This invention relates to entertainment systems such as compact disc players and video disk players. More particularly, this invention relates to methods and apparatus for announcing information about compact disc and/or video disks loaded into an entertainment system.
With presently known compact disc and video disk players, when a listener inserts the disk into the player, the player reads certain information about the contents of the disc from a directory on the disc itself. That is, the disc contains both performance data (such as a song or a movie) and information data about the performance (such as the title or producer of the song or movie). Thus, in addition to the performance that is expected to be rendered audibly or visibly when the disc is played, the discs are also formatted with directories containing information about the performances contained on the disk and where they can be located on the disk. By known methods, these directories of information tell the compact disc or video disk player what performances are on a disk and where the player can find the performances that a user may request. These directories also have the capacity to contain, and sometimes do contain, other information about the performance. The directory is usually provided in a known digitally encoded form (such as ASCII).
Even though the directory information is read by the compact disc or video disk player, it is not conveniently available to the listener. During the playing time, a current selection may be identified to the listener only by a digital display on the front of the compact disc player and only by the disk number, track number, and playing time of a particular selection. This rudimentary information about a currently playing compact disc is thus available to a listener at the face of the compact disc player, but is not necessarily conveniently available to the listener.
The rudimentary information provided on the face of some compact disc players is also not specific enough to satisfy most listeners. With current players, obtaining more specific information than that provided on the face of the player is a laborious process. With current devices, for example, the listener loads multiple compact discs into the compact disc player and plays selections from the compact discs in various orders and arrangements. If, during the course of the performance, the listener wishes to know some information (such as the title) of a current selection, the user must note from the face of the player the disk number and the track number of the selection desired and must then either interrupt the music (or remember the disk and track number until the end of the performance), unload the compact discs to identify which compact disc corresponded to the desired track number being played, and then study either the compact disc label or the literature in the package accompanying the compact disc (assuming it is available) to learn the specific information desired. To resume the playing operation, the listener must reload the compact disc and reposition the player to the appropriate disk and track selection where the interruption occurred. With today's technology, these laborious steps are required even to learn such simple information as the title of a selection.
The difficulty in obtaining information about a current selection on a compact disc or video disk is particularly notable when the listener wishes to inquire about the current selection, but is unable to easily assess the compact disc player. For example, when a listener is operating an automobile while listening to a series of compact discs that have been preloaded into the compact disc player, the complicated procedure of interrupting the music, identifying the appropriate disk and track, and finding information about the current selection by reviewing the disk literature or literature accompanying the disk can be especially awkward and dangerous.
Some compact disc and video disk players do present some limited information about currently played selections, but display the information in letters on the player which may not be readily visible to listeners unless they are close enough to be able to make out the characters.
It would be desirable to provide a compact disc system and a video disk system which did not require the listener to interrupt the music or video being played to conveniently learn detailed information about the music or video performances. It would be desirable to provide the information more conveniently to the listener than by requiring the listener to move close enough to the player display to read a display.
The present invention is an improvement over prior media players, such as compact disc and video disk systems, in that it may announce audibly requested information about a performance being rendered by the player. In one embodiment of this invention, information about the performances is audibly rendered after a request by the user through a remote control device associated with the media player. Operation of the remote control device instructs the player which information was requested and precipitates the audible rendering of the requested information.
The present invention may render the requested information through a voice synthesizer and a speaker. The speaker may be included in the compact disc or video disk player or, alternatively, may be included on the remote control device itself. In still another embodiment of the present invention, the information requested may be displayed on a remote control device rather than (or in addition to) being rendered audibly.
In certain embodiments of the present invention, the invention audibly renders information provided on the directory of the media being played as well as additional information not contained on the directory such as the current elapsed playing time. Information that may be available to the listener of a performance in accordance with the present invention includes the title of a selection currently playing, how long the selection will play, how much time has already elapsed since the current selection began, how much time has elapsed since the compact disc began, how much time has elapsed since the listening session began, who the composer, vocalist, or orchestra of a selection is, who the leading actor or actress of a video selection is, what the next selection to be played is, what the previous selection played was, who the author of a selection is, the date a selection was composed, produced or rendered, or any other pertinent information available or obtainable about any particular selection on the media.
The announcements of information may be prompted by a specific demand of the listener, or may occur automatically at a particular point within each performance. Thus, for example, the announcements for a compact disc may occur automatically once per album, once per song, at the beginning of a selection, or at the end of a selection, etc.
The present invention may be used in an audio compact disc player, where the voice synthesizer announces (verbally) some, or all, of the information stored on the compact disc. The invention may also be applied to video technology, where the information may be announced either audibly (through a channel for sound), or visually (through video signal generation).
Solely as an example, “current selection” information that may be audibly announced by the present invention may take the form of:
Another example of the information that may be announced by the present invention is the number of the compact disc that is playing, which may take the form of:
In one embodiment of the present invention, the information that is announced is mingled with the audio signals to produce a “voice-over”. In another embodiment of the present invention, the currently played audio is attenuated while the announcement is made. In still another embodiment of the invention, the music is paused or muted while the announcement is made.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the request for an announcement is made by a remote control device. In another embodiment, the announcement is made by other signal generations, such as a voice recognition device or a hand clap recognition device.
While many of the embodiments are described in the context of a compact disc player, this is solely an example of how the invention may be used with any media player. The invention may be used in video devices or any other media containing auxiliary information in a form which can be isolated and presented audibly or visually on demand. This includes general magnetic media, optical media, electronic media, laser disks, digital tapes, and “solid state” devices, which are capable of storing audio and/or video works.
In still another embodiment of the present invention, a compact disc player audibly reads the information from a compact disc or a batch of compact discs, at the time they are loaded. The user is then able to step through the information as it is read, and mark as either “desired” or “not desired” particular selections in the batch of compact discs. “Desired” selections would then be played while “non-desired” selections would be skipped automatically by the compact disc player.
These and other features and advantages provided by the present invention will become better and more completely understood by studying the following detailed description of presently preferred exemplary embodiments in conjunction with the drawings, of which:
The storage device 30 is accessed by the digital processing unit 10. The storage device 30 may store data including information from one or more media directories, the state of various components in the overall system, and information obtained from the user/remote control interface.
The digital processing unit 10 is also connected in two way communication to a speech synthesizer 40. Digital text to be spoken (such as ASCII text) is provided from the digital processing unit 10 to the speech synthesizer 40. Synthesizer 40 converts the digital text into digitized audio waveforms and provides those waveforms back to the digital processing unit 10. The digital processing unit is connected to the digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70 which, in turn, is connected to the speaker 80. The waveform provided by the speech synthesizer 40 is channeled to the digital to analog waveform transformer 70 through the digital processing unit 10.
In the embodiment shown in
The player 2 is operated remotely by a remote control device 50, which is similar to the device commonly used to remotely control televisions, VCRs, compact discs, and other consumer equipment. The present remote control device 50 also allows the listener to signal a request for information about a performance as is more fully described below.
The player 2 includes a remote control sensor 60 which receives commands from the remote control 50. The remote control sensor 60 may sense sonic, infra-red, radio, or other electromagnetic signals generated by the user, or the user's remote control device. In the embodiment shown in
The remote control sensor 60 may perform various degrees of filtering or signal analysis on the signal transmitted from the remote control 50, before providing the signal from the remote control sensor 60 to the digital processing unit 10.
Some components shown in
The components illustrated in
In operation, the digital processing unit 10 prompts the compact disc reader to read the data from the media. The data includes information from the compact disc directory, which is loaded into RAM digital storage unit 30 through the digital processing unit 10. All of the digital data that is retrieved from the directory of the compact disc reader can be loaded into storage device 30 immediately after loading the compact discs into the player 2, or can be delayed and read selectively upon request from the listener.
By collecting the digital data from the compact disc as an initial step, and loading the information into RAM storage 30, user queries at a later time can be satisfied without interrupting the compact disc reader 20 during play. If the directory information is not collected as an initial step, the player 2 may incorporate less RAM memory in the storage unit 30, but may require interrupting the music being read by the compact disc reader 20 when the user requests information. In the latter embodiment, after a user query is received, the compact disc reader 20 interrupts the play of music, repositions the reader to the directory on the compact disc, fetches the desired information, announces it, then repositions the reader to resume play at the point of interruption. In the former embodiment, the information can be retrieved directly from storage 30, without interrupting the reader 20.
Once the directory data is obtained from either RAM storage 30 or reader 20 in response to a user query via the remote control unit 50, the digital processing unit 10 delivers the information requested to the speech synthesizer 40 for conversion into a digitized audio waveform. The digital processing unit 10 then outputs the directory data to the digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70 or mixes the directory data with the performance data coming from the compact disc reader 20 and outputs the mixed signals to the digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70. The digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70 then outputs the signal to the speaker 80 where the queried information is delivered to the user by an audible response.
To facilitate the input of queries from the user, the remote control device 50 may include an “announce” key, which may be augmented by other option keys. For example, depressing the announce key followed by a 1 key may refer to a request to announce the title of the current selection, depressing the announce key followed by a 2 key may request an announcement of the artist of the current selection, depressing the announce key followed by the 3 key may request an announcement of the author of the current selection, and so forth. Depressing the announce key followed by the 7 key followed by the 2 key may request an announcement of the artist of the seventh selection on the compact disc. Other options for identifying the query to the player 2 may be used.
The operation of the present announcing system is now described with particular reference to the flowchart of
At step 1040, once the request is received by the player 2 at the remote control sensor 60, the request is processed in the digital processing unit 10 to determine the type of data being requested, for example, the album title, song title, author, artist, selection index or duration, for a current, next, or some specified selection or track. At step 1050, the digital processing unit 10 requests directory information from storage device 30 in response to the query request from the remote control device 50. At step 1055, an inquiry is made to determine if the requested information is available. At step 1056, if the desired information is not available from the storage device 30, then digital processing unit 10 generates a message-to-speak signal indicating that the information is not available. In this case, for example, the message-to-speak may result in a message announcement of “sorry, unknown”. If at step 1055 the message information is available, the requested information is retrieved from the storage device 30 and is established as the message-to-speak in step 1057.
At step 1060, the message-to-speak is output from the digital processing unit 10 to the speech synthesizer 40 to create the message sound waveform in a digital state. At step 1080, the message-to-speak digital waveform is mixed with the digital performance waveform generated by the compact disc reader 20. The mixing may occur by superimposition, by substitution, or by suspending the performance and resuming the performance after the announcement is complete. Each of these implementations involves particular processing which should be evident to those skilled in the art of digital signal mixing.
At step 1090, the resulting waveform from the mix of the message-to-speak and the performance data is supplied to the digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70. At step 1095, the digital-to-analog waveform transformer 70 delivers the resulting waveform to the speaker which makes the response audible.
The storage device 30 may be initially loaded with the directory data in ASCII format or in digital waveform format (i.e., after the data is processed by the speech synthesizer). In the latter case, when the query is received, the announced information could be presented straight to the D to A transformer 70 from the storage device 30 without going through the speech synthesis step.
In still another embodiment of the present invention, the compact disc reader provides data directly to the D to A waveform transformer 70, without routing through digital processing unit 10.
In the embodiment of
The above description is of illustrative embodiments of the present invention and the invention is not limited to the specific embodiments described. Rather, the present invention covers all obvious modifications of the above described embodiments that do not depart from the spirit and scope of the present invention.
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 08310337 | Sep 1994 | US |
Child | 10975463 | Oct 2004 | US |