Whoah, it wasn't their decision - we had WMA support lined up as empeg before any SONICblue involvement.

WMA *is* popular, and is getting more so due to the bundling of a fairly good music manager (wmp7/8) with winME and onwards. Lots of people use the stuff they get with their system - eg, iTunes on the mac, and not supporting WMA because it has DRM possibilities (note - we don't support DRM protected files as yet) is very short-sighted.

Most music companies are not going to release commerical music digitally without some kind of DRM. To limit the use of the empeg player to files people have encoded themselves *ONLY* (or obtained illegally via napster & equivalents) is a very short-sighted decision.

In the future, when you can download music and it *is* less hassle than buying the CD and ripping it, are we really going to place ourselves at a huge commercial disadvantage by not supporting these files?

MP3 isn't free - you have to pay for both encoders and decoders (with the exception of free PC player apps). Just because we pay Thompson as opposed to Microsoft doesn't make it any less a format controlled by a large company. Thompson have various plans including licence fees on mp3 radio stations too...

Hugo