METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ELAPSED PLAYBACK TIMEKEEPING OF VARIABLE BIT-RATE DIGITALLY ENCODED AUDIO DATA FILES

摘要

The present invention involves a digital audio player (10) and a method for processing encoded digital audio data, wherein the digital audio data is encoded using one of a plurality of encoding formats. The audio data player has a hard disk or other data storage medium (32) for storing data files, a microcontroller (22), buffer memory (25) for anti-skip protection, and an audio decoder (12). The encoded audio data files and associated decoder files are downloaded from a personal computer or similar device to the audio data player hard drive. The player provides a menu-driven user interface for selection, sorting, and playback of stored audio data files. During playback, elapsed playback time is computed and displayed. For variable bit-rate audio data files, the audio data player (10) generates an elapsed playback timekeeping map concurrently with playback and fast forward scan of audio data files. Concurrently with playback, forward scan, and reverse scan of the audio data file, the audio data player (10) determines the compression ratio for each data portion traversed, and calculates a playback time for each data portion traversed.