FOR RELEASE OCTOBER 16, 2000
Audible
Magic Applies Patented Technology to
Provide Audio
Identification for Streaming Media
LOS GATOS, Cal., October 16,
2000—Audible
Magic Corporation (www.audiblemagic.com),
a startup that provides solutions for identifying audio content over the
Internet, today announced its acquisition of Muscle Fish LLC, a
Berkeley-based company founded by acoustic engineers formerly from Yamaha Music
Technologies, Inc. Muscle Fish engineers pioneered the
use of content-based analysis and classification of audio files with over six
years of extensive research and development.
Muscle Fish’s invention, embodied in a patent
issued last year, measures a variety of psycho-perceptual characteristics of
the audio file. These measurements can be used to analyze, compare, classify,
and retrieve audio files. The technology has been demonstrated to be accurate at exact pattern matching for a range of
file formats, including streaming audio on the Internet.
In addition, it can be used to match and identify "similar sounding" audio files,
returning a list of closest matches to the user.
Audible
Magic has demonstrated that the technology is robust enough to identify
streaming content for all streaming formats. With over 10,000 Internet radio
stations, streaming is fast becoming the preferred method of delivering
content, and as a result, the market potential for Audible Magic identification
services is growing exponentially.
Audible
Magic is currently working with the digital media industry to apply this
versatile technology. “Muscle Fish invested over six years of hard work
pioneering the concepts and developing the core technology,” stated Vance Ikezoye, CEO and co-founder
of Audible Magic. “Now that their innovative concepts have been accepted
and proven, Audible Magic intends to monetize their work by using the
technology to enable a wide variety of applications.”
"Audible Magic's
software allows record companies and online music companies to do many things
they weren't able to do before,” said Malcolm Maclachlan, a senior analyst in Consumer eCommerce Media at
International Data Corporation. He added, “For instance, it is now
possible to run a peer to peer subscription and still pay artists the correct
amount of money for their work. Consumers, in turn, can now be guaranteed that
the song they download is the one they want, and will have a certain standard
of sound quality."
The
technology has been licensed and is in use today by a number of companies
including Virage (NASDAQ: VRGE) and the Bulldog Group, a privately held media
asset software company. In addition, the company has demonstrated the accuracy
of the technology, claiming automated song recognition accuracy above 95% today
for both Internet and traditional broadcast radio broadcasts as well as highly
compressed MP3 files.
Audible
Magic acquired all Muscle Fish assets, which included numerous software
applications, as well as the patented technology. “The value of the Muscle Fish acquisition will be
seen not only in audio content identification, but with the digital media
access, control and monetization opportunities it enables,” according to Ikezoye.
“We are already working with a number of customers on some very intriguing
applications and have multiple patents pending, so stay tuned.”
About Audible Magic
Audible
Magic provides technology and services to the digital media industry. The company’s
patented audio technologies provide the industry new opportunities for content
access, control, and monetization. The company is based in Los Gatos,
California. It is privately held and was founded in July 1999.
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For more information please contact:
|
Torie Zinsmeister Wave Rock Communications 503.944.6211 toriez@wave-rock.com |
Sarah McMullen
McMullen & Company 310.283.7907 smcmullen@earthlink.net |
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