Alliance for Open Media Proposes Royalty-free Immersive Audio Specification

The Alliance for Open Media is a non-profit industry consortium formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery that can "serve as alternatives" to the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standards. The organization is the creator of the AV1 Video Codec and now proposes an Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) Container Specification that the organization says will enable ecosystem-wide innovation in the Immersive/Spatial audio domain.

To make it easier for all developers to include MPEG-H Audio playback into their applications, the MPEG-H Audio decoder software implementation from Fraunhofer IIS is now available as source code on GitHub. As the research institute explains, the release is intended to facilitate the broad adoption of advanced audio formats with immersive audio and personalization capabilities. The MPEG-H Audio System development team was recently awarded the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023 for their work.

Celemony Software is placing the ARA Audio Random Access exchange interface under an open source license as well as releasing a comprehensive software development kit. This will make ARA integration even easier for digital audio workstation (DAW) and plug-in manufacturers. ARA was created as an integration extension for audio plug-in interfaces, allowing greater amount of audio information exchange, such as key, tempo, pitch, and rhythm, for an entire song.