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Liquid Audio Delivers Dolby Quality Audio Over the Web

Technology lets you download and buy music.

By Samantha Parent, PCWorld   

Liquid Audio is debuting a new music-on-demand technology for the Internet at todays Audio Engineers Society Convention in Los Angeles. Sammy Hagar, formerly of Van Halen, and producer Phil Ramone will be present to discuss their implementation of the technology and how it will impact the music industry.

Liquid Audios software products are designed to provide a complete solution for delivering and publishing Dolby Digital quality music over the Web. The Liquid Audio suite consists of three components:

• The free Liquid MusicPlayer, which is available for download on Liquid Audios Web site today, enables users to stream near-CD quality music over the Internet, while viewing lyrics, artwork, and liner notes. Future upgrades, to be released in Q1, will allow consumers to purchase the music and print it directly to an audio cassette or recordable CD, allowing for high quality playback on any standard cassette or CD player.

• The Liquifier is an authoring tool for preparing audio for Internet delivery. Features include waveform editing, an enhanced version of Dolby Labs audio compression technology, and single-click upload capability. The Liquifier also allows users to combine audio with multimedia information.

• The third part of the suite, the Liquid Music Server, uses standard protocols to deliver scalable, Dolby-encoded audio and media over IP networks. The server can provide any number of simultaneous audio streams from Unix or Intel platforms and provides a solution for copyright protection, royalty tracking and reporting and all other aspects of transaction-based music commerce.

According to Gerry Kearby, co-founder and president of Liquid Audio, this product is not trying to compete with Real Audio, Xing, or Macromedia. Rather, the companys objective is to be the %dquotpremier provider of music-on-demand products for Internet commerce.%dquot

Kearby says that Liquid Audio will make it possible for consumers to download a whole CD from the Internet in 5 minutes and garage bands will be able to publish their music on the Net for under $1000.

The Liquifier content creation tool will be sold at an estimated street price of $295.00, plus an additional $295 for high-end add-ins. The Liquid Audio Player is free and downloadable off the companys Web site. There was no pricing available for the Music Server.