Aloha,well I just downloaded something superior in my estimation in audio for Real,Liquid
check out some songs on both of them at
iuma.com
like this one
iuma.com
Here is an article from wired news
IUMA Bets on Liquid Audio
by John Alderman
8:50amÿÿ13.Mar.97.PST Liquid Audio and Internet Underground Music Archive announced a partnership Wednesday, bringing Liquid Audio's streaming audio technology to one of the Web's first ongoing music sites. IUMA will feature the jointly developed IUMA Music Player starting 1 April.
Danny Johnson, the creative director of IUMA, says the choice of Liquid Audio was based on a combination of the superiority of Liquid Audio's streaming capability, extensive audiophile sound controls in the encoder, and an interface that is more artist-friendly than Liquid Audio's primary competitor, RealAudio. Liquid Audio allows more information - such as band background and contact numbers - to be delivered with the sound files. In later versions of the software, Liquid Audio will allow users to listen to a group of songs at a lower bandwidth, and decide whether to download and buy a high-bandwidth, hi-fi version.
"We're always pushing for ways that enable musicians to make a living outside of the big music industry," Johnson explains. "Liquid Audio is one step closer."
"We're usually pretty conservative when it comes to audio formats," says Johnson. "We didn't jump on Shockwave, for instance, when everybody thought it was the next big thing."
Although Johnson says IUMA will continue to use RealAudio, he predicts that Liquid Audio will soon be the preferred audio format on the Internet. Johnson points out, however, that IUMA embraced the MPEG format because IUMA believed that it offered superior sound. MPEG hasn't proven to be very popular.
Besides IUMA, Liquid Audio is used on Music Boulevard, 911 Entertainment, and the Web site for City of Industry, a new Orion movie.
RealAudio continues to be the most popular streaming audio format on the Net.
"It's gonna be tough to go against RealAudio," says Kim Danders, producer of RadioSegue, a weekly digital culture radio magazine. "There are a lot of good products and formats out there, but it's hard to beat whatever's dominant."
Net Music With A Watermark
By Connie Guglielmo
1:30 PM EST
Liquid Audio Inc. doesn't think that a few-second-long, crummy-sounding clip of music is enough to convince users whether or not they should purchase a CD. So they've come up a with a solution: new technology that lets professional audio engineers create Dolby Digital CD-quality music specifically for sampling and publishing over the low-bandwidth, 28.8-kilobit-per-second world of the Internet.
For users, the year-old company's new free Liquid Music Player will let them preview and download CD-quality music and at the same time check out accompanying artwork, lyrics and liner notes.
For the music industry, the company's new Liquifier Pro and Liquid Music Server gives it a way to encode copyright information into their music and deliver CD-quality music optimized for delivery and playback over the Net, said Stephen Klein, Liquid Audio's vice president of marketing.
Liquid Audio was able to address that first concern, sound quality, by developing a new compression technology that improved on Dolby Laboratory's Dolby Digital compression, according to Klein. It now has exclusive rights to use an enhanced version of that technology, which it has incorporated into the Liquifier Pro, its $995 audio mastering environment, and the $20,000 Liquid Music Server, which delivers and keeps track of the encoded audio it delivers over the Web.
As for copyright concerns, Liquid Audio developed a data-encoding technology, digital watermarking, to protect intellectual property rights. The copyright information is encoded into the music, without compromising the quality of sound.
Monster Music, an 8-year-old independent record label in San Francisco, has already announced that all the samples for its site will be created and delivered using Liquid Audio's technology.
"They're absolute rocket scientists and they've tackled a lot of serious challenges for the music delivery," said Chris Stevens, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston. "They've made it possible to listen to music on a 28.8 modem. That's amazing. They've come up with a way to produce music specifically for the 28.8 medium, instead of taking an existing CD and trying to sample it down for the Internet. And they can do it without a music publisher worrying that their music will be stolen."
Liquid Audio can be reached at www.liquidaudio.com
Monster Music can be reached at www.monstermusic.com
Lots of things have great futures,but profits,and competition will dictate prices. Always remember that a companies fundamentals do mean something when competition begins to breathe down their necks.
Hiram |
