Loudeye Supports AAC Digital Media Standard

6-Sep-00

Loudeye Technologies, Inc. announced support for the AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) digital media standard. AAC is implemented in Loudeye's Digital Media Center and available immediately for Loudeye's customers to add to their digital media strategies and business plans. Compared to MPEG-1 Layer-3 (MP3) audio, AAC provides higher quality audio reproduction, yet it requires approximately 30 percent less data. Numerous companies contributed to the standardization process of AAC including AT&T, DolbyÆ Laboratories, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, and Sony Corporation. Fraunhofer IIS-A developed the primary components of the encoder and supervised the integration of all contributions and audio quality optimization. AAC incorporates features to enhance coding efficiency including Temporal Noise Shaping and Prediction, and offers a 16-fold data reduction while maintaining CD quality. With the addition of AAC, Loudeye's Digital Media Centers now support 15 downloadable and streaming formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real Media, among others. ""As a platform agnostic company, we are dedicated to implementing and utilizing the latest digital media technologies,"" said Jim Van Kerkhove, Minister of Realization, Vice President of Production, Loudeye Technologies, Inc. ""AAC is an important codec for the digital media market in terms of its sophistication and audio quality. By adding AAC to our comprehensive roster of audio formats, Loudeye continues to prove itself as an innovator while meeting the business needs of our customers."" Dolby Laboratories licenses AAC on behalf of the co-developers/licensors of the technology, and also provides licensees with reference code and tools to aid in the development of AAC encoders and decoders. ""We are very proud that Loudeye Technologies now supports AAC technology,"" said Ramzi Haidamus, Director, Business Development, Dolby Laboratories. ""With its superior sound and increased compression efficiency, AAC is the ideal technology for secure Internet music delivery."" For more information, visit www.loudeye.com.

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