An ear for music

The music industry failed in its bid to ban Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, a tiny
solid-state device that can play music downloaded from the Internet. Now Texas
Instruments is patenting an even more portable system (GB 2 325 547). Whereas
Rio is the size of a pager, Texas will build its system into one earpiece of a
pair of headphones, so joggers will no longer need to clip a personal stereo to
their belt. Texas claims its system needs only a button-sized battery to play
music for as long as a normal player. Music in the MP3 format can be loaded into
Texas’s device either by hooking it up a computer or by using a special encoder
connected to a normal hi-fi system.