Sonnox, maker of industry leading audio plugins and long-time partner of Fraunhofer IIS, has updated their Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin – an easy to use and yet powerful monitoring and encoding solution for audio professionals – by integrating xHE-AAC.
The award-winning audio specialists from Sonnox are most famous for their high-quality plugins from EQ to mastering and everything in between. Also, they have never overlooked the importance of keeping sound stellar in all output formats. Their focus on integrating audio codecs into producers’ workflows has led them to team up with Fraunhofer IIS, creators of ground-breaking audio technologies for several decades.
The Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin does more than just encode audio signals. Its primary purpose is to provide a way of monitoring the material in various Fraunhofer codecs without the need for offline encoding. Up to five codecs can be compared simultaneously while the plugin also provides additional information about what the codecs are doing. This way producers do not have to solely rely on their ears but also scientific facts – like the codecs’ impact on the frequency spectrum, audible artifacts, and codec-induced overloads, all of which can be monitored visually on a user-friendly interface. “With the latest iteration of the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin, producers can easily assess the quality of their masterpieces and make sure that it will be delivered with the best possible sound to their audience,” says Rod Densham, Managing Director, owner and founder of Sonnox Ltd.
Until now, the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin featured a wide palette of MPEG stereo or multichannel audio codecs. As the latest generation of the AAC family, the newly added xHE-AAC inherits and at the same time surpasses the qualities of its predecessors. Improved quality at stereo bit rates of 12 to 500 kbit/s, adaptive streaming through MPEG-DASH or HLS, seamless transitions between bit rates, and MPEG-D DRC mandatory loudness and dynamic range control are the new features of the codec. They make xHE-AAC the audio codec of choice for adaptive audio and video streaming and digital radio. It is supported natively by the latest Apple, Android, and Amazon operating systems and products. Fraunhofer’s xHE-AAC software has been licensed to market leaders such as Meta, Microsoft and Netflix.
“We are happy to see xHE-AAC finding its way into the digital media landscape in the way we designed it: as a prime audio encoding solution for video services as well as music, audiobook or podcast streaming under the sometimes challenging conditions of today’s networks. With the latest iteration of the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin, producers can easily convince themselves of the qualities offered by our latest encoding technology,” says Max Neuendorf, Head of Audio and Speech Coding Group at Fraunhofer IIS.
If you are interested in the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plugin, it is available directly from Sonnox or from retail partners all over the world.
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