Uberaudio for the Ebookman

Uberaudio is an audio player application for the ebookman PDA by Franklin. It provides more codecs than the audio player included with the ebookman (and an easy framework to add more).

FAQ

Q: What is an ebookman?

A: A PDA made by Franklin Publishers that had a 27 MHz RISC processor.  The OS was not Palm and not Windows CE, so it has been discontinued.  There are some still available on the internet.  What made it cool was that it had a speaker, headphones and mic and the ability, although limited, to record and play audio.

Q: What formats are supported?

A: These are them:

1. Oki/Dialogic VOX - 8 KHz, 32kbps, mono, ~14 MB/hour (known as 4-bit) ADPCM.  File must have the extension ".vox".  Good for voice and music when compression is more important than fidelity.
2. GSM 06.10 - 8KHz, 13.2 kbps, mono,~6MB/hour (NOTE: This is NOT Micro$oft's version.  This is the real standard).  Okay for voice when compression is more important than fidelity.
3. Franklin ".music" files.  These are the standard for the ebookman.  They come in 2 forms: 22.05 KHz stereo - great for music, and 8KHz mono 8kbps, ~3MB/hour encoded with VoiceAge's Spot 'n' Go codec.

Q: How do I get it?

A: Download the "uberaudio" package from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/uberaudio

This is a zipped ".seb" file.  Just transfer the uberaudioapp.seb file to your ebookman with the Desktop Manager (or ebmsync for Linux).

Q: How do I make GSM and VOX files?

A: Firstly, no one on the team takes any responsibility for any encoders. We wrote the player, not the encoders.
VOX: VOX is tricky. There are some encoders that do it, but it is hard to find a free one.  The source for the one used to design the player is here
GSM: A command line encoder for GSM named "Sox" can be found here. There are executable versions for many OSes including Windows and, of course, Linux.
To create a GSM file use the following command line:
   sox infile.wav -c 1 -r 8000 outfile.gsm
OR
   sox infile.mp3 -c 1 -r 8000 outfile.gsm

Q:  Why don't you support MP3, OGG, or speex?

A: Limitation of the processor.  We tried, but we only have 27 MHz, no floating-point unit and no mulitiply or add instruction in the processor.  And yes, we did try the fixed-point implementations.  If you have a suggestion for a new codec post it to the yahoo group.

Q: How can I write the developers?

A: All discussion so far has been on the ebookman-SDK discussion group on yahoo.  Go to

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eBookMan-SDK-Discussion/

Q: Who's responsible for this mess?

Yves Bodack(yahoo ID:acidman242), Bobby Weinmann(yahoo ID:ybkosher) and Andrea Basso (yahoo ID:speedsthatbeat)