SMART TRAY FOR AUDIO PLAYER

摘要

The present invention is a smart tray for an in-home audio player adapted to play pre-recorded music stored on a semiconductor music chip storage medium. Music chips are loaded into the smart tray which holds a predetermined number of chips and is inserted as part of the audio player. Each tray will have a low cost, low power microprocessor on board to handle routing and accessing of the music from an individual chip on the tray. For instance, the tray level microprocessor will be able to cue up a next song selection while a digital signal processor (DSP) within a base portion of the audio player finishes decoding the current selection. The smart tray minimizes music selection search times and allows the DSP to focus on processing the encoded music from the chips thereby minimizing housekeeping activities performed by the DSP and increasing efficiency. The smart tray allows for active music selections by the user so that the user can select a particular artist, song, music style, etc. with the touch of a button. This can be done since the music chips self-register content and music style to the smart tray upon power up. The audio player can be expanded by adding additional smart trays up to a predetermined limit.