Newcastle , DE - Aug 22, 2001 – AudioScience , a specialist in digital audio peripherals for the broadcast and entertainment markets, has announced that it has licensed MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) from Thomson multimedia and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS-A for use in its DSP-based sound cards.

As well as the patent license from Thomson multimedia, AudioScience has licensed a Texas Instruments TMS320C6711 version of the MP3 encoder from Fraunhofer. MP3, which is part of ISO standard 11172-3, is the most powerful member of the MPEG-1 audio coding family. Based on psycho acoustic principles, the algorithm compresses audio by removing sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear due to phenomena of auditory masking. CD quality audio can be maintained while using compressed bit rates of 128k/s.