You'll have to cut and paste for that link to work, or I can just paste the post (without permission) here
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Subject: Re: Nomad - rewrite the firmware?
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 09:23:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: jamie
I've been working closely with a creative engineer who is working on solving the nomad's inabilities. When I asked him about things such as programming th enomad to record 24bit spdif, or use codecs like .ape and .shn, this is the response I got:
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That's the assumption everybody makes. Firmware for a piece of hardware like the NJB1 or NJB3 is so specialised that one is not likely to be able to just compile ANSI C code for it and expect it to work. Our MP3 encoders, WMA decoders, and MP3 decoders are all hand-written assembler - there is no way otherwise to get the chip to give you all these and more and yet provide 11 hours of battery life. Supporting a specialised chip would also require special compilers, tools, etc, that we can't supply either (we don't own the tools).
As Creative is a business organisation, it has to watch its bottom line. This means the effort to support any new codecs will have to have a suitable ROI (return on investment). As you can guess, this typically means only mainstream consumer stuff gets highest priority.
Off topic, but this is why high-end equipment is so expensive. It's not so much the hardware, but the fact that few sets are going to move, and hence R&D costs (and other costs) have to be recouped via higher retail prices.
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The encouraging thing is that they _are_ actively working on solving the recording glitch problem, so it will be able to replace your d8. Since it also works as a firewire drive, you could also use it to ge tthe '5 minute' 24bit patch after the show