Fraunhofer’s MPEG audio codecs integrated into Nullsoft’s software products enable highly efficient use of bandwidth in streaming, download and transcoding applications
ERLANGEN, Germany – August 31, 2011 – Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies, today announced a licensing agreement with Nullsoft, which will enable the inclusion of Fraunhofer’s MPEG audio codec software in Nullsoft’s popular software products, such as Winamp and SHOUTcast.
Consumers and broadcasters alike will benefit from Fraunhofer’s high-quality codec implementations, which combine best audio quality, robustness and highest compression efficiency. The Fraunhofer provided codec suite includes HE-AAC v2, the de-facto standard for bit-rate constrained applications such as online music streaming, as well as the lossless HD-AAC codec. HD-AAC combines lossless audio quality with the flexibility and convenience provided by the underlying AAC codec.
“The Winamp media player, well-known among consumers, has always been on the forefront of innovation,” said Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems department at Fraunhofer IIS. “With the inclusion of our codecs, consumers will have access to the best quality and the latest codecs that professionals value for use in media production and distribution via SHOUTcast.”
The latest versions of the Winamp client and SHOUTcast broadcast tools incorporate Fraunhofer’s HE-AAC v2. Future versions will also feature HD-AAC. Winamp and SHOUTcast are available for download at www.winamp.com and www.shoutcast.com respectively.
For more information, visit http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/bf/amm/.
About Fraunhofer
The Fraunhofer IIS Audio and Multimedia division, based in Erlangen, Germany, has been working in compressed audio technology for more than 20 years and remains a leading innovator of technologies for cutting-edge multimedia systems. Fraunhofer IIS is universally credited with the development of mp3 and co-development of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) as well as technologies for the media world of tomorrow, including MPEG Surround, MPEG Spatial Audio Object Coding and the Fraunhofer Audio Communication Engine.
Through the course of more than two decades, Fraunhofer IIS has licensed its audio codec software and application-specific customizations to at least 1,000 companies. Fraunhofer estimates that it has enabled more than 1 billion commercial products worldwide using its mp3, AAC and other media technologies.
The Fraunhofer IIS organization is part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, based in Munich, Germany. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organization and is partly funded by the German government. With 17,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 59 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas. For more information, contact Matthias Rose, matthias.rose@iis.fraunhofer.de, or visit www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm.
About Nullsoft, Inc.
Launched in January 1998, Winamp (http://www.winamp.com ), distributed by Nullsoft, is a world leading advanced media player application with millions of worldwide users. Winamp supports high fidelity playback of over 60 different popular digital audio and video formats as well as skins and plug-ins. With over 7 million downloads, Winamp for Android is the most downloaded free application for managing and syncing music on Android devices (http://www.winamp.com/android). Winamp and SHOUTcast(http://www.shoutcast.com) were acquired by America Online, Inc. in May 1999 and are part of AOL Music’s leading offerings (http://www.aolmusic.com )
