Dynamic information storage or retrieval – Duplication or copying
Reexamination Certificate
1999-04-19
2002-02-05
Tran, Thang V. (Department: 2651)
Dynamic information storage or retrieval
Duplication or copying
C369S059260, C369S053340, C369S124080
Reexamination Certificate
active
06345028
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates in general to recording and playback of data tracks and digital signals in general, and in one aspect, to recording and playback on disk drives and the like. In another aspect it relates to maximizing the number of audio or video tracks that can be played back from a disk drive.
The disk drive that is ubiquitous in computer data and application storage is also useful in storing audio information for mixing, production and performance of music. Audio tracks from instruments, voice input, and sampled sounds may be digitized and stored on a disk in the same manner that other data is stored. Disk drives are typically formatted to contain a large plurality of concentric digital data tracks which are each divided into multiple sectors, the sectors and data tracks being assigned unique address locations. A computer records data, and retrieves the data by moving one or more read/write heads to address locations corresponding to the data sought. Disk operating systems often record data on an available track sector that is closest to the read/write heads. Moreover, a data may be split up and recorded on many sectors of different digital tracks, in accordance with track availability and proximity to the read/write heads, disk operating system programming, and the like.
When it is desired to play back the audio information, the disk drive read/write head(s) seeks the address locations of the information on the disk drive, reads the digitized audio information from the addressed sectors and digital tracks, and sends it to RAM. In the frequent instances wherein multiple audio tracks must be played simultaneously for polyphonic composition and the like, all of the tracks generally must be loaded into a RAM buffer before playback can proceed. Clearly the seek time of the playback head(s) comprises a significant temporal limitation for the playback system. In addition, the size of the RAM buffer generally comprises an operational limit to the number of tracks that are read into memory before playback proceeds.
As a general rule, 12 Mb of RAM can buffer
64
simultaneous record or playback tracks from a single very fast disk drive. Increasing the amount of RAM does not significantly increase the number of audio tracks that can be played simultaneously, unless the full length of each entire audio track is fully loaded into RAM. This approach can require an enormous amount of RAM, and is not practical due to the large expense involved. For example, a 4 gigabyte hard disk drive can be purchased for as little as $300, which is approximately the same cost as 64 Mb of RAM (at current prices). However, four gigabytes of RAM would cost $3000, or more than 10 times the cost of hard disk storage capacity.
Furthermore, the number of tracks that can be played back from a single disk rive is also determined by the sample rate and the bit structure of the data being recorded on the disk. As the sample rate increases, i.e., from 48 Khz to 96 Khz to 192 Khz, the space required on a hard disk, magnetic tape, or optical media is doubled each time. This factor slows down the acquisition of this data by conventional means. The same increase in disk space occurs if the bit structure of the data increases, i.e., from 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit words.
SUMMARY OF THE PRESENT INVENTION
The present invention generally comprises a process for arranging a plurality of signals, including data tracks, audio tracks, or video tracks in composite data frames, each data frame containing a temporal segment of each data track, audio or video track. The composite data frames may be recorded to any recording medium, such as magnetic disk drives, optical disks, DVD, CD-ROM, WORM drives, RAM, FLASH memory, any memory that permits random access, any memory that permits random access and is rewritable and/or usable as the main memory of a processor, ROM and magnetic tape, or the like.
For the purposes of this invention the following memory can be used: random access memory (RAM)—SRAM, DRAM, etc., FLASH memory and any memory that permits random access and any memory that permits random access and is rewritable and/or usable as the main memory of a processor. In all descriptions herein, all references to “RAM” shall include any of the types of memory just described. In addition to the types of memory described above, a read only memory (ROM) can also be used for storing assembled composite data frames. In the case of ROMs the memory contents are the composite data frames, and these frames would be one time configured in the ROMs.
In one embodiment, the invention relates to recording and playing back audio, video, or data tracks simultaneously from a disk drive, whereby the number of audio tracks that can be played simultaneously directly from the disk drive is increased far beyond the capability of state of the art devices. For purposes of this discussion a “disk drive” or “data drive” refers to any type of disk drive capable of playing back audio or video or any data. This includes all hard disk drives, optical drives (both WORM and erasable), removable disk drives, compact disk (CD), digital video disk (DVD), other read only optical drives, floppy drives and the like. Hereinafter, any reference to audio tracks, data tracks or video tracks will be presumed to include any and all audio signals, data signals, or video signals, whether or not they are specifically configured as tracks, and any reference to one is intended to encompass all.
Initially, a plurality of audio tracks are recorded on a disk drive, using technology known in the prior art, the audio tracks being recorded in digitized format in available portions of the disk drive. Thereafter, in order to maximize the number of audio tracks that can be played back simultaneously, the recorded audio data is re-ordered, as follows. Incremental temporal segments of each recorded audio track are read from the disk and assembled into a composite data frame in RAM, and the frame is recorded back onto a disk drive. Thus, for example, the first 100 ms of each audio track comprises the first incremental temporal segments, and all of these segments are recorded in a defined order in the first composite data frame. The second frame consists of the second 100 ms segments of the same audio tracks, which are recorded in the same order as in the first frame. This process is reiterated until the entire lengths of all of the audio tracks are re-ordered and recorded in such frames on the disk drive. Reiteration may be carried out R times, where R may vary from zero to any positive integer. The frames are placed on the disk in contiguous order, to the greatest extent possible, to minimize the seek time of the disk drive read/write heads. But because of physical writing limitations of disk drive architectures and/or requirements of disk drive operating systems, these frames may not always be capable of being written in contiguous order. Within the constraints of any given operating system, the disk can be partitioned to improve the probability of contiguous allocation of space for composite data frames.
In an alternative embodiment of the invention, each composite data frame is constructed of sub-sections, each sub-section comprising portions of the audio tracks that are held in RAM. After the audio tracks are recorded in original format on a disk drive, incremental temporal segments of each recorded audio track are read from the disk and stored in RAM, as in the previous embodiment. However, in the alternative embodiment, a plurality of sub-sections are formed from the RAM data, all of the sub-sections comprising one composite data frame. Each sub-section is comprised of incremental time slices of all of the audio tracks, arranged in a predetermined order. For example, given that 100 ms segments of all tracks are stored in RAM, each sub-section may comprise 10 ms incremental time slices of all tracks, and 10 sub-sections are required to construct one composite data frame that fully represents all of the audio track data stored in RAM. Thereafte
Intertactile Technologies Corporation
Tran Thang V.
Zimmerman, Esq. Harris
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