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 broadcaster 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 defacto standard for bit-rate constraint applications such as online music streaming, as well as the lossless HD-AAC codec. HD-AAC is combining lossless audio quality with the flexibility and convenience provided by the underlying AAC codec.

“The Winamp media player, well-known amongst 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.

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