LONDON — APTX, the developer and licensor of apt-X audio compression technology, is developing improved coding algorithms and novel implementation techniques as part of a project readying its next, 'cognitive' audio codec dubbed apt-X Scalable.

The Belfast, Northern Ireland-based group revealed the development at this week's AES Convention, taking place in Munich, Germany.

The research is focusing on cognitive architectures that are inherently capable of intelligent, automatic, and dynamic adaption across important dimensions of operation and in response to varying environmental conditions such as audio resolution, temporal latency, error resilience, available bandwidth, computational power, and energy consumption.

Last month the company introduced apt-X Lossless, a low-latency version of its audio compression line-up for high-definition audio in broadcast, professional, and consumer applications, that offers sampling rates up to 96 kHz and sample resolutions up to 24 bits.

The technology is implemented as C and C++ code, and has been verified on x86 processors, ARM 9E and ARM Cortex M3, Texas Instruments C64xx, with others on the way, and initial versions will be available from July.

The apt-X Scalable codec is targeted at applications such extended battery life in portable media players; improved streaming to wireless peripherals; optimal use of network bandwidth for dynamic mix of audio traffic in VoIP; Internet audio services such as surround-sound radio and interactive gaming; broadcast audio; and digital wireless microphones.

Noel McKenna, CEO of APTX, said: "Scalable audio coding elegantly solves various real-world deployment issues, such as compromised bandwidth over wireless links or internet connections, and power conservation in portable applications."

Related Aericles :

apt-X to expand licensing business after sale of hardware division

Consumer group licenses Belfast audio codec

A Fast Algorithm for Computing Two Channel Odd Frequency Transforms with Application to Audio Coding