MP3 meets Car Audio: Empeg Mark II in-dash Car MP3 Player

Using Linux as the empeg’s OS provides for quite a bit of flexibility with the unit.  Since the empeg is software based, as more compression standards become widely used a simple software upgrade can keep the empeg up to date.  If the MP4 standard becomes widely used, the empeg would require no more than an upgrade of its software (which can be done using the serial interface) in order to support the standard. 

With the open source nature of Linux, there are a number of end user projects being conducted for the empeg, and hypothetically if one were not satisfied with the UI on the empeg itself they could modify the interface themselves. 

As we mentioned before, even during MP3 playback the empeg’s 220MHz StrongARM processor is only at about 30% CPU utilization, so there is quite a bit of other tasks the empeg could tackle. 

There have been hints dropped about using the microphone input of the unit in order to support some form of voice recognition which could definitely eat up some of those unused CPU cycles. 

The point here is to illustrate that the possibilities are endless, the guys at Empeg are currently working on updates to the empeg software as are the very dedicated members of the empeg community that happen to be all interesting in improving the empeg as a product.