Gracenote Introduces Flexible Music Recognition Solutions to the Consumer Electronics Industry

New Agreements/Product Releases Signal Demand for Gracenote Technology

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Gracenote, a content delivery platform specializing in music recognition services, announced today a complete rollout of technology solutions to support consumer electronics manufacturers. Additionally, the company has several new agreements to develop devices featuring Gracenote's patented CDDB® music recognition technology.

Gracenote has developed multiple solutions that can be tailored and scaled to meet manufacturers' needs for traditional non-networked playback devices, networked devices, and traditional playback devices. Each solution eliminates the need for users to manually input artist, album or song information in order to create a personal music database. Advanced services provide additional content such as album cover art, artist biographies and advanced play list management.

Recognizing the benefits of this industry standard in digital music, leading manufacturers including Pioneer, Kenwood, ZapMedia, Perception Digital, Imerge and AudioRamp are all incorporating Gracenote CDDB in their new products.

"The ease-of-use and added benefits that Gracenote provides in the online world have created consumer demand for the same in consumer electronics devices," said David Hyman, President of Gracenote. "The solutions we developed are completely customizable to fit the needs of any manufacturer, product or end-user, and are helping to drive the next generation of offline products."

Traditional CD Players

We have created a CD version of our patented music recognition service just for devices without a network connection or hard drive. Our lightweight application, running on any RTOS, retrieves data from a CD with a special encrypted, compressed version of our database. Successful queries can be cached in local RAM to make lookups even faster. The CD can reside permanently in a dedicated tray, multi-disc changer carousel, or swapped in-and-out of portable devices and single CD players. Updates are as easy as changing a CD.

MP3 Jukeboxes with Hard-Drives

For devices with internal memory, Gracenote has encoded, compressed and embedded its entire service to reside in local memory so off-line devices can deliver the same functionality as their networked counterparts. Ideal for car audio, portable devices and basic home media servers, the information set can be customized on several levels to deliver the exact data you need.

Networked CD Players and Jukeboxes

A simple, lightweight lookup layer is installed in the device to interface with the Gracenote service via standard TCP/IP protocols. The information delivered can be customized to meet individual display capabilities and end-user needs. Lookups can be cached for periodic lookups via a dial-up connection, or submitted instantly using always-on connections such as broadband connections or 2.5G or 3G wireless networks. Typical lookups only require 1 KB, so they can easily be cached locally for even faster performance.

Gracenote's music recognition technology is also a foundation for many value-added features and services that allow manufacturers to give end-users access to broader content. Additional offerings include:

  -- Album Art
  -- Music news
  -- Artist biographies
  -- Album reviews
  -- Proprietary recommendation technology
  -- Advanced play list management
  -- Extended data

New devices featuring Gracenote's technology are expected to ship later this year.

About Gracenote

Gracenote is a content delivery platform specializing in music recognition technology that enables relevant information and services to enhance the music listening experience. Gracenote designed its platform based for makers of media players and encoders, consumer electronics manufacturers, record companies, and on- and off-line consumer brands. Its network of technology and services opens new direct interactive channels to online music fans worldwide. Over 4,000 partners worldwide, serving more than one million consumers daily, rely on Gracenote's CDDB® technology, which is the industry standard in Music Recognition Services (MRS). Gracenote was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Berkeley, California. For more information about Gracenote, please see http://www.gracenote.com/.

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SOURCE: Gracenote

Contact: Lauren Karp of Gracenote, +1-510-849-2332, or lkarp@gracenote.com

Web site: http://www.gracenote.com/