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Khronos Announces New OpenSL ES Initiative for Low-level, Cross-platform Sound and Audio Acceleration

Business Wire, August 1, 2005

LOS ANGELES -- Beatnik, Creative Labs, NVIDIA, QSound Labs and Sonaptic Join as Founders of the New Sound and Audio Working Group; Open Call for Industry Participation

The Khronos(TM) Group is pleased to announce the formation of the new OpenSL ES(TM) (Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems) working group to define an open, royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) standard to enable low-level audio hardware acceleration across multiple embedded devices and platforms. OpenSL ES was initiated by Creative Labs and already has strong initial support from audio industry leaders including Beatnik, NVIDIA, QSound Labs and Sonaptic. OpenSL ES will be developed under the proven Khronos participation framework and Khronos invites any interested company to join and participate in the development of OpenSL ES and other Khronos standards, more information at: http://www.khronos.org/members/ and http://www.khronos.org/opensles/.> The goal of OpenSL ES is to define an application-oriented audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to hardware acceleration features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback. OpenSL ES will provide a fully cross-platform foundation for a wide range of higher-level audio APIs, including JSR-234, and will enable easy porting of game and applications of across multiple platforms and audio devices. OpenSL ES is at an abstraction level similar to OpenGL(R) ES for 3D graphics and will complement the system-oriented audio component of OpenMAX IL, another Khronos Group API currently under development.

"Creative has always been at the forefront of audio API development on the PC platform and has long recognized the importance of open APIs for developers," said Dr. Nathan Charles, OpenSL ES acting working group chair and senior software engineer at Creative Labs, Inc. "OpenSL ES will provide a cross-platform foundation to rationalize the wide-ranging variety of closed audio development libraries in embedded markets, providing developers and hardware vendors a stable standard to build the market for audio applications and accelerators."

"Beatnik welcomes the opportunity to participate in bringing the benefits of an open standard audio API to the mobile application and handset manufacturing community," said Jeremy Copp, chief sales officer at Beatnik, Inc. "Continuing our commitment to defining and supporting new standards in audio technology means that, as well as being able to utilize standard content formats, applications will soon use a common interface across a wide range of devices to access real time audio generation services."

"We are looking forward to participating in the new OpenSL ES working group and contributing to the goal of seamless playback across multiple hardware devices," stated David Gallagher, president of QSound Labs, Inc. "Our previous experiences and contributions to audio APIs in both the PC and mobile industries made the decision to participate in developing an open standard a simple and logical one."

"Sonaptic firmly believes that enhanced audio will help bring the mobile gaming experience to a new level; and we recognize that to deliver great audio performance, software developers need an open, royalty-free API that enables cross-platform, high-performance, 3D positional audio," said David Monteith, managing director at Sonaptic. "As a leading supplier of Hi-Fi Audio Solutions for the mobile device market, Sonaptic is delighted to become a member of the Khronos Group and participate in the successful development of OpenSL ES within Khronos."

"OpenSL ES will enable Khronos to include sound and audio functionality in its integrated family of media APIs for embedded markets," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "Sound is a vital ingredient in compelling handheld gameplay and this low-level open standard will enable a new-level of innovation among silicon vendors to ship great audio on millions of devices."

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

OpenGL ES: "Birds of a Feather" Meeting

Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm. Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles. More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.> About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA(TM), OpenGL ES, OpenMAX(TM), OpenVG(TM), OpenSL ES(TM) and OpenML(TM) to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.