Beatnik, Inc. - Enhanced Audio Solutions

Beatnik Delivers Optimised OpenMAX Compliant Audio Engine

Beatnik Audio Engine integrated with OpenMAX Integration Layer API and includes latest ARM architecture optimisations

3GSM Congress, Barcelona - February 13th, 2006 -- Beatnik, Inc., the leading provider of structured audio software solutions for mobile devices, today announced the availability of its mobileBAE as a fully compliant OpenMAX Integration Layer (IL) API component as well as performance and memory optimisations for the very latest ARM processor architectures. The latest enhancements to the Beatnik Audio Engine offer developers and platform providers an open, standard and straightforward way to integrate and communicate with the high performance music synthesis and audio playback functionality provided by the engine, thereby reducing development time, cost and risk.

Mobile device manufacturers, hardware & software platform and operating system providers are now able to rapidly integrate the Beatnik Audio Engine's functionality below the OpenMAX Integration Layer API - an open, standardised media component interface published by the Khronos Group. Beatnik has played a leading role in defining the OpenMAX IL and Application Layer (AL) API audio functions, and is ideally placed to deliver pre-eminent support for the standard to its licensees.

Beatnik is now also making available additional optimisations to the mobileBAE software that provide performance and memory footprint improvements for implementations on the key ARM architecture families: ARM4, ARM5E and ARM6. The optimised software supports all ARM processor cores currently used in mobile phone platforms - ARM7, ARM9, ARM9E and ARM11. Using the new optimisations, current versions of mobileBAE require 15% less processing power on ARM9E processors and 30% less on ARM11 processors as compared to releases made available in early 2005. Further architectural improvements have allowed the RAM requirements of mobileBAE to be cut by 50%, with innovative instrument wavetable loading techniques providing a further 20% reduction. Fine-grained componentisation is also providing the means to build versions of mobileBAE such that it uses as little as 80Kbytes program memory. This means that handset manufacturers and device platform providers are able to target low cost, severely resource constrained product profiles whilst delivering high fidelity, market-leading audio functionality. The flexible, pure software mobileBAE enables the real time generation of high quality audio by any application on mobile phones, including polyphonic and real music ringtones, music players, multimedia messaging and interactive games.

"The specification and support of open wireless industry standards is a key component of Beatnik's strategy and has helped to place us in a market-leading position," said Jeremy Copp, Chief Sales Officer at Beatnik. "Our latest optimisations and OpenMAX compliance mean that our customers can continue to deliver consistent personalisation, audio service and audio-enhanced applications in all classes of devices, from low cost mass market phones to high end smartphones."

As a complete audio subsystem, the mobileBAE incorporates a synthesiser, mixer, sample rate converter, linear audio player and support for MIDI, SP-MIDI, Mobile XMF, Mobile DLS, RMF, WAV, MP3, aacPlus and AMR-WB file formats. This gives users full control over all sounds produced by their mobile phone, allowing full audio personalisation. Beatnik has licensed its BAE technology to industry-leading wireless handset manufacturers and platform providers including Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung and Panasonic. As well as being an OpenMAX IL compliant component, mobileBAE is available as a plug-in for Microsoft Windows Mobile and Symbian OS platforms, as well as a wide range of real time and embedded operating system environments and architectures.

About Beatnik, Inc.
Beatnik licenses scalable, standards-based structured audio software solutions for mobile devices, which enable rich multimedia content delivery and an enhanced user experience for games and device interaction. Beatnik markets its core software technology and audio content development tools to mobile device manufacturers and a community of creative professionals. Incorporated in 1996, Beatnik was founded by musician and composer Thomas Dolby Robertson.