Fraunhofer IIS Previews DAW Plug-in from Sonnox for "Mastered for iTunes"

New version 2 of the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec Plug-in comes with iTunes Plus codec and multi-channel support.

Las Vegas – April 16, 2012 - At NAB in Las Vegas, Fraunhofer IIS shows a preview of the new upgrade of the award winning Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec Plug-in for digital audio workstations. The new version of the plug-in will come with easy and intuitive tools for mastering engineers to mix their music for the “Mastered for iTunes” program. Furthermore, the plug-in will support the latest multi-channel audio codecs such as MPEG Surround. The upgrade will be available in July for free for all current users of the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec.

For the first time, the plug-in enables mastering engineers to use the iTunes Plus codec for real-time auditioning of their mix. This makes the plug-in a powerful and time-saving tool to mix directly for the “Mastered for iTunes” program, including clipping detection and the possibility for real-time corrections while mixing. For this new functionality, Sonnox has added the Apple versions of the AAC and HE-AAC codecs to the plug-in so that the exact clipping behavior of the iTunes encoding chain may be monitored..

In addition, Sonnox and Fraunhofer integrated the latest surround audio codecs MPEG Surround, AAC multi-channel, and HE-AAC multi-channel. These codecs provide superior audio quality for surround music and are used in surround broadcasting and streaming. Version 2 of the Pro-Codec plug-in makes Fraunhofer’s surround codecs conveniently available to producers of surround music.

Of course, the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec still includes Fraunhofer implementations of all major MPEG audio codecs, including mp3, AAC, and HE-AAC as well as lossless codecs such as mp3HD and HD-AAC. This makes the Pro-Codec the most powerful codec plug-in available for digital audio workstations.

Due to its unique feature set, the Pro-Codec plug-in saves time during the mixing process and ensures a high audio quality of the output files. It was first released in June 2011 for $US495 and has recently been awarded the Sound On Sound Editors' Choice Award 2011.

A consumer version of the Pro-Codec plug-in will be available soon as well.

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 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 5 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 20,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 60 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.