".."Mention MP3 these days and everyone comes running," says Petter Nordwall, Software Product Group Manager of Adaptec. Nowadays the people coming running are likely to be lawyers from the record companies but Adaptec wants to provide the music industry and the end-user with the tools to turn MP3 into a legal, rather than potentially piratical, transaction.

Adaptec believes that once a song is downloaded from the Internet users will want to use it in a number of ways. Some will transfer it to small mobile MP3 players like the Diamond Rio; some will simply store songs on their hard disk; others will make an audio CD to play the songs in their car or on their home hi-fi system.

Nordwall predicts that within the next few years almost 2 billion songs will be being downloaded from the Internet and wants Adaptec to be supplying the software for consumers to handle their downloads. The next version of Adaptec's EasyCD Creator software will contain MP3 features to make the process easy and legal, promises Nordwall.."