If you've got a PC, outside the car, that rips a CD and emplodes the music into your EMPEG, then that's potentially compliant with IASCA rules.

Nope. You have to play the music from the judge's CD, not a copy of the judge's CD. They're making a real big deal of this in the rules for next year.


It's not real-time, which may cause the judges some grief (they walk up to your car and it takes you 10 minutes to rip and emplode a 60 minute disc).

Not even a remote possibility. The judges run themselves ragged trying to get through all the cars as it is, usually not spending more than 15-20 minutes total at each car. And I don't think you could get the IASCA disk into the empeg in 10 minutes... It usually takes me 30-40 minutes start to finish to put a CD in the empeg, but that includes the time spent calling up CDDB, then carefully modifying each song title (CDDB never does them the way I want them) then double and triple checking the directory path(s) where the music will go. Then, normalize the tracks, then rip them. Now I can have emplode grab them and put them in the empeg, after which I will probably have to work some more on the song titles because the ID3 tag truncates at 30 characters, and many of my titles are longer than that (Tchaikovsky-Violin Concerto #1, 1st mvt for example). All this takes at least a half hour, maybe more. Then I can finally run the synchronize step. One time out of five, the synchronize will lock up on me, so after re-booting, figuring out what actually made it in, and what is sitting in the unattached file, try it again. This time, the empeg will decide, based I think on a random seed derived from the sum of the digits on the license plate of Hugo's Miata, to do a full disk check. There goes another 10 minutes. By this time the judge has given up in despair and is working three cars further down the row.

I really believe the only possible solution (other than just giving up and adding a CD player to my car) is the watermark thing. IASCA will attach a tamper-proof "watermark" to the file. The empeg can with a push of a remote button display this watermark on the VFD screen. It might look something like "IASCA 1999-2000 track 06 Waylungo Percussion Verification=27ff3a6b9c44567e" with the last part being the actual tamper-proof watermark. Now it's really easy for me to sit here in my position of invincible ignorance and say how easy this would be to do. I don't really know if it's even possible. But until something like that does become feasible, I don't see how digital music players will be allowed to compete.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"