Lossless Digital Music Now Available in Soundbuzz

Even the fussiest audiophiles can now embrace digital music, with today’s launch by Soundbuzz of Asia’s first online store offering high fidelity songs, supported by technology from Exploit Technologies.

In a world’s first, the store utilises a pioneering technology, known as SLS (Scalable-to-Lossless), which allows consumers to purchase a standard quality song, and then “top up” to receive a high audio fidelity (lossless) version of the same song at a later date. Consumers are also able to synchronise the purchased songs to their mobile handsets.

The store is the outcome of a partnership between Soundbuzz and Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd, the marketing and commercialisation arm of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

It enables consumers to decide on the quality of music they wish to purchase and enjoy it on devices of their choice utilizing technology which is currently not available anywhere else in the world.

The SLS technology is developed by the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), an institute under A*STAR. The I²R team was awarded the National Technology Award 2007 for its research and development work on SLS.

Singapore customers can purchase music singles from a catalogue of Asian independent labels at http://www.soundbuzz.com/sls. Standard quality files of 256 kilobytes per second are available for S$2.50, or high fidelity files for just S$3.00.

Alternatively, customers can purchase a standard music file for now and, for a fee of just 80 cents, top it up at any time and receive an additional lossless file which merges with the existing file to create a higher fidelity song.

To further enhance the flexibility of the offering, Soundbuzz has deployed a “synch to mobile” function which allows for the easy transfer of songs from customers’ PCs to their mobile handsets via a simple plug-in they can download from the music store. The song file will be reduced in size to a more suitable bitrate that caters for the smaller memory capacity of most mobile handsets currently in the marketplace.

Mr Boon Swan Foo, Executive Chairman of Exploit Technologies said: “Exploit Technologies is pleased that we have successfully commercialised A*STAR’s technology in digital media, and offer to a Singapore company like Soundbuzz a competitive edge in this growing market.

“Through this collaboration, we pave the way forward in the world of digital music. SLS plugs a current gap in the consumer market with effective commercialisation of new technological developments.”

SLS is an MPEG4 audio standard that is capable of compressing music files (such as CD tracks) for playback without any loss in fidelity. It also allows for fine-grain pre-encoding of music files at different bitrates so that they can be subsequently streamed or played back at different quality, depending on the device type or available channel bandwidth.

Soundbuzz Asia General Manager, Ms Yen Ong, said: “It is critical with any new digital music offering that we give consumers a number of flexible and simple options so they can tailor the experience to their own tastes.

“With A*STAR’s technology, consumers can now purchase incredibly high quality songs that they can enjoy on the most sophisticated home entertainment system, but also transfer easily to their mobile handsets if they want to take their music with them.

“We are very fortunate that our partnership with A*STAR, supported by IDA,  has facilitated the development and testing of new technology which is right at the edge of the digital music experience available for consumers anywhere in the world.”