communication channel is available, it then receives the playlist or command from the control device (step 68). Upon completion of the receiving all the information from the control device, it verifies the communication checksum to determine whether or not the transmission completed successfully (step 70). It terminates the communication (step 72) if the transmission is completed successfully and save the playlist provided by the control device (step 74). Otherwise, it advises the control device that the transmission failed and request for retransmission of the play list and command.

As described above, the control device 14 contains a management console software 38. The console software 38 provides the management and communication features for controlling the operation of the playback device 12. The process first displays a welcome screen (step 76) and follow with establishing the wireless communication channel via executing the data transmission routine (step 78). Next, the process can be separated into four different service routines: data reception 80, editing 82, operation 84, and communications 86. The data reception routine 80 displays the device contents on the display (step 88), and distributes contents into management console database 90 and receives the table of contents 92 and detail table of contents 94 of the digital music stored in the media placed in the playback device 12. The editing function 82 is capable of editing information presented in graphics user interface (GUI). It can edit each music (step 96) or edit the playlist (step 98) and save the edited information in the management console (step 100) or transmit the edited information to the server 28 (step 102) in the playback device 12. The operation function 84 provides the feature for editing title of the music, artist, album, or the publisher (step 104). The operations that it provides include play/pause, stop, move forward or backward, program a playlist, or edit a program list, or ever control the volume for playback (step 106). The operation function further provides the communication status including the communication device status and the transmission status (step 108). The operation function also provides a display operation including displaying the ID3 information, lyrics for the music being played, publisher's information, or general date and time information (step 110). Another part of the management console software is that it provides the software driver for controlling the communication channel for infrared, radio frequency (RF) or communication in compliance with the bluetooth standard.

While the invention has been particularly shown and described with reference to the preferred embodiments, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that many other modifications and variations may be made thereto without departing from the broader spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the claims. The specification and drawings are accordingly to be regarded as illustrative, rather than in a restrictive sense.

What is claimed is:

Claims

1. A portable digital music system, comprising: a portable playback device having a playback device wireless communication driver, a storage device for storing music to be played on the device, and a playback device driver for retrieving and maintaining music information in the storage device; and a control device having a keyboard and a display, said control device further including a control device wireless communication driver, a console management driver for retrieving music information from the playback device and controlling operations of the playback device through wireless communication.

2. A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1, wherein said control device receives music information stored in the storage device and operative to generate and transmit a playback sequence to the playback device.

3. A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 , wherein said control device organizing the music by title of music.

4. A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 , wherein said control device organizing the music by artist.

5 A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 wherein said display is capable of showing lyrics of the music being played.

6 A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 , wherein said wireless communication is conducted via infrared.

7 A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1, wherein said wireless communication is conducted via radio frequency.

8 A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 , wherein said control device is a personal digital assistant (PDA).

9 A portable digital music system as recited in claim 1 , wherein said control device is a mobile telephone.

10. A management console in a portable music playing device for controlling operation of a remote playback device, comprising, a display for showing music being stored in the playback device; a keyboard for entering commands to the music playing device wherein commands are being presented on said display for editing.

11. A management console in a portable music playing device as recited in claim 10, wherein said console controls the operation of the playback device via wireless communication.

12. A management console in a portable music playing device as recited in claim 10, wherein said console retrieves table of contents of the music stored in said playback device.