In an effort to develop a service that will comply with a court order, Internet song-swapping service Napster Tuesday said it is acquiring Gigabeat.com for an undisclosed amount, however, the deal will incorporate assets.

The announcement confirms rumors stemming as far back as last month that the two companies were working together on a deal.

Under the terms of the agreement, Palo Alto-based Gigabeat's music indexing technology will be incorporated in Redwood City-based Napster's ongoing service and development efforts.

"Gigabeat has developed some very interesting and innovative technologies," says Napster CEO Hank Barry. "We look forward to working with their technology and highly qualified engineers."

Along for the ride are Gigabeat's co-founders, Dr. Wilburt Labio and Dr. Narayanan Shivakumar, as well as Gigabeat's engineering team, who will join Napster. Gigabeat's technology

Gigabeat's music search and song file identification technologies, combines collaborative filtering, media processing and data mining technologies.

This is not the first company to come to Napster's aid. Last month, Napster employed the services of Gracenote to exclude copyrighted files from its file sharing service. The Berkeley-based music recognition service specializes in database management.

Napster is currently operating under a court order to filter out certain songs so that artists' copyrights are not infringed upon.

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The company returned to court Tuesday to fight off claims by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) that Napster is not working hard enough on the problem.