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NEW
YORK (Gracenote) Gracenote, the global leader in digital entertainment
technology, today announced that it is supporting encoding and playback
of the aacPlus v2 format, also known as High-Efficiency AAC v2, in the
Gracenote Media Manager. By offering this standard codec in its mobile
music services, Gracenote is making it easier for handset manufacturers
and carriers to integrate PC-based music management software into
mobile applications. This follows 3GPP's recent announcement of the
MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC as the codec of choice for delivery of audio
content to future 3G devices. "Gracenote's solutions are leading the
market in media identification and management on the PC. By integrating
support for key technologies like aacPlus v2 these technologies can now
be applied to the universe of mobile content," stated Guillaume
Decugis, COO of Musiwave. "This will allow mobile music service
providers like Musiwave to provide a complete solution to carriers and
consumers."
"Gracenote is a powerhouse in the music industry",
said Victor Kanevsky, Senior
Director of Strategic Alliances for Coding
Technologies. "We are delighted that Gracenote is now using aacPlus,
which has become the common denominator codec, to strengthen their
position in the mobile space." Gracenote's technologies are designed to
enable wireless operators, service providers and handset manufacturers
to take advantage of higher bandwidth networks, new music phones
offering increased storage capacity and better sound, and growing
consumer interest in purchasing commerce and content via mobile phone.
Gracenote
offers the industry's fastest mobile music recognition service, enables
linking to third-party content and commerce, such as ringtones,
ringbacks, full-song downloads and more, and also offers a white-label
media manager. The Gracenote Media Manager provides a complete
environment to manage and play digital music on the PC and transfer it
to a music-enabled handset with clean and standardized music metadata.
MPEG-4
aacPlus is AAC coupled with Coding Technologies' SBR (Spectral Band
Replication) and Parametric
Stereo technologies. SBR is a unique
bandwidth extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver
the same quality at half the bit rate. Parametric
Stereo enhances the
codec efficiency a second time for low-bit-rate stereo signals. Both
SBR and Parametric
Stereo are backward and forward compatible methods
to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec. As a result, aacPlus
delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 Kbps,
near CD-quality stereo at 32 Kbps, excellent quality stereo at 24 Kbps,
and great quality for mixed content down to 16 Kbps and below. This
level of efficiency fundamentally enables new applications in the
markets of mobile and digital broadcast.