Mr Bhaskaran,
I work at a project called Rockbox at http://www.rockbox.org/ . We are an open-source, GPL-licensed firmware for a variety of MP3 players and I am contacting you in the interest of trying to open up communication lines and possibly some cooperation between us. So far we have supported and offered improved capabilities for a variety of MP3 players from Archos, iriver, iAudio and Apple, including their most recent iPod Video and iPod Nano players. We have also recently been approached by Sandisk, who make the Sansea e200 series of players featuring your PP5024 chipset. Due to the lack of publically available datasheets it is quite difficult to implement support. We would like to attempt to extend our support to the e200 series, as well as other PortalPlayer based devices.
While we are aware that you may not be able to offer much, or possibly anything, we would like to, at the very least, open avenues of communication because we feel that some positive interaction could benefit both parties. A wide support of Rockbox on a variety of PortalPlayer based devices would both increase Rockbox's popularity as well as making PortalPlayer the ideal choice for creating a music player targeted at users who want a more full set of music playing features than most current devices offer. As well, due to the nature of Rockbox, moving from one supported player to another with superior hardware is always a zero-penalty act because with proper hardware support, all the software features that hardware is capable of are available in Rockbox. This means that for users with a PortalPlayer based player who have tried Rockbox, when their player fails or it becomes time to consider an upgrade, the upgrade path would of course ideally fall to another PortalPlayer based player. Sandisk has already approached us seeking to draw our interest to their e200 series, and we think soon other manufacturers may see some benefit, especially for publicity, of having an alternative open firmware available to their devices.
Our firmware currently offers a variety of features that many MP3 players on the market currently do not including gapless playback, a full 5-band parametric equalizer, crossfade, crossfeed for comfortable headphone listening, customizability of the While Playing Screen, on the fly playlist creation, and a wide format support including MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, WAV, Musepack, Wavpack, with work being done on implementing both AAC and WMA. On devices that support recording we offer a variety of features professionals find useful including pre-recording, and the ability to monitor gain levels to ensure a recording free of clipping. As well, there are many other features such as a variety of game plugins. Development is also constant with new features becoming available over time, which then become available to all users who download an update so long as their hardware is physically capable.
I look forward to your response, and hope you can discuss some possibilities or point me in the direction of someone I should be suggesting this to.
Thank you,
Paul Louden