Writing at CNET, Matthew Broersma reports that Monday's release of 'Tremor', a version of the Ogg Vorbis player that does not require a floating-point unit, could pave the way for portable digital audio players to support the open source alternative format to MP3. Broersma writes . . .

“The format reached a milestone 1.0 release earlier this year, and now the Xiph.org Foundation, which coordinates Ogg Vorbis development, has released an open-source Ogg Vorbis player that will work with ordinary digital music player hardware. Xiph has also offered to give hardware makers free engineer time to help them integrate the format into their offerings . . . “

“While Ogg Vorbis has been added to some PC-based music software, until now no hardware vendor has supported it, with the exception of Sharp's Linux-based Zaurus handheld. This is because Ogg Vorbis players have only been designed to work with processors capable of performing floating-point calculations; the chips commonly found in PCs can handle these, but the embedded processors found typically in portable music players cannot . . . “

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