Digitally Imported Radio adds aacPlus

Digitally Imported Radio, one of the most listened-to radio services on the net, and Coding Technologies, the leading provider of audio compression for mobile, broadcast, and Internet, announced today that Digitally Imported Radio (DI) has added aacPlus streams to their free radio service.

Listeners can tune in to these streams immediately at http://www.di.fm and http://www.tuner2.com/.

"We are always working to hit the perfect balance of cost vs. quality for our popular radio channels," said Ari Shohat, President of Digitally Imported. "aacPlus delivers a 4X improvement over mp3 in quality per bit, dramatically improving both our listener experience and our bottom line."

MPEG-4 aacPlus is AAC coupled with Coding Technologies' SBR (Spectral Band Replication) and Parametric Stereo technologies. SBR is a unique bandwidth extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate. Parametric Stereo enhances the codec efficiency a second time for low-bit-rate stereo signals.

Both SBR and Parametric Stereo are backward and forward compatible methods to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec. As a result, aacPlus delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 Kbps, near CD-quality stereo at 32 Kbps, excellent quality stereo at 24 Kbps, and great quality for mixed content down to 16 Kbps and below. This level of efficiency fundamentally enables new applications in the markets of mobile and digital broadcast.

Coding Technologies is a privately held company with offices in Sweden, Germany, and Silicon Valley. Founded in 1997 in Stockholm, the company later merged with a spin-off of the renowned Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, the inventor of MP3. Coding Technologies' customers include AOL, iBiquity Digital, KDDI, mmO2, MusicMatch, Nokia, RealNetworks, SK Telecom, Texas Instruments, Thomson, Vodafone, and XM Satellite Radio.

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